Violence and the 2024 Election
How do we talk about the U.S. election and its candidates following the assassination attempt against Trump? Unsurprisingly, the media emphasis is on the ‘violent rhetoric’ of ‘both sides’ and how we must all ‘dial it down.’ Despite Trump’s well-documented history of inciting violence against his opponents, critics, and targeted groups, the 2024 election – at least in this highly charged moment – has the two parties competing for the moral high ground on the question of violence.
There is at least one significant difference between the camps. Republicans are seizing the opportunity to undermine the Democrats’ key campaign argument that Trump’s agenda constitutes a far-right attack on democracy. Such statements, Republicans claim, amount to a vilification of their candidate and an incitement to violence. Let’s be clear. To point out the anti-democratic threat of a Trump presidency is not an incitement to violence. It is an incitement to vote.
As for the Democrats, the storm that raged following Biden’s terrible debate performance temporarily subsided in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Trump. Crudely put, Thomas Matthew Crooks probably did more to quell that storm than any of the arguments put up by the Biden camp. But the turn of events got me thinking about the question of violence, the Democratic campaign, and my despair about Biden’s candidacy right from the start.
To stop the violence of Trump, I had to vote for Biden. In other words, I had to accept the violence of Biden. To stop the dangers of Trump, I had to ignore the dangers faced by the children of Gaza who have been dying in the thousands. These are our weapons delivered under Biden’s watch and support for a Trumpian leader, Netanyahu, hellbent on a genocidal mission that will never make Israel secure and which future generations may never forgive. With a son who descends from Holocaust refugees, nothing made me sadder than this ill-judged response to the tragic events of October 7. In sum, only the deepest fear of a Trump win could make me vote for Biden.
So, Biden was never my preferred Democratic nominee. Long before the debate debacle, I was in despair about his candidacy. Yet, I supported him because – as is clear to all but the Trump cult members – the 2024 election is an existential one. A Trump presidency will usher in a more extensive and better-organized assault on women’s healthcare and bodily rights, civil rights, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the environment, and democracy itself. Make no mistake, these are violent outcomes for those on the receiving end of the Trump agenda. Finally, the future of the republic would be in grave doubt. And as for the children of Gaza, there is nothing to hope for in a Trump victory.
I understood all too well the stakes of this election and the necessity of joining the fight to stop Trump. So, I contacted my branch of Democrats Abroad and signed up to help. At some point, I would be invited to a training session in phone-banking and handed a script from which I must not depart, making the case for Biden.
Then came the debate. It dawned on me immediately that I would now be making a case for a candidate whose foreign policy already troubled me deeply, and who now looked incapable of articulating any of the remaining reasons we should vote for him. Biden’s physical and cognitive frailty, long-feared but relatively well-hidden by the White House and his campaign team, was now in plain sight, and could not be returned to the shadows. Biden supporters and detractors alike watched in frustration as arguments about his candidacy raged.
My own view has been, and remains, that Biden should step aside. Ideally, he would do so enthusiastically, embracing the pass-the-torch opportunity to take part in the kind of democratic primary process we were denied by his incumbency, ending in an open convention – one that might fire the hopes and imaginations of voters.[1] The risks of further cognitive debacles are, I believe, greater than the risks of an open convention and a new nominee. And again, the stakes are too high. This is not about a single election whereby a loss can be recuperated in four or eight years without having destroyed democracy and the republic during that period.
This is not to be alarmist. It is to take note of what a second Trump presidency means. We are beginning to see the threat of Project 2025, not only in its 900-page plan for a Trump regime but the people behind it. In brief, here are the headline objectives of Project 2025 as summarized by University of Iowa emeritus prof, Steve Corbin:
“Among other things, Project 2025 proposes to eliminate the U.S. Departments of Education and Commerce, deploy the U.S. military whenever protests erupt, and dismantle the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The federal government would also remove all protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and would terminate all affirmative action policies and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
“Additional mandates include: siphoning off billions of public school funding, funding vouchers to pay for private school tuition, phasing out public education’s Title 1 program, gutting the nation’s free school meals program, eliminating Head Start, banning books, suppressing any curriculum that discusses the evils of slavery.
“Project 2025 also calls for banning abortion, restricting access to contraception, forcing would-be immigrants to be detained in concentration camps, and eliminating Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. The Trump administration would recruit 54,000 loyal Republicans to replace existing federal civil servants, and would end the separation of church and state, a bedrock constitutional principle.
“In a Politico article from February, Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla described Project 2025 as an authoritarian Christian nationalist movement and a path for the U.S. to become an autocracy. Several legal experts have indicated implementing the 180-day plan would undermine the rule of law and the separation of powers.”[2]
In other words, we should not only dread a return of the Trump of 2016, the Trump who already caused fear to so many. Trump Two will be much worse. It will be a vengeful and more organized Trump with an army of Heritage and other far-right activists who will claim him as their leader and use him like a puppet. As Kevin Roberts, the head of Heritage threatened, “We are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
Taking note of the widespread alarm caused by Project 2025, Trump has attempted – far too late – to dissociate himself from the plan, at least during the run-up to the election. Here CNN anchor, Abby Phillip does good work fact-checking Trump’s feigned innocence: Trump and Project 2025.
We may desperately hope that the Republicans will be stopped at the electoral gate, but there too, we face terrifying challenges:
“A handy primer on the [voting rights] issue is the 30-minute documentary “Suppressed and Sabotaged,” by Brave New Films. Released in 2022 and re-released this year, the documentary examines the various ways Republican states have attempted to disenfranchise voters they don’t like… The techniques include reducing the number of polling places in Black precincts, erecting barriers to voter registration, wantonly purging voter rolls, changing the rules for absentee ballots, slashing the number of drop boxes and passing voter ID laws with the pretext of preventing voter fraud, a rare occurrence that MAGA Republicans have become hysterical about.”[3]
This is the terrible situation in which we find ourselves. And the candidate to save us? Biden. The same Biden we saw two weeks ago on the debate stage. Although I favor replacing him, and soon, through a process as democratic as possible in the time we have, I am all too aware of the arguments against such a position. Let’s draw upon two arguments making the rounds.
First, Biden defenders cite – quite rightly – the gross lack of balance in the media obsession with Biden’s age and cognitive weaknesses while ignoring the same problems with Trump. Trump is also old, gaffe-prone, and cognitively challenged. Worse than that, the panic about Biden seems to have left little air time for covering the relentless lies spewed by Trump throughout the debate and in all his appearances.
My initial response to this point about media obsession and the lack of balanced reporting was that most of the critics calling for Biden to step aside are doing so precisely because we know Trump is a dangerous liar. We do not need to convince ourselves that Trump is a threat: we need a candidate who can stand up to him. Hence, our ‘obsession’ if you will, with the problems of Biden. I have since revised that view in favor of coupling our concerns about Biden with constant reminders of Trump - mainly because of Timothy Snyder’s well-stated argument that:
“If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside… I know the counter-arguments: his people wouldn’t have cared and he wouldn’t have listened. The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.”[4]
So yes, for every mention of Biden’s issues, let’s go for three of Trump’s. But I do not accept that calls for Biden to step aside are fuelled only by the media. There are many disillusioned voters whose support Democrats tend to take for granted. A lack of voter enthusiasm has been evident since Biden first announced his candidacy. There are also down-ballot Democratic candidates increasingly worried about their own elections and the prospect of losing both houses of Congress, a result that could prove catastrophic to the republic.
Second, some commentators fear the risk attached to any removal of Biden at this late stage. Heather Cox Richardson points to the history of open conventions (esp. 1968) to argue that opening the nomination at this point – whether through an emergency primary process and/or a floor vote at the convention would bring chaos and further alienate voters. This is a valid concern, though I remain unconvinced that the risks are greater than keeping Biden as the nominee. Moreover, I think Richardson’s position amounts to an uninspired and conservative defense of the status quo, one that puts little faith in other Democratic candidates, the voters, and democracy itself.
I disagree with her certainty that chaos would ensue should Biden withdraw. What would ensue is democracy. Is democracy messy sometimes? Yes. But it is a worthy process, rather than the charade of a primary in which voters are offered no choice other than the incumbent. We should not have to remind Democrats that we’re in a live-or-die situation for America and that we urgently need the strongest candidate to defeat Trump. Here is a chance to energize voters and reset the stakes. Forget the rest. It’s a five-alarm fire now. It’s all about stopping Trump. Every other question can be addressed later.
We have rightly been calling out Trump as a grave anti-democratic threat to the republic. Our response need not be a curtailment of democracy in our own camp. An open convention would stand in wonderful contrast to Trump’s anti-democratic impulses, engaging a party base that has, up to now, largely been excluded from the nomination process. Here, we might remember Jane Addams’s well-known statement that “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” This is our chance to effect that cure.
[1] See, for example, Ezra Klein’s podcasts on Biden’s candidacy and the ‘open primary’ question, in particular How an Open Primary Would Work. Klein interviews Elaine Kamarck, a foremost scholar of the history and practice of primary politics. She has also worked on four presidential campaigns and ten nominating conventions – bot both Democrats and Republicans. Finally, she is a member of the Democratic National Rules Committee. Together, Kamarck and Klein address many of the current warnings that an open convention must be a chaotic failure.
[2] Steve Corbin, Project 2025 Poses Threat to Democracy, in Bleeding Heartland, June 2, 2024.
[3] Robin Abcarian, “Why are Republicans making it harder for some people to vote?” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2024.
[4] Timothy Snyder, “Fascism and Fear: The Moment, the Media, the Election,” July 7, 2024.
As an American observer abroad, one’s distress must be heightened but for the relief from not swirling in the soup the domestic experience has become, has always been. The American experience is just that, a state of living in a pot that varys from a simmer to a boil but never quells.
Is this not the most aggressive society in the world in terms of non-institutional violence, citizen against citizen. Is it an abundantly diverse society that only wastes the richness of its diversity with interracial hatred? Does its laws not celebrate unrestrained armed individuality, a lethal love of gun culture? Does it thrive on the wealth of weapon manufacture? Has it not the most destructive military, despite the rhetoric of just cause? Has there ever been an elected official here who’d argue for anything other but the right to bear the means to kill?
This would-be assassin if he were successful was a boy joining a string of boys that would have known they would die in the act—suicide by cop. He would know his life would be made historic if only in infamy like his predecessors. Investigation has revealed a troubled youth and at least a fascination with guns from a gun owning household.
The results of in the wake of this event, described as tragic, are bizarre, surreal: a presidential candidate arguing he was saved by an act of the Christian God, declaring deification? Who would dare not vote for that?
The if/then fallacy almost comically counters such rubbish, for it is reportedly known the young man scoped out the plans of both conventions. That he chose the Republican candidate, under their candidate’s logic, his rival was also saved by God. The freedom of religion clause becomes a noose, not a key to freedom once again.
Susan and I like it here. We live in peace, we’re privileged with relative freedom from persecution, we’re fed and clothed, I can write like this. We are white, not wealthy but comfortable, and mostly left alone. We have access to opportunity. Our only disturbance is the guilt our awareness to privilege and our inadequacy to affect change. With an ear for absurd irony, life here breeds anger towards official paradigmatic self-justification.
When mass violence occurs once again here, the argument repeats, “it’s not the gun, it’s the shooter.” No, it’s the gun; madness’s access to gun within reach is its effect.