Don’t Fall for the Partisan Trap

This piece was first published in our news digest, The Front Page. To get our latest scoops, investigations, and columns in your inbox every morning, Monday through Thursday, become a Free Press subscriber today:

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?”