Assassinating the President

At this point we still don’t have a firm grip on the motivations of the young man who took a shot at Donald Trump. We may find out more in the coming days about the motivations of the would-be assassin, and they may make some kind of ends-means political sense that isn’t transparent at the moment. What I worry is this; over the past thirty years (since Columbine, really) the path to notoriety and immortality for a (usually) young (usually) man of middling talent and minimal psychological help has been to kill a bunch of people in a murder-suicide spree. That has become harder now than it was in the past; on the one hand police and bystanders have (generally speaking) become more aggressive about shutting down a spree-killer mid-tally, and on the other hand it’s become more difficult to stand out from the crowd of murder-suiciders. I mean, if you kill five people do you even get a wikipedia page anymore? Does the NYT bother visiting your hometown and asking folks about how you kept to yourself, and how no one ever would have guessed that you could be a killer apart from your massive collection of firearms?

But killing a President? History knows the name John Wilkes Booth; history knows the name of Lee Harvey Oswald; Charlie Guiteau has a nifty song named after him. Leon Czolgosz… well, that fella was just born with too many Zs in his name. Two centimeters to the right and history would know the name Thomas Matthew Crooks, no matter how many bullets the counter-snipers put into him. Hell, yesterday the young man was nobody; now his name is in lights! Now, I can see the argument that maybe we’d rather have Presidents get assassinated instead of elementary schools shot all to hell, but the American political system (any political system, really) cannot abide assassination attempts against major political figures at the rate that American society can tolerate mass shootings. I very much worry that we’re at the precipice of a very bad new trend in American politics, one that will produce more assassinations and assassination attempts as young men try to deal with their demons by pulling the trigger on whatever politician they can get into their sights.