Historian Douglas Brinkley told the story on CNN Sunday morning about how after President Ronald Reagan was shot, when he woke up in the hospital, he told a friend nearby that the experience had transformed him, that he was now going to dedicate his life to peace.

Not only did he not once blame the shooting on Democrats; Reagan instead largely followed through on that promise, Brinkley said, spending the rest of his presidency trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He later worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trying — successfully — to deescalate tensions between the US and the USSR.

A few days after he left the hospital, Reagan wrote a personal note to then-Soviet leader Brezhnev saying he’d like to reach out and work together for “a meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace.”

Don’t expect that this attempt on his life will similarly “awaken” Donald Trump. Already, his surrogates are using the opportunity to demonize — and shut up — Democrats.

Republican Senator and VP wannabee JD Vance was one of the first:

In other words, Democrats damn well better stop calling Trump and the people who support him authoritarians or point out the parallels between their policies and rhetoric and those of Nazis unless they want to be blamed for the actions of a random 20-year-old madman with the classic “bullied loner” profile of a school shooter wanting to die in a blaze of glory.

What an authoritarian thing to do. And it’s intentional: the goal is to blow up the re-election plan that Joe Biden laid out in a speech just a few days before the shooting: to focus on Trump’s violent rhetoric, violent provocations on January 6th, and his years-long embrace of authoritarian violence.

They’re trying, in other words, to silence Democrats. To shut down the Biden campaign’s sharpest weapon against Trump and his neofascist rightwing MAGA movement.

Republican Senator and fellow VP wannabee Tim Scott also got the message, perhaps directly from the campaign or maybe he just saw an opportunity on his own to turn up the heat; he jumped right in:

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, on CNN with Jake Tapper Sunday morning, blamed “Critical Race Theory” for the shooting, saying that the study of historic anti-Black racism in American schools was responsible for the attempt on Trump.

Marjorie Taylor Greene took the opportunity to suggest Democrats are trying to start a second American Civil War, as if people on the left are buying assault weapons and organizing into militias:

Democrats, in other words, damn well better shut up right now about Trump and MAGA’s violent words and memes. Condemning Trump and the militias and racists who promote him is now off-limits: that’s rhetoric that will lead to a “civil war.”

Georgia Republican Congressman Mike Collins went straight for the jugular, tweeting simply:

In that, he’s echoing Donald Trump’s prior claims that when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for the top-secret documents he’d stolen from the White House, President Biden was trying to use the opportunity to have the FBI assassinate him. Trump’s exact statement on Truth Social was that Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”

Trump is now claiming it was “God alone” who kept him safe from death; so far, it looks and sounds like Trump, instead of choosing Reagan’s path to peace, will be claiming martyrdom and directing all the attention to himself. Just two months ago, in fact, Substack author Rohn Kenyatta warned of a scenario very much like this in his excellent LookingNWords newsletter.

Many hope that Trump and his followers won’t continue to use this attempt on his life to blame Democrats for political violence in America, although social media is already afire with such memes.

As noted, the goal of Republican efforts now will be directed to getting the media to condemn Democrats whenever they point out the GOP’s embrace of violence, from January 6th to Trump joking about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi to the “very fine people” in Charlottesville.

If they choose to take the fascist response to a political bloodletting rather that Reagan’s de-escalation response, there’s a well-trod path — laid out in the book Trump’s first wife said was on his bed-stand for years — that I very much hope Trump doesn’t choose to follow.

Ninety-eight years ago this month, the echo of a similar martyrdom first appeared in Germany, an event I’m connected to by only two degrees of separation.

On July 4, 1926, the Blutfahne, or “blood flag,” was unveiled at the second party congress of........

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