Is It Over?

Making sense of an absolutely unreal day in politics.

Whelp.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

I’ll spare you the platitudes. Since the events on Saturday, it has been nothing less than bizarre to watch the charade of mainstream journalists speaking about Donald Trump’s near-miss assassination attempt with this great degree of gravity and seriousness. Trying their best to remember the iconic monologues of their predecessors, they’ve defaulted to plastering clichés everywhere they can. They’ve called “shocking.” “Unthinkable.” A “wakeup call” that should—must—make us all come together. As they see it, an event of the scale of an attempted presidential assassination must change things. It just has to. We’re either “all MAGA now,” or we’re something else. Something too scary for them to imagine.

It’s pointless. We all know the truth here; what everyone on TV is thinking, but is too afraid to say. This is the obvious fact that nothing that happened on Saturday was profound in any way. It did not teach us a thing we did not already know about this country. It did not teach us a thing we did not already know about this political moment. It hardly even taught us anything we did not know about Donald Trump, who has been obviously the luckiest man alive for quite some time. The only thing that was the slightest bit confusing about it was that the shooter somehow got in a position to do what he did right under the nose of the secret service. Besides that, it has been abundantly clear for nearly a decade that people are willing to kill for, and kill, Donald Trump. It’s already happened. The fact that tensions are this high has always been abundantly obvious. To pretend otherwise may be something, but it isn’t honest, and it definitely isn’t journalism.

But even if the fact that someone desired to murder Donald Trump isn’t really news, there’s no way we can ignore it. I had never seen people as pessimistic about the possibility of a Trump second term as I saw on Saturday, and it’s not hard to see why. Right as we began to assess the aftermath of a debate that saw Trump reach his best-ever polling numbers and sent Democrats into the ninth circle of political Hell, the former president pulled off the photo opportunity of a lifetime—one that cemented his self-constructed image as a martyr among his supporters and defined him as a candidate of strength and vitality. With even top Democrats saying that they’ve “resigned themselves” to a Trump second term, can anything stop the 45th president from becoming the 47th? Is it, at long last, truly over?

Never Underestimate the Right’s Ability to Fuck Things Up…