Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump has sent our national political tension up to an 11. How we respond to this traumatizing event is crucial, and the stakes for our country are high. As our leaders navigate the troubled aftermath, they can take some comfort in the fact that we’re not totally in the dark — America’s history is not free of difficult moments.
The worst thing political leaders can do is create a panicked narrative that this awful moment — one in which multiple people were injured and one person was killed — is what will take down the American experiment. After all, the country was literally split in half until months before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and hundreds of thousands of people died to reunite it. If there was ever a time for the American experiment to fail — long before social media and cable news — it was then.
The 1960s were also a bad time. Cultural tensions, the Vietnam War and the Cold War were the backdrop to the assassinations of two leaders — President John F. Kennedy and his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — and one of America’s most important cultural leaders, Martin Luther King Jr.
The last shooting of a president came after years of economic stagnation, the Iran hostage crisis, and a national political crisis related to the Richard Nixon resignation. Yet, that shooting wasn’t the “last straw” for our country, either. Ronald Reagan bounced back from his injuries and led our country to decades of prosperity, national confidence, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The United States has been heavily divided for a long time, and neither party has the “shining city on the hill” mentality that Reagan kept at the forefront of our minds. Trump is either a fascist or a persecuted hero; Biden is standing against fascism or a crimelord who targets his political opponents. It’s overwhelming to try to cut through the rhetoric to the truth.
It can be hopeless when we are reminded daily via e-mail, social media, and conversations with family and friends how the January 6 rioters threatened to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence, a Bernie Sanders supporter who shot Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017, and non-politicians like Paul Pelosi and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were more recently lethally targeted.
For a moment, after the assassination attempt on Trump, many leaders seemed to put the country ahead of partisanship. President Biden and other Democratic Party leaders set aside their rhetoric against Trump, with Biden saying he and his wife were praying for his recovery. Trump — himself inclined toward negative rhetoric — likewise rightly called for unity after Biden’s speech.
But it didn’t last long. By midweek, Biden accused Trump and Republicans of wanting to deny Black Americans their rights, reiterating a similar claim from 2012 that then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney wanted to put Black Americans “in chains.”
Stopping the rhetoric that frames political opponents as hateful, evil people who want to destroy America would go a long way toward helping reduce fears that our nation is too divided to continue.
It doesn’t reduce the awfulness of what happened or the tensions and tough times our nation is going through. But it can remind us that we’ve beaten tough times before, mainly because our leaders stepped up. We are human first, Americans second, and partisans last. And we can move forward together in our families, neighborhoods, cities and towns, and states — even if the scaremongers on social media say it’s impossible.