We’ve known for ages that the U.S. Republican Party is the grand old party of hypocrisy, so anyone who didn’t see the latest rhetorical twist coming hasn’t been paying attention.
On Saturday, July 13, former President Donald Trump was shot at during a MAGA rally in Butler, Pennsylvania (above). According to news reports, shots rang out while he was speaking on stage, and he suddenly dropped to the ground as blood spurted from his right ear, which had apparently been grazed by a bullet.
Trump will be fine, but the gunman, who has been identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel, Pennsylvania, and a rally attendee were killed and two others were critically injured.
Naturally, Republicans are outraged over the violence at the MAGA event, blaming President Joe Biden and his recent “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye” comment while demanding an unbiased investigation and unbiased coverage. Yes, unbiased . It’s that word they love to toss around, even though they’ve never met a biased angle they wouldn’t exploit. No motive has been disclosed for the shooting on Saturday, but it is being investigated as an assassination attempt.
“We won’t forget,” Georgia’s Republican U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene cryptically posted on X . Meanwhile, Trump said, “It is incredible that such an act can take place in our country.”
Political violence of any kind is unacceptable. It was unacceptable when President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, and it still is in 2024. I’ve never really bought into the idea of the United States as a beacon of strength and morality in the world. We have way too much historical baggage for that. But we must do better than this.
It’s hard to process the MAGA outcry, though, when, for years, the GOP has been the party of gun violence — of violence period . They’re the ones who defend to the death their Second Amendment right to bear arms, bragging about buying their toddler granddaughters shotguns, rifles, and ponies for their second birthdays.
They’re the ones who are less worried about gun violence killing students across the country than they are about transgender students playing school sports, Critical Race Theory being taught to second graders (which it is not), drag queens, and teachers who say “gay.”
They’re the ones who invited Patricia and Mark McCloskey , the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matters protestors in June of 2020, to speak at the 2020 National Republican Convention.
They’re the ones who glorify guns and treat them as being as sacred as the American flag and are ready to shoot down — figurately and literally — anyone who disagrees with them.
They’re the ones who gave then 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse a standing ovation at a conservative Turning Point USA Event in Phoenix in 2021, one month after he was acquitted of shooting and killing two people and injuring another person at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Florida’s Republican U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz even offered to offer Rittenhouse a congressional internship because apparently his office could use more Smith & Wesson M&P 15 -toting teenagers.
They’re the ones who pretend that thousands of rioters violently storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an insurrection that left five people dead, looked like nothing more than “a normal tourist visit” to the Capitol. Trump has suggested that, if re-elected in November, he will pardon the jailed insurrectionists because, apparently, like the White supremacists who incited deadly violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the White supremacists on Jan. 6 are “very fine people.”
They’re the ones who glorify guns and treat them as being as sacred as the American flag and are ready to shoot down—figurately and literally—anyone who disagrees with them.
Of course, now they’re the ones who are outraged, now that Trump has been threatened by the sort of gun violence that they usually just shrug off as the price we must pay for living in America, land of the free, home of the gun-wielding brave. Haven’t they been paying attention to their own actions?
I’m outraged, too. But my outrage is sparked mostly by the eight years of dangerous rhetoric, hypocrisy, and advocacy that has led us to this moment and will likely, frighteningly, lead to more like it. In the new America that feels a lot like an old America from before I was born, nobody is safe — not children in school, not Black people in church, not Asian Americans at work, not Jewish people on public transportation, not police and politicians working in the U.S. Capitol, and not presidential candidates on the campaign trail.
“This is not who we are,” some Americans, including Joe Biden, like to say in moments like this one. They’re wrong. This is exactly who we’ve become.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeremy Heligar's work on Medium .
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