American Berserk

A bullet comes for Trump

Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, died at twenty, which means he was born in September of 2003. For the youth, there is nothing remarkable about this fact, but if you’re even a decade older, you remember these as science fiction years. The millennium promised the psychic break from 1 to 2, dates scrawled in notebooks that would leap miraculously back from /99 to /00, everything possible in two stark, space capsule zeroes. Like anyone inexorably aging and self-aware, I’ve been pondering generations, and what it means to have found consciousness in a particular interval of history. Born two years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, Crooks was eleven when Trump descended the golden escalator. This meant, for nearly half his life, he was subsumed into the life and myth of Donald J. Trump, American President, that his waking moments of intellectual maturity—whatever he could achieve, in these alien years before he tried, very desperately, to insert himself into history—were hardened, bent, and fired by a political leviathan unlike any other who has trundled across our land. Trump, like Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley, and even Lee Harvey Oswald, is indisputably American. This I began to think as the news raged across the backyard barbeque where I was when Crooks’ bullet nearly blew apart Trump’s skull; Trump is our inheritance, and he is what this titanic empire, as glorious as it is savage, has naturally disgorged. Trump is America’s demented world-spirit. Of course he would, bloodied, pump his fist.

Trump is a criminal, a pathological liar, a narcissist, and an inveterate bully. He has few deeply held beliefs. As a politician, he has no regard for the mechanics of government or the analysis of policy. He is, as his critics say, vacant. And he is also a genius—not in the sense of a soaring I.Q. or an aptitude for the sciences or any ability to make computations that most human brains cannot. He is, in no way, an intellect. His genius is for the all-American, for publicity, for having the native foresight, buried deep in his viscous core, to understand what he had to do. He had to perform. He had to shout fight, he had to hunt out the cameras, he had to get his fist in the air, he had to apprehend, somehow, what this all meant before the secret service barreled him away. He himself, in the hospital, seemed astounded by his own power. “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” he told Michael Goodwin, the sycophantic New York Post columnist. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.” This is the platonic ideal of a Trump quote: self-aggrandizing, incorrect, and aimed straight, like an arrow into the heart, at all that he will ever care about, and all he has gained. He is known. He is forever known. He has fame, and the best kind, the American kind, that which, like Cronos, devours whatever else is on this Earth, so men and women in Paris and Egypt and Kampala can think of him and dream of him and even bear his likeness, this image of the blood and the flag and the fist, on a cotton t-shirt. What else, near death, can Trump long for? The presidency is beside the point. If he wins, as everyone seems to think he will, he’ll only get four more years anyway, no matter what they tell you about American Hitler. Trump has no genius for governing or genuinely dominating others; he cannot, like Napoleon, stand up a new empire or, like the Nazis and the Soviets, make fascism as real as the gun pressed to your temple. His political machine runs on the exhaust fumes of his own mania, and it can do little to discipline the states, the little republics of federalism that will choose, if governed by Democrats, to shirk Trumpism. Soon, Trump will be eighty, and this milestone will either be celebrated in the Oval Office or at Mar-a-Lago, in permanent exile as a two-time presidential loser.

Those who try to kill tend to be young and tend to be male. It is mostly forgotten now that Oswald, with his wife and receding hairline, was just twenty-four when he took aim at John F. Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository. In youth, there is a particular ambition that can meld with madness and irrepressible rage. Everything is possible and nothing is possible. Motives are rarely narratives, like we so long for—even if Crooks left behind a manifesto, which he did not, the true motivations of an attempted murder of the likes inextricably bound to spectacle will always be, to some degree, muddled. One would-be assassin tried to kill a president to impress Jodie Foster. Another, the rare female shooter, wanted to spark a vague, violent revolution to overthrow the powers-that-be. William McKinley was killed by a lonely, unemployed anarchist. The man who killed James Garfield believed, very wrongly, he had been passed over for administration jobs he deserved. The assassination attempt on Trump, then, is something of a throwback. For reasons that few have properly explicated, shooters lost interest in world leaders. In the twenty-first century, young, gun-obsessed men like Crooks headed for schools, shopping malls, movie theaters, and nightclubs, where the victims were anonymous and defenseless. If Crooks craved fame on the scale of what Trump enjoys, he failed dramatically. A missed shot is a historical footnote, a Wikipedia page visited less and less with each passing year. It is a curiosity, one more hunk of data to be recalled about the 2020s and the second collision between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, two elderly presidents who had, in divergent fashions, effectively held their political parties hostage, producing a showdown that revolted millions of Americans. Has the photo made Trump the 47th American president? Maybe. Maybe not. This hothouse world moves faster than we’d like. A July assassination attempt isn’t an October assassination attempt. The scars on Trump’s ear, come Election Day, might even be healed.