Donald Trump has a lot of things to celebrate this week, but a foregone conclusion in November isn’t one of them.
Joe Biden is down in the polls and losing the unwinnable war against time’s toll.
But Biden is nothing if not tenacious, and the president has a trick ready to turn Trump’s latest triumph— over an assassin’s bullet—into a political defeat.
In his Oval Office remarks last Sunday, Biden tied the attempt on Trump’s life the day before to a litany of other acts of political violence, including the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Biden was returning to a winning theme from 2020, when the summer of rage following the death of George Floyd gave Democrats an opening to identify Trump with chaos.
The Biden campaign’s next move is obvious enough—blame Trump and the GOP themselves for the assassination attempt by linking it to their position on guns.
Just why 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to murder Trump isn’t clear. But how he tried to do it is significant enough for Biden’s purposes:
Crooks used a rifle, and whatever his ideological interests may have been, he’s confirmed to have been a firearms enthusiast.
He tried out for his high school’s shooting team, belonged to a gun club, and died wearing the T-shirt of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch.
A vote for Trump, Democrats will say, is a vote for political instability and putting deadly weapons in the hands of unstable individuals like the Trump shooter.
Republicans, meanwhile, have already sprung a trap on themselves.
To score cheap political points, or because they’re simply victims of their own groupthink, Trump supporters have started echoing a theme of Democrats.
They think they’re turning the tables on progressives by holding them accountable for creating a climate of violence with their extreme anti-Trump rhetoric.
Trump even appears as Adolf Hitler on a recent New Republic cover.
Isn’t that an incitement to murder the man?
When Biden himself talks about putting Trump in a bull’s-eye, isn’t that language likely to lead to someone actually putting him in the crosshairs?
Republicans never thought so before, whenever they used such “targeting” metaphors and progressives were the ones accusing them of inspiring violence.
It shouldn’t take an exceptional degree of self-awareness for supporters of Donald Trump to recognize how hyping the dangers of intemperate language might backfire.
Any comparison of Trump to Hitler is moronic, but it’s not an instigation.
And if rude rhetoric were the deciding issue of the campaign, voters would be quick to send Trump into retirement—not only for the things he says but for the deranged utterances he elicits from his enemies’ mouths.
Democrats are only too happy to wage a campaign on these terms.
Their strategy calls for getting voters to see Biden, once again, as a force for calm and unity and Trump as a source of endless controversy, anger, and upheaval.
Trump, on the other hand, has to court moderates without repudiating the right if he wants to match or surpass his 2016 victory.
He needs the Republican base, including gun owners and pro-lifers, to turn out in full strength—but the no-compromise policies conservatives hope for are what many swing voters fear most.
Trump was the president who built the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade.
But he’s seen how referendums on abortion have turned out since then, and he’s determined not to let his campaign become one. Democrats are doing their utmost to turn it into just that.
Biden is no moderate when it comes to guns or abortion, or almost anything else, but moderation is a message he’ll exploit to the fullest.
He wants to be the no-drama candidate—a steady, mature hand at the wheel, even if one that’s a bit too mature.
Trump at his best is an inimitable mixture of humor, optimism, urgency, and outrage.
He takes the stage to opera, disco, and the Rolling Stones—drama is his element.
Trump must, however, be seen to master the whirlwind, as he did when he rose to his feet and raised his fist defiantly after the assassin missed his shot.
Biden seeks to turn his own mediocrity into a strength. It worked last time.
Republicans shouldn’t help him do it—either by becoming complacent about their chances Nov. 5 or by adopting the Democrats’ framework on rhetoric and violence.
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