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An hour and a half after Donald Trump was nearly killed at a rural Pennsylvania campaign rally, Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic strategist in northern Virginia who advises Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, emailed journalists, suggesting the shooting might have been “staged.”
Mehlhorn acknowledged that the idea of a fake almost-assassination “feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally.”
This way, Mehlhorn said, “Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.” Vladimir Putin and Hamas terrorists have employed similar tactics, he added.
“If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit.”
By this late date, there’s nothing especially surprising about a partisan, on either side, floating nutty conspiracy theories. Recall that two years ago, Republican influencers like Donald Trump Jr. and Dinesh D’Souza pushed the totally uncorroborated theory that the intruder who attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was his gay lover.
We have come to expect those engaged in electoral battles to say and tweet and post the most absurd, offensive blather. Their job is not to seek out the truth, but to fight relentlessly—blindly.
The problem, of course, is that they forget that the rest of us—the vast majority of us—are not partisans, that we are capable of something more generous and ecumenical. That we are able to disagree passionately with our fellow Americans about the border or the climate or TikTok or whatever and still, somehow, not fall for the most insidious lies about them. That we can make basic moral distinctions. For example, Trump is not Vladimir Putin. Nor is he Adolf Hitler. He’s just the presumptive Republican nominee.
He’s also, as one Democratic consultant put it to me, “the luckiest son of a bitch who ever lived. The fact that he emerged from this thing with the presence of mind to do that fist pump in the air and the whole Rambo thing is just unbelievable.”
There are, to be sure, millions of Americans who fear that President Trump, given a second term, won’t defend and uphold the Constitution. That he endangers our democracy. There are also millions of Americans who believe that President Biden has been a disaster—and that he’s the one endangering democracy with his lies about his mental acuity.
So be it. But we need not succumb to the partisan trap. The partisan stupidity. Because that is exactly what this is. A myopia and mindlessness so blinding that it conjures up scenarios that go beyond the fiercest partisanship into the realm of insanity. That’s what happens when one views one’s political foe not as a human being with human failings, but as Satan himself. Donald Trump, his innumerable foibles notwithstanding, is not Satan.
On Sunday, Mehlhorn followed up with another email: “Last night, I sent an email I now regret. I drafted and sent it without consulting my team. I have apologized to them directly. I also want to apologize publicly, without reservation, for allowing my words to distract from last night’s central fact: political violence took yet another innocent American life.” He also said he agreed “entirely” with Reid Hoffman’s “thoughtful post” Sunday morning, in which Hoffman said that he was “horrified and saddened by what happened to former President Trump and wish him a speedy recovery.”
When I texted Mehlhorn to see if he had anything else to add, he texted back: “Nope that’s it,” adding a sideways smiley face.
Peter Savodnik is a writer for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read his piece, “Islamists Keep Stabbing People. Why Aren’t We Talking About It?”
But there is a threat to our democracy. This threat suppressed a legitimate news story by the country's oldest newspaper to swing a Presidential election their way. They sent the FBI after a journalist to discover his source and recover a diary with unflattering truths about their party leader. They impeached the President, twice, then tried to have him removed from ballots for what he was acquitted of in one of his failed impeachments. They silence the free speech of dissenters; they force ludicrous belief systems on children with our money and through our schools and the leader of their party met in the White House with three prosecutors who went on to sue and indict his opponent. The pinnacle of which was prosecuting and convicting their chief political opponent for his bookkeeper calling a check for a lawyer's invoice 'legal fees' ostensibly to cover up a crime he's never been charged with and that the prosecution refused to name during the trial. And the judge allowed the trail to proceed not only without a conviction record for that crime, but ended up instructing the jury they didn't have to unanimously agree on that matter of fact in order to convict him. It is not a case of both sides being equally bad. One side is utterly lawless, abusing their elected offices to deny people their fundamental rights in order to win elections and further their partisan politics. It must stop and the man who is about to do it was nearly assassinated due to an extremely suspicious security lapse that allowed a man with a rifle to get into an overwatch position just 150 yards away. There must be impartial justice for the people doing these things before the country can forgive and forget.
No, no, no. I'm sorry, but Trump Is Not a threat to our Constitution. Nothing he did in his term comes close to suggesting this. Biden, on the other hand has in fact violated and threatened "our democracy." You want proof? The SCOTUS ruled Biden could not cancel student debt, but he's gone ahead with it anyway. Who engaged in lawfare? Seriously, Savodnik, yes, we need to ignore the crazy theories and we ought not give into the rhetoric. Trump supporters and the man himself are not fascists, but the Dems have behaved as such. It's not simply a matter of perception.