On the convention stage, Donald Trump said he would talk about the assassination attempt only once. Understandably, he has continued to talk about it, as many people do when shocking things happen to them.
“I’m not nicer,” he told donors on Aug. 2, rebutting the idea that he’d mellowed in the aftermath. At rallies outdoors, he now stands behind bulletproof glass onstage. At a rally in Michigan recently, he said he’s been treated worse than various presidents, adding, “I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”
Mr. Trump told The Daily Mail that he’s had no flashbacks or nightmares. Asked by the interviewer whether he thought he might have post-traumatic stress disorder or consider counseling, Mr. Trump said: “A couple of people have asked me that, and I have had no impact. It’s just amazing.” He went on to say that he didn’t think about the shooting much and did not want to.
In a livestream on X, Elon Musk opened with the assassination attempt, asking, “What was it like for you?”
“Not pleasant,” Mr. Trump replied and Mr. Musk laughed. Then Mr. Trump talked in much detail about the things that did happen and could have happened. Across more than 10 minutes, it seemed like Mr. Trump had consumed a lot of information about that day in Butler, Pa. He described different perspectives and footage: video of a woman who saw the shooter, the view of the crowd control experts, the local police officer who’d climbed up to the roof, his Secret Service detail who piled on top of him, and the sniper who killed the shooter. “He’s been with them for 23 years, and he’s never had anything like this, and all of the sudden he has to act,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a very tough thing to act and to be shooting somebody.”
“The bigger miracle is that I was looking in the exact direction of the shooter,” Mr. Trump said, “so it hit me at an angle that was far less destructive, so that was the miracle.” It’s actually a striking description of what happened: to be looking at and unable to see a source of imminent danger.
In the past five years, a man walked into the House speaker’s home with a hammer and assaulted her husband; a young man upset about the Supreme Court’s direction turned up in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood with a gun; a man showed up at a district office of Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia with a baseball bat looking for him and attacked two staff members; this year, someone lit the door of Bernie Sanders’s Vermont office on fire with seven staff members inside.
The list goes on up to and including the many things that happened on Jan. 6, and the threats and harassment politicians, election officials and workers, judges and other public officials faced after Mr. Trump refused to concede the election and attacked political and legal efforts to hold him to account. This also leaves aside less targeted violence, like the carjacking attempt that took place near Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home.
Things can feel alarmingly precarious: What kept the shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice from turning into something much worse was the presence of Representative Steve Scalise, who suffered some of the worst injuries but also had an armed Capitol Police security detail who returned fire. Near Justice Kavanaugh’s home, the unwell young man with a gun never followed through, because his sister talked him into calling 911 on himself. Part of what made the attack on Paul Pelosi — which Mr. Trump has told jokes about — particularly harrowing is that Ms. Pelosi’s armed security detail was not there because she wasn’t there.
“It made our home a crime scene,” Ms. Pelosi said in the months after the attack. “If he had fallen, slipped on the ice or was in an accident and hurt his head, it would be horrible, but to have it be an assault on him because they were looking for me is really — they call it ‘survivor’s guilt’ or something.”
A large number of the people — in Congress, in the judiciary, in the executive branch — who make decisions in this country, as well as their staffs, have either experienced violence in the past decade or felt its repercussions in their work and lives. It is changing the composition of Congress as some lawmakers tire of threats and retire.
One thing that is clear is that the effects of these violent episodes often stay with people for a long time.
Months after pipe bombs were found on Jan. 6 outside the Republican and Democratic headquarters, aides in both parties described how much the presence of a bomb outside their workplaces still disturbed them. Almost a year after the baseball-practice shooting, many of those there that day were still deeply affected by the experience.
Several lawmakers told BuzzFeed News that in the year after the shooting, they had wondered why not them. “Folks that didn’t get shot at one of these have a harder time, because they do the what-if game,” said a lobbyist who nearly died after getting shot in the back. Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, remarked of Steve Scalise: “Steve was shot and I wasn’t. I don’t know how to figure things out.”
The threat of political violence is not new. Ronald Reagan told a lot of jokes about his own near-death experience in 1981, but in the published volume of Reagan diaries, which follow a concise, straightforward style, the shooting lingers in subtle ways for long after the date. He notes a message John Hinckley’s parents sent to him about the “strange” experience 19 months after the shooting of walking into the hospital where Mr. Reagan had been taken.
Prosecutors, Mr. Reagan wrote, “want me to testify in the trial. No president has ever done that before. Staff lean very much against — I’m not as sure as I was that it would be wrong.” That entry was logged nearly a year after the shooting, following a description of a cabinet meeting. Three months later, he wrote: “Yesterday Hinckley was found innocent by reason of insanity. Quite an uproar has been created.” Even in his pretty short and straightforward recollections of his days, where the reader can only wonder how much he was thinking about any particular observation that he shares, the shooting was still coming up well over a year after the event.
We also seem to be living in a society where overt and threatened acts linger. In a recently published memoir by Salman Rushdie about his near death and the loss of half his vision after a man stabbed him several times, he describes a similar desire to testify at the trial and to speak to the man and understand why he did it. “By his own admission, he read barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed,” Mr. Rushdie writes of his attacker.
Mr. Rushdie writes at length of how intense and difficult his recovery has been and how challenging the first years after Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa were, living with heavy security restrictions and the fear or resentment he sometimes encountered from others about his situation. Contemplating a visit to England in 2023, almost a year after he was stabbed, he writes that the police told him: “‘Just to reassure you, we have no knowledge of any threat against you in the U.K. But the trouble is, there can always be one crazy individual, and it’s hard to have all of those on our radar.” He notes, “A statement that was simultaneously reassuring and not reassuring.”
This is one of the destabilizing features of this political era — not only do the effects of violence linger, but the potential for threats to endure does as well, in a securitized world where security lapses occur.
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