River News: Our View

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were assassinated in an open motorcade in Sarajevo, a murder that by all accounts sparked World War I. There’s no telling if the deep rifts in the geopolitics of Europe would have ultimately led to war anyway, but there’s no question that the bullet that tore through the archduke’s jugular vein triggered an international war.

There but for the grace of God go we. Former President Donald Trump’s turned head on Saturday spared this nation not just a personal and political tragedy but an upheaval of massive proportions that would have shaken the very foundations of the republic.

That’s not to say that an international war or even a civil war would have ensued. Nobody knows the aftermath, but it’s safe to say the red-meat polarization that is running through our politics and that has defined this presidential campaign would have produced chaos and deep civil unrest, if not violence.

A head turn avoided the worst. Accordingly, the Republican national convention this week has turned into a celebration for a triumphant and defiant Trump and for party and national unity. We shudder to think what the scene would have been like had Donald Trump died last Saturday.

Word has it that the former president is going to give a speech calling for national unity while continuing to underline what Republicans see as the abject failure of the administration’s policies. By the time this column is read, we will all know if that came to pass.

For the nation’s sake, we hope it did. The political heat needs to be turned down on both sides. However, it’s important in this context to understand just what is meant by “turning the heat down.”  

We begin by saying what it does not mean: Turning the heat down does not mean disengaging from passionate political disagreement over policies. Lord knows we have them, and they are driving polarization, on issues from immigration to inflation to Ukraine and Israel to the bureaucratic state to cultural and identity politics. 

It’s OK — indeed necessary in a representative democracy — to articulate those disagreements and to define why one position or another is good or bad for the country. In this election cycle, and over the past few election cycles, Republicans have more or less done just that.

Take immigration, for example. Speakers at this week’s Republican convention focused on the more than 10 million illegal aliens that have invaded our open border and they explained in detail why they believe that is bad for the nation — the egregious crime that comes with criminal crossings; the security risks posed by letting unvetted potential terrorists enter the country easily; the drain on public and human resources; and, worst of all, the human trafficking it encourages and the flood of fentanyl that has killed more than 300,000 Americans, most of them young people.

It would be wrong for those who believe in those arguments not to make them, and make them passionately.

That’s completely different than inciting violence through demonization. Demonization is to transform policy discussion into ad hominem attack, and, unfortunately, the Democrats over the years have made demonization their signature strategy.

Policy never makes much of an entrance on the Democratic stage. To cite the aforementioned immigration, for example, we do not hear from Democrats why open borders are good for the nation. First, we heard denials that the border was open — “The border is secure,” Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas exclaimed before Congress — then we heard it was actually Donald Trump’s fault, though Democrats never said how, then, confronted with the largest border surge in decades, Biden finally signed an executive order limiting illegal daily crossings to 2,500 a day, which is still nearly a million illegal entries a year.

What a goal. Because they are, you know, illegal entries, why not limit them to zero? And if open borders are so good for the nation, why is Biden capping the daily crossings at 2,500, except for political optics?

Rather than hearing substantive reasoning for Democratic policies, we have heard demonization. It first started in earnest when Hillary Clinton dubbed half the nation to be “deplorables.” It has continued to escalate. We hear that Trump is “Hitler.” We hear that he is a fascist. We hear that he is an “existential threat to democracy” and cannot be allowed to regain the White House.

We hear Biden say that Trump needs to be put into a “bullseye.”

When such language is used, it doesn’t take much to nudge the most unhinged and unstable among us to take action. After all, in their mind, they are only carrying out what Democratic Party leaders say must happen. This is how thew widow of the Trump fan killed at the rally put it:

“This was a 20-year-old boy on the roof. He didn’t come back here from Vietnam. He didn’t see all of these terrible things. He just knows what he’s been hearing, what the media has portrayed this man [Trump] to be, and it’s very unfair.”

It’s also very unfair the way Democrats have for years portrayed  the millions in the MAGA movement. As Sen. Marco Rubio put it last night, those who attend Trump rallies are hardly deplorable; they are average hard-working Americans who care about their families and their country:

“These are the Americans who wear the Red Hats and wait for hours under a blazing sun to hear Trump speak and what they want is not painful or extreme. What they want are good jobs and lower prices. They want borders that are secure and for those who come here to do so legally. They want to be safe from criminals and from terrorists, and they want for our leaders to care more about our problems here at home than about the problems of other countries far away.”

And Rubio made this important point: “There is absolutely nothing dangerous or anything divisive about putting Americans first. Anyone who is offended about putting America First has forgotten what American means.”

Of course, Democratic Party leaders all know none of their rhetoric is true. Donald Trump served this nation for four year as president, and never moved against the civil liberties of Americans. Even during the early pandemic there was no federal move to lock down the United States.

Not only that, Trump never pressured social media companies to censor Americans, and he used his presidency — successfully in many cases — to roll back regulatory overreach, and was upheld multiple times in the Supreme Court on those and other constitutional matters. To be sure, Trump’s talk about rights has often been careless, but his actions have been anything but. 

By contrast, while Republicans have refrained from calling Joe Biden “Hitler,” he has actually attempted assault after assault on the constitution, including overreaching attempts at vaccine and mask mandates, building a White House censorship complex, refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws; attempting to end-run the constitution on student loans; pushing unconstitutional race-based admissions and grant programs; not to mention the Democrats’ vicious attacks on women’s rights — an attempt to erase women altogether — by allowing biological males to eviscerate their privacy in bathrooms and to destroy female athletics.

All of this is dangerous policy because they undermine the rights that our constitution guarantees each and every one of us and because, if they are allowed to take hold, they will fundamentally alter our nation. But none of them — not even their accumulation — makes Joe Biden “Hitler.”

What it makes him is a failed, weak president whose policies we must reject by voting him out of office. Add to that his cognitive inability and it’s even worse. Of course, Democrats and the Democratic-aligned media pretended that calling out Biden’s cognitive decline was itself demonization, that is, until the debate exposed it and the media began calling him that, too.

The real demonization must stop. Let the Democrats drop the shrill pronouncements about democracy being on the ballot and counter the GOP’s arguments with policy substance. Tell us why open borders are good. Stop gaslighting us about defending democracy in Ukraine — Ukraine is not a democracy, and Zelenskyy is a dictator — and tell us why the war is necessary. 

We may and should have a spirited debate about all that, and, if we stick to policy, the temperature will come down, and maybe we can avoid another era of political violence, such as that which gripped the United States between 1963 and 1981.

Finally, we cannot close without mentioning the massive failure of the Secret Service. The bullet that tore through Trump’s ear nearly created a Franz Ferdinand moment, and it is surreal to think just how close the nation came to calamity.

Nor can we fail to mention the man who lost his life there, Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief who shielded his family from harm as a final act in life. There is no truer definition of hero than that.

The bullet may not have killed Trump, but it nonetheless changed the trajectory of the presidential race and, likely, history. What the nation saw — captured in an iconic photograph — was a gigantic and authentic American hero, willing not only to take a bullet for his country but to stand up, fist clenched and pumping, exhorting the crowd to “Fight, fight, fight.”

Is this the man you want leading this nation, or what? We all know it is.

Right now those massive Secret Service failures must be explored and questions must be answered. As Elon Musk wrote on X afterwards, the failure was either deliberate or the result of mass incompetence.

As CBS and other media have reported, cellphone video captured onlookers pointing toward the gunman and frantically trying to alert law enforcement for two full minutes before any shots were fired. CBS also reports that a sniper took a picture of the shooter looking through a rangefinder several minutes before he fired at the president.

How could this happen? We suspect mass incompetence: A government hit would not likely look so Keystone cop-ish and we also have woke statements from the Secret Service that a sniper wasn’t placed on the shooter’s building because a sloped tin roof made it unsafe.

Unsafe! Well, it wasn’t unsafe for the shooter to climb atop, and, not only that, there were Secret Service snipers on other sloped, tin roofs.

All in all, it was a fiasco, deliberate or otherwise, and an investigation — including one by the House — must get to the bottom and find the truth. In the meantime, the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, must resign or be fired.

In 1914, incompetence led to the death of Franz Ferdinand after an initial assassination attempt failed earlier in the day. Cops in the security detail were left behind when the motorcade departed without them, and then a driver fatally took a wrong turn and had to stop the car, which was not supposed to even slow down, allowing the shooter to kill the archduke and his wife.

The result wasn’t the same, but the same breathless incompetence was on display last Saturday. It cannot be allowed to happen again.

When the government cannot protect its leaders, that tells everyone that it cannot protect us, either. The gaping holes in security raise questions whether the assassination attempt was more than incompetence, but either way Americans now have one more reason not to trust the government on anything. 

The only remaining question is whether Trump used his Thursday night convention speech to drive home the message of unity, strength, and courage, and the need for a change to not only rebuild our institutions but our trust in them.

Trump turned his head at the last moment, giving us all now a chance to turn a big corner in November. It also gives us time to reflect on our character and, as Rubio said, what it means to be an American. We close with his words:

“Who do we come from? We come from pioneers who ventured west to chase their dreams and slaves who overcame bondage to claim their right to the promise of America. We come from exiles who fled tyranny in search of freedom and of immigrants who left behind all they had and knew because they could not be or achieve God’s purpose for their life in the nation of their birth. That is an American.”

It sure is. Let us proudly reclaim the courageous lives of our ancestors as we now carry the banner of liberty for them into the future — all of us, equal and free, as Americans.