Attempted assassination is the consequence of increasing hate rhetoric and polarization
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump Saturday July 13 opens a deep wound among baby boomers like myself, but is a warning of the dangers of today's intense political acrimony
By Ray Hanania
FREE/Politics attempted assassination/Wednesday July 17, 2024
Some things to think about.
The first words that come to mind when I hear the word “assassination” is shock and disbelief.
The idea that an American leader can be killed by an assassin contradicts the foundation of American democracy. The politics of the violent political assault raises concerns of disbelief and foments suspicions of coverups, which fuel conspiracies.
Some events have been so impactful that it is impossible to forget. I was 10 years old in 5th grade at Joseph Warren Elementary School when returning from lunch a friend yelled to me from the school playground, “The President was shot.”
I know exactly where I was standing when that cry rang out that Friday, early afternoon and the picture of that moment remains embedded in my mind even though the school, the playground and the fence I walked along have all been changed over the years.
The subsequent assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also resonate in powerful memories for me. Our generation saw great tragedy. But as the years go on, “great tragedy” seems to be common. That includes the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon and attempted suicide commercial airline assault on Washington D.C. It includes the increasing series of school mass shootings that have taken so many innocent lives. And, it includes the violence around the world that is directly tied to American policies including Israel’s military violence in what many now call the “Gaza Holocaust.”
In the wake of all that, a 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks was identified as the shooter. Crooks is from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburg founded in 1886 and known for being the location of the first armored car robbery of aBrinks Truck on March 11, 1927. The town was named after its first church, Bethel Presbyterian.
The FBI is still trying to figure out Crooks’ motives for trying to kill Trump, whi escaped by mere chance when he turned his head slightly and the bullet his the top of his ear rather than the back of his head. What drove Crooks to try to kill Trump?
We never did get to the bottom of the JFK assassination and it remains an unanswered quagmire for many Americans my age. How does a former military veteran and political crackpot, like Lee Harvey Oswald, plant himself on the 6th floor of the Dallas Book Depository Building — warehouse for a textbook distribution firm that previously housed the Chicago-based grocery wholesale business, the John Sexton & Co. — and so easily change the course of American history and politics with only a few tragically well-placed shots?
In my mind. there is no way that Oswald did this on his own. But there are many factors that ground that belief.
The conspiracy theories of the JFK assassination were born of a mix of deeply grounded and suspicious political circumstances that might have impacted Oswald’s violent action and suggest he was but a pawn in a bigger conspiracy, which involved:
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover despised and hated the Kennedys, and although he was a Protestant who held the Catholic Church in high esteem, he felt the Catholic Kennedy Faily didn’t live up to the religious principles.
The hatred for Kennedy by the Chicago mafia, which had ties to Kennedy’s father Joseph, close to mafia controlled bootleggers. The mafia helped Kennedy win by stealing votes in Chicago but was angered when the new president named his bother Robert as U.S. Attorney who the targeted the “mafia” and organized crime.
Kennedy was the focus of Cuba’s Fidel Castro’s anger; Kennedy was blamed for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to topple Castro which was planned by Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight D.Eisenhower immediately prior to the presidential election.
Then Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson felt he was being slighted and disdain for the Kennedy clan fueled a public and Dallas police animosity against the Kennedy clan and JFK.
What can you say about Crooks? He was only 20 years old. He registered as a Republican, in an area that predominantly Republicans, but never had voted yet. And, he was a political contradiction, donating to a Democratic cause.
He used his father’s AR-15-like rifle, was spotted by police before he took his eight shots against Trump and then the Secret Service and police. The bullet barely missed killing Trump, wounding him on the top of his right ear and causing a lot of blood to the right side of the former president’s face.
It came in the middle of a political battle that was playing in Trump’s favor.
Trump had been forced to restrain himself during the debate with President Joe Biden three weeks early because of restrictions imposed by CNN to help Biden. CNN circumvented th U.S. Presidential Debate Commission which normally hosts presidential debates.
While Trump came across respectful and controlled, Biden’s debate performance was so terrible it ignited a national debate over his ability to remain as the Democratic nominee given his elevated age, 81, the oldest president in American history. His memory stumbles were historic, introducing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “Putin,” and referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
Democrats were intensifying their calls for Biden to withdraw as the candidate, not just because of fears his stumbles were undermining his support among American voters but also weakening the re-elections of Democrats across the country.
And then steps in Crooks with his eight shots, one that wounded Trump in the ear, killed a spectator and injured two others. Crooks was shot and killed by the Secret Service minutes after firing on Trump, all captured on TV and cell phone video.
There was no Zapruder film to be scrutinized that raised questions about the Trump attempted assassination. The Zapruder film was the 8mm color motion picture video sequence shot by public spectator Abraham Zapruder with a Bell & Howell home-movie camera shot from the side of the roadway in Dallas when Oswald’s bullet slammed into Kennedy’s head. That film was rare and was kept secret for years.
There were hundreds of cell phone and camera and TV videos of the attempted Trump assassination.
We all know what is going to happen.
After Trump wins and Biden loses — and the Democrats crash in a ball of political flames on Nov. 5, 2024, the news media which hates Trump more than they hate carnage, serial killers and criminals, will blame Biden’s defeat on the empowering of Trump by the attempted assassination. They’ll say it knocked some sense into Trump, making him calm his reckless rhetoric and tendencies, and curtail his vicious pettiness towards irrelevant critics which distracts him from focusing real issues.
The Arab American community will be the bigger loser. They launched the #AbandonedBiden campaign following Biden’s failure to restrain the vengeance war by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has taken the lives of between 40,000 and 200,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a carnage being called the”Gaza holocaust.” Arabs make up huge voter constituencies in key states that Biden barely won over Trump in 2020, like in Michigan. There, Biden defeated Trump by only 154,000 votes out of more than 5.4 million votes cast.
Kennedy only defeated Nixon by a mere 112,827 votes in a race that saw more than 68 million votes cast. Had Nixon carried Illinois and Texas, which Kennedy won by razor thin margins, Nixon would have become president. Allegations were made that the Chicago mob stole the Chicago election giving Illinois to Kennedy, while LBJ’s inclusion on the ticket swayed voters to JFK, too.
Republican Senators Everett Dirksen and Barry Goldwater both accused Kennedy of election fraud and voter theft. Nixon’s biographer Earl Mazo, a former journalist, also claimed votes were stolen. Back then, no one challenged the claims the way the news media automatically labels similar claims by Trump and his allies as “lies” to undermine his credibility.
There was more criminal corruption in journalism through the 1960s (with some journalist working for organized crime) but more political corruption in the media today with many journalists working for corporations driven by greed.
When I think about America today, I don’t have the same feeling of patriotism that filled me even as a young child in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. It’s a different world. America had a strong future back then.
Today, America is caught in an ugly political war of animosity and polarization. There is no middle ground, just a lot of hatred. People on the Left openly complain privately, openly and on social media that they wish the Crooks Bullet had not missed. People on the right embrace the most extremist agendas of intolerance. Rather than seeking to resolve wars they seek to end them through political action.
The Right wants to abandon Ukraine. And while they claim to be isolationists, they make one exception for Israel, a foreign country that has the most powerful political lobby in the Western hemisphere, AIPAC, which openly boasted recently that through its massive multi-million campaign funding, they won all 224 election contests that they backed.
Why wouldn’t Republican isolationists make an exception for Israel, when they receive so much money from Israel’s lobby every campaign fueling their wins?
The dizzying changing political winds are pushing us towards a precipice that we can’t even comprehend, or steer ourselves away from.
The question today isn’t who was behind the Trump assassination, but certainly could be, who killed America?