Since Donald Trump was injured on Saturday in the chilling assassination attempt at his Pennsylvania rally, the nation has been advised – including by Joe Biden – to reduce the political rhetoric that can lead to violence.
“Turn down the temperature,” is the going phrase.
That’s a fine idea.
But it shouldn’t mean silencing criticism of Trump in this extremely consequential election season. It shouldn’t mean transforming him into some mythic combination of martyr and hero. And it certainly shouldn’t mean that he gets a pass – a literal get-out-of-jail-free card – for his innumerable past misdeeds.
The assailant’s bullets didn’t destroy history, and they shouldn’t destroy the rule of law.
But we’re already seeing evidence of that.
Most notably, the Trump-appointed judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, on Monday issued a stunning ruling that is a huge, although legally questionable, win for the Republican presidential frontrunner. She dismissed the entire case about Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, citing violations of the constitution in the appointment of the special prosecutor Jack Smith.
Cannon’s decision, fully in keeping with the way she has leaned hard right at almost every turn, may well be reversed on appeal – “it’s wrong six ways from Sunday,” opined the Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck. Nevertheless, the immediate effect is to delay any consequences for Trump’s apparent malfeasance until after November’s election.
It’s likely, of course, that Cannon was headed this way long before the assassination effort this past weekend. But the good will that Trump is garnering makes her ruling much more acceptable, at least to the millions who buy the idea that he has been woefully mistreated by a rigged justice system. And perhaps by others, too.
And her action fits perfectly with a broader movement to shut down criticism and accountability for Trump in the wake of the shooting. A lot of former critics are running scared, unwilling to be branded unpatriotic or insensitive in this fraught moment.
Trump’s allies, both in politics and media (good luck trying to tell the difference), immediately blamed Democrats for the Pennsylvania attack. The gunman was motivated, they charge, by the left’s constant depictions of Trump as a would-be authoritarian, and therefore any such talk must stop.
Not so fast.
One, we still don’t know what motivated the 20-year-old assailant, though we do know he was a registered Republican who had ready access to an assault-style weapon; two, Trump himself has bragged that he wants to be a dictator on day one of a second term and his confederates have cooked up a detailed plan to help; and three, if anyone has inflamed the nation’s anger, sense of grievance and propensity for violence, it’s Trump himself with his threats of retribution and promises to persecute his political rivals.
Somehow, however, we’re now supposed to believe he’s had a profound spiritual awakening and to forget all that divisiveness, including the Trump campaign email that called Joe Biden a “threat to democracy” just last week.
“Can we wait to see some evidence before declaring that he is Mandela now?” suggested Tim Miller of the Bulwark, commenting on an Axios report that imagined a kinder, gentler Trump as well as the view from the former Fox News rabble-rouser Tucker Carlson that “getting shot in the face changes a man”.
Perhaps, as many are predicting in lofty terms, this assassination attempt will change America forever. Maybe it should.
But then again, the slaughter of innocent schoolchildren from Newtown, Connecticut, to Uvalde, Texas, should have done that, but apparently did not.
As we wait for that wondrous change, it is more important than ever to hold fast to things that matter. That goes for the news media, for public officials and for American citizens.
Let’s be steered not by political opportunism, delusion and blame-casting, but by a more constant north star: the rule of law and the truth.
Sympathy for Trump is called for. A free pass is not.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
