The nation is relieved that former President Trump survived yesterday’s assassination attempt. However, an audience member was killed in the attempt and another injured. They and their families should be in our thoughts and prayers. The photo of Trump defiantly raising his fist before the flag recalls Theodore Roosevelt’s defiance of the attempt on his life during his 1912 presidential campaign, famously declaring that “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose”.
I lead, however, not with that quote, but with Roosevelt’s equally famous “Man in the Arena” speech, where he calls all Americans to embrace the risks of action and the kind of “dust and sweat and blood” that Trump defied. This call does not necessarily mean a call to enter politics ourselves, but to the kind of courage that those who fight for our country here or overseas live daily. This injuries and deaths at the Trump rally now call us to a new fight for our political life here at home.
Over the past few years, our political debate has coarsened and polarized to the point where violent rhetoric has become shamefully common. Only last week President Biden promised to put his opponent Trump “in the crosshairs”. A poll in the New York Times revealed that 10% of respondents believed violence was justified against Trump and a similar percentage believed the same about President Biden. The rest of us have seen all of this and either shrugged our shoulders or remained silent out of fear.
We can no longer be among the “cold and timid” who assume this is someone else’s problem. It is time to summon the courage to confront calls to hatred and violence in the political arena and ostracize those who engage in them. Media outlets that feature or promote them must be shunned and boycotted. Finally, each of us must have the courage to confront friends and acquaintances who engage in such hateful rhetoric and ostracize them as well. If necessary, we should not hesitate to report them to law enforcement if they pose an imminent threat. Otherwise, the hatred will not only worsen, but we will also then be complicit in what happens afterwards.