The Madness Is Just Beginning

When History Rhymes

Your editor is old enough to have a vivid and unusual memory of the last time someone tried to kill a U.S. president.

It was March 30, 1981. In the Central time zone, it happened when the school day was almost over. At the conclusion of ninth-period English class, a student from a classroom nearby burst in: “Reagan’s been shot!”

I walked home and turned on CNN — which had been around for only a few months. Then, It was an upstart outfit, willing to take chances the “Big 3” networks would not.

One chance it took that day was live and impromptu man-on-the-street interviews in New York.

Most people expressed the requisite shock and/or horror. Then there was a woman in her 30s who said something to the effect of, “Well, I guess I’m not surprised, really — what with the budget cuts he’s planning and all…”

The part about “He had it coming” was merely implied. Callous, perhaps, but harmless.

For whatever reason, the memory stuck. Somewhere in the early 2000s it occurred to me that the post-9/11 atmosphere in the country had turned so paranoid that had it happened then, the woman would have surely gotten a visit from the feds.

With the passage of two more decades and another assassination attempt, well…

A “volatile escalation of division”...

Well, here we go. The last time I devoted an entire edition of an e-letter to the aftermath of breaking news was the day after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.

With one glaring exception — it’s now beyond doubt that police did let some of the protesters in — most of what I wrote stands up pretty well.

Then as now, there are financial implications to ponder. Then as now, the Dow Jones industrials are rising to record heights. Then as now, I can’t help thinking about a new American civil war — and a relevant episode from the old one.

In May 1863, Wall Street experienced a bull market known as the “Chancellorsville rise” — after a Confederate victory in Virginia that racked up more than 17,000 Union casualties. The market rallied on the theory that with the war lasting longer than expected, the Union government would have to issue more inflationary “greenbacks.”

Easy money fueling a bull market. Sound familiar?

“The Trump Trade” and the Markets Today

Right or wrong, Mr. Market is increasingly pricing in a Trump victory in November. Bloomberg calls it “the Trump trade.”

“The series of wagers — based on anticipation that the Republicans return to the White House would usher in tax cuts, higher tariffs and looser regulations — had already been gaining ground since President Joe Biden’s poor performance in last month’s debate imperiled his re-election campaign.”

As noted above, stocks are rallying. In addition to the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq are at or above all-time highs.

At last check, Trump Media (DJT) is up 33% on the day — surely fueling the fevered dreams of the “BlueAnon” crowd that thinks the whole thing Saturday night was “staged.” (The family of the ex-firefighter who was killed would like to have a word with them...)

The dollar is up relative to other major currencies. Bond yields are rising.

Crypto — still the only market that trades 24/7 — started to take off moments after the shots were fired on Saturday. Bitcoin hasn’t looked back — from $58,500 then to over $63,000 this morning. (Presumably Trump is still on for his scheduled address at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville 12 days from now.)

Also in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, billionaires Elon Musk and Bill Ackman endorsed Trump. Neither is exactly a surprise — but the news reinforces the impression that competing cadres of billionaires are lining up on opposite sides in this election.

That’s a stark change from eight years ago — and another “volatile escalation of division” suggesting incipient civil war. Read on…

Disturbing Discourse (NOT the “Bull’s-eye”)

Already there’s a disturbing turn in the discourse across these United States — as if 2024 wasn’t already a terrible year for freedom of expression.

You don’t have to look far on social media to find howls from the right about how Joe Biden and/or other Democrats “incited” the shooting Saturday.

Really? Biden says, “We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye” — and that’s some sort of dog whistle to activate a sleeper or something?

Isn’t this hand-wringing the kind of “words are violence” rhetoric that’s come from the left for many years? Justifying all manner of social-media censorship in the name of policing “hate speech”?

Yeah, it cuts both ways. On X-formerly-Twitter, the irascible political reporter Michael Tracey reminds us of an episode in which liberals accused conservatives of incitement: Sarah Palin’s political action committee used bull’s-eye imagery to denote the congressional districts the PAC was “targeting” in the 2010 midterms — including that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), who was shot and wounded in early 2011.

It’s a metaphor, people. Gee, whatever happened to the conservative defense that Trump’s words should be taken “seriously but not literally”?

That said, the critics on the right have one valid point.

You don’t get to spend eight-plus years demonizing Trump as “literal Hitler,” a threat to “our democracy,” an agent of a foreign power — and then act surprised when someone tries to put a bullet in him. (Granted, at this point we don’t know the dead suspect had a political motive.) Nor do you get to wish him a speedy recovery and say political violence is never acceptable.

I for one would like to hear from neoconservative theorist Robert Kagan, who published a 6,000-word screed in The Washington Post last November practically begging for Trump’s assassination.

Don’t take my word for it — decide for yourself. Here’s a non-paywalled link. As the independent journalist Matt Taibbi said, “It could have been headlined, ‘Where’s Hinckley When You Need Him?’”

And yet… despicable as Kagan’s rhetoric may be, it is and should be protected speech.

More than 50 years ago, the Supreme Court drew bright red lines about what constitutes incitement. Sensible lines they are: Unless, for instance, you’re standing outside someone’s house with a mob urging them to burn it down at that moment, everything is fair game. Only “imminent lawless action” is off-limits.

I sure as hell don’t want to live in a world where the woman in New York on the day of the Reagan shooting would feel as if she had to police her thoughts lest they be viewed by overwrought politicos as “incitement to violence.”

Trust in “the System”? Forget It…

Meanwhile, the erosion of trust in “the system” that began with the JFK assassination is probably beyond the breaking point. Justly so…

The news this morning is that Secret Service chief Kimberly Cheatle says her agency will take part in an “independent review” ordered by Joe Biden into the events of Saturday night. Gee, how magnanimous of her!

If Cheatle had any honor or decency, she would resign.

But that’s not the American way, not in the years since JFK’s killing. The journalist Jeff Stein, who’s been covering the Washington scene since the 1970s, writes at his SpyTalk column on Substack…

In my adult lifetime, I can’t recall a senior official taking responsibility for the millions of lives lost from their failures — or outright mendacity — ranging from Vietnam, through Cuba, Chile and Central America, onward through 9/11, through Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention domestic disasters like opioid megadeaths and bank collapses, and done the right thing by stepping up, apologizing and resigning out of principle. My AI searches for examples came up blank.

Stein also reminds us that some of the Secret Service agents on JFK’s detail were so drunk after a night of carousing in Dallas they could hardly walk.

Writes Jefferson Morley, a journalist who’s been suing the CIA for over 20 years to open up all the JFK records…

The cultural reflexes engrained by the trauma of Nov. 22 and the ensuing governmental coverup have been unleashed by the near-miss of July 13: deep suspicion of the authorities, distrust of democratic institutions, fear of a high-level plot and the sense of things falling apart, all turbocharged by a social media information system unknown in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Media… and the Process of “Othering”

I suppose I should say a thing or two about the corporate media, seeing as that’s how I earned my living for the first 20 years of my adulthood.

For all the roasting the media is getting for its initial hesitancy to label what happened Saturday night as an assassination attempt…

… there were several instances in which the legacy media acquitted itself with professionalism.

It was a New York Times photographer who got the justly famous bullet photo. It was the New York Post that named the suspect two hours before the officials did. It was Pittsburgh’s CBS outlet that scored early interviews with the suspect’s classmates.

Most important, it was BBC reporter Gary O’Donoghue who got the interview with the red-haired guy who said he saw the gunman climbing up a building to the roof, rifle in hand — and who tried to warn the authorities to no avail.

To whatever extent the heat is on the Secret Service this week, it started with that interview going viral Saturday night, barely an hour after the shots rang out. Millions of people saw it, and they can’t unsee it.

Presumably the feds are asking him the same questions and many more. Given how millions of people already know his story, it will be mighty hard for the feds to browbeat him into changing that story.

In other words, they won’t be able to do to him what they did to the several witnesses who saw a mysterious woman in a polkadot dress the night that Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968.

It is tempting — especially given the market action today — to think that “the drama is all over now.”

Even before Saturday night, Trump was starting to look competitive in heretofore “blue” states like Virginia and Minnesota. What Democrat in his or her right mind would want to replace an enfeebled Biden atop the Democratic ticket now?

But it’s still 113 days until Election Day. And 189 days until the inauguration.

The “volatile escalation of division” is not over. The process of “othering” has not been arrested — a process described by historian Michael Vlahos in The American Conservative in 2018: “Warring identities have concluded that the only solution is the complete submission of the enemy party, and both sides are beginning to prepare for an ultimate showdown.

“Othering is a transforming process, through which former kin are reimagined as evil, an American inner-enemy, who once defeated must be punished.”

Vlahos even likened the red-blue divide to “an irreparable religious schism, deeper in doctrinal terms even than the 16th-century Catholic-Protestant schism.”

With that in mind, we give the last word to the aforementioned Matt Taibbi — and a cautionary note that does not let corporate media off the hook.

“We should probably all steel ourselves for what will surely be the Mother of All Propaganda Onslaughts. To say this is a critical moment in American history is an understatement.

“Everything is on the line, which means no lie will be out of bounds, no move too treacherous to try. Madness incarnate, and nowhere near over.”

P.S. As we go to press, Emily reminds me of one prominent federal resignation: Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie!” Brown stepped down as administrator of FEMA after the government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

And in that instance, it wasn’t enough to restore confidence.

For all the deaths of U.S. troops that had occurred in Iraq up to that point, it was Katrina that punctured the patina of competence surrounding the Dubya Bush administration.

Just one more signpost on the road from Nov. 22, 1963 to July 13, 2024…