The Republicans are squandering all the sympathy and goodwill — and any hope of the country healing.
By Dana MilbankJuly 19, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EDTAfter Saturday’s failed assassination attempt, Donald Trump said he wanted to “bring the country together” and “unite America.”
It was about as plausible as President Biden announcing that he hopes to take up rugby.
“In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” Trump proposed. That was on Sunday.
On Monday, he demanded “the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts” — the legal cases against him — and referred to the case about his role in the 2021 attack on the Capitol as “the January 6th Hoax.” Wrote Trump: “The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.”
On Tuesday, he denounced the “Radical Left Democrats” who “are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System.” The Uniter speculated that the “reason that these Communists are so despondent is that their unLawful Witch Hunts are failing everywhere.”
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That evening, the Republican National Convention showed a video in which Trump announced that “we must use every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats. They are destroying our country.” He added that “we must swamp the radical Democrats” who “cheat” in elections, “and frankly it’s the only thing they do well.”
Follow this authorDana Milbank's opinionsFollowOn Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social an image of him raising a fist after the assassination, juxtaposed with three photos of Biden stumbling on jet stairs. “TRUMP VS BULLET,” it said, and “BIDEN VS STAIRS.”
By then, Trump allies at the GOP convention had called Democrats “jackals,” “corrupt,” “feckless,” “evil” and “Marxists” who tried to kill Trump. (The failed assassin was a registered Republican, and authorities have found no evidence of a political motive.)
Ah, the warm courage of national unity.
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Then came Thursday night’s closing of the GOP’s unity convention.
Eric Trump told the crowd his father had been “persecuted … by far-left Democrats,” and “ruthlessly silenced, slandered and attacked by a corrupt administration,” and he implied that “the swamp” was behind the attempted assassination.
Hulk Hogan ended his convention address by saying: “All you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags … and all you crooked politicians need to answer one question, brother: What you going to do when Donald Trump and all the Trump-a-maniacs run wild on you?”
Trump himself, after a feint toward unity — “the discord and division in our society must be healed” — soon reverted to type. He complained about the “fake documents case against me” and the “partisan witch hunts.” He denounced “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” and invoked the “China virus.” He said Democrats “used covid to cheat” and called the United States a “nation in decline” with “totally incompetent leadership,” where there is “cheating on elections.”
Despite his campaign’s claims (credulously swallowed by some in the press) that he wouldn’t mention Biden in his unifying speech, Trump told the convention that he would “take back the White House from Crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of our country.” He then delivered his standard stump speech, packed with vitriol and fabrications.
It looked like I had picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
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I was already missing this week’s convention to go to a reunion, and the night before I departed, the would-be assassin came within an inch of killing the man Republicans were about to nominate for president. It was the sort of national trauma that had the potential to reshape politics.
Trump, recognizing his close call had given him a huge opportunity to recast himself, vowed to unify the country. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” he told the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito the next day. Biden and other Democratic leaders recognized the importance of rising above politics. They condemned the heinous act and expressed gratitude that Trump wasn’t seriously harmed. The news media embraced the talk of unity with a newly subdued and respectful tone.
But it turns out I didn’t miss anything. The world didn’t stop, or even slow down. Republicans baselessly blamed Democrats for the shooting, and Biden and the Democrats went back to describing Trump as a liar and a felon and an aspiring autocrat. The press coverage went back to what it was before. And the public didn’t pay much attention to any of it.
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After the shooting, 16 million people watched coverage of the shocking event on broadcast and cable news, Nielsen figures showed. That was considerably fewer than the 24 million who had watched Biden’s news conference after the NATO summit a couple of days earlier. This was consistent with what I saw as I traveled across the country: People weren’t crowding around televisions or scrolling for news. On Tuesday, a Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted after the shooting found that the presidential race was fundamentally unchanged, with Trump leading Biden by two percentage points, a statistical tie.
The ho-hum reaction is not a good thing, for it shows that Americans are now so numb to gun violence, mass shootings and even political violence that we are no longer surprised by it. The indifference seen in the viewership and in the polls also provides more evidence that Americans have already made up their minds about this presidential contest — and that there is seemingly nothing that will change their minds as long as these two unpalatable candidates remain the choices.
Biden’s spectacular flop at the debate may have nudged the polls a point or two in Trump’s favor, but it didn’t fundamentally alter the race. The assassination attempt didn’t either. The two candidates remain extremely unpopular. Most voters think Biden is too old and mentally unfit. Most voters think Trump is too dangerous and temperamentally unfit.........