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Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Since the vile, civically calamitous attempted assassination of Donald Trump, some of the ex-president’s allies have rushed to blame those who tried to warn of the danger he poses to democracy. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Empowered by the righteous fury of victimhood, Trump’s movement wants to cast discussion of his autocratic record and vengeful threats as incitement, smothering the debate at the heart of the 2024 election in a cloying fug of sanctimony.

It would be easy to expound on Republican hypocrisy and list all the many, many times Trump has encouraged violence against his opponents. But in this case, the mainstream debate about polarizing political rhetoric isn’t just suffused with bad faith. It also seems to be irrelevant, because the more we learn about the shooter, the less it makes sense to analyze his actions in conventional ideological terms. Though details remain sparse, this appears to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young men being radicalized into pure nihilism.

In the immediate wake of the attack — which killed rally-goer Corey Comperatore as he shielded his family — many understandably assumed that the perpetrator was a leftist like the man who shot Representative Steve Scalise and several others in 2017. But what we’ve learned since then, while not enough to draw firm conclusions, complicates the picture.

The would-be........

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