In the wake of the near assassination of Republican presidential candidate, Donald John Trump, the reaction from his MAGA faithful and Congressional Republicans was swift and angry. At first, it was all Joe Biden's fault; the gunman, one Thomas Matthew Crooks, gave $15 to a Democratic political action committee (PAC), the Secret Service was to blame - it's their fault - and angry Trumpists swore to "get to the bottom" of this dreadful act of trying to kill their messiah.
Not to be outdone, President Joe Biden came out and told America and the world that the gunman's action was not what we do as Americans, and that violence of any kind has no place in America today. I struggled to keep a straight face; to not descend in uncontrolled laughter bordering on temporary lunacy. What?! While you're turning a blind eye to daily violence in Gaza, and now tagged with the sobriquet "Genocide Joe" you're waxing self-righteously and piously about violence?
I've now come to the firm conclusion that in America today guns have twisted and distorted men's (and some women too) minds. There is a kind of sick addiction to guns and firearms in general. When one of the now normalized senseless acts of gun violence occur the default mechanism is a reconfiguration of the Second Amendment, and the illogical statement that "guns do not kill; only people with guns do." And when that sounds kinda worn out and trite, it's never ever a "gun problem" but a "mental health problem." There is even speculation that would be assassin Crooks, now dead as a doornail, was "not all there,"
And the very shocking and sad truth is that AR-15s now speak an auto-erotic self-delusional language of love and attraction to the vast majority of the MAGA horde. They are adored, beautified and glorified at every turn as if they were the very articles of Republican (and some Democrats) orthodoxy. These sacred, must-have objects of mass murder have done a big favor for the Republican Party and its new King Donald by allowing him to ascend into GOP Political Heaven, with a copious wad of white plaster adorning his right ear where the assassin's bullet narrowly missed the bovine one.
Of course, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, Trump and company used this unfortunate incident to distract away from his rape judgments, civil fraud penalties, and felony charges for espionage, sedition, and electoral racketeering. For the Republican Party's faithful these were "minor things," little more than pesky "trespasses" that the electorate (at least the GOP diehards) is happy to forgive and move on from. The man has divine protection and was sent by the Almighty himself.
If assassination deification wasn't enough, the Supreme Court's decision to do its political job of making the former president the new American King by shoving aside his various indulgences and repeated sins. First, the right-wing, ultra-conservative Roberts Court overturned the original intent of the U.S. Constitution that no man or woman, even a president, is above the law-- by listing all those presumptive instances (including the official act of paying off a porn star while seated at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office) when a U.S. president can beat any and all raps.
In less than two weeks, the Supreme Court's ruling and the assassination attempt have transmogrified Donald Trump from a psychotic talking about how "the late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man-- to a pseudo-statesman and the Great White Hope of those who dream of a United States of Apartheid. At the just concluded Republican National Convention, Trump basked in the near-endless hallelujahs that "God protected him" in Butler for a higher purpose. That was the message spread from every speaker from the airheaded Marjorie Taylor Greene to "Little Marco Rubio" and dog killer, Kristi Noem.
I swear that after a while, the Lord Almighty began to sound like yet another political action committee eager to buy Trump air time or launder money for his attorneys. Finally, nobody should be surprised that Donald Trump would find common cause with the school shooter industrial complex-- the NRA, gun fetishizers like his son Don Jr., the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, and the asinine Second Amendment crowd. Or that they will all pretend that the would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was just a misguided but very nice kid that was influenced by radical democrats.
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