Are calls for unity real, or politics?

Trump signs are placed on the seats at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday.

July 16, 2024 3 AM PT

Hello and happy Tuesday. There are 111 days until the election and man, what do you even say at this point?

Like most of us, I am happy that Donald Trump was not seriously injured in Saturday’s assassination attempt and deeply saddened for the innocent bystander who was killed, and those who were wounded. While I’m at it, I am sorry for all of us because this is too much and none of us deserves it.

So how did we get here? And what comes next?

The short answer to the first question is that we’ve been on this road for a long time, and for those that study political extremism, this political violence was predictable. In fact, if you recall the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, it’s an escalation — but also just a continuation of this journey to the flat-earth edge of democracy.

What comes next is harder to discern, but there are some things that are safer bets. So here we go.

Not everyone is against violence

There’s an undeniable sense of unity — thank goodness — that political violence is not acceptable. But it’s not a universal feeling.

Garen Wintemute is an emergency room doctor and head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. His organization studies gun violence and political violence.

I asked him if he was shocked by the Trump shooting.

“To be honest, for weeks I’ve been expecting something on a daily basis and counted us lucky at the end of every day that it didn’t happen,” he told me.

That’s because his studies have found that nearly one-third of those surveyed said they believed that violence was “usually or always” justified to advance at least one political objective.

For more than a decade, Wintemute said, those political objectives have largely been right-wing (though there have been times in history that violence was more likely from left-leaning sources, such as the Weather Underground in the 1960s).

In 2022, Wintemute’s study found what most of us would have guessed — that those who thought violence had acceptable uses were predominately MAGA Republicans, Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists of the QAnon ilk and the historically violent white supremacists.

In 2023, Wintemute expanded the categories he asked about and found that those with more generalized and less organized hatred were also more in favor of violence: racists, sexists, xenophobes and the usual litany of those against anything LGBTQ+.

“When we did it in 2023, there they were,” Wintemute said of those new findings.

There will always be not just a certain percentage of folks with hate in the hearts, but a certain percentage who believe violence is a fair way to further that hate.

But Wintemute doesn’t believe that element has to win, that there is a path forward where “the extremists won’t take us over the cliff with them, which is otherwise what could happen.”

Are calls for unity real?

So if a third of people are OK with violence, the good news is that leaves a solid majority that isn’t.

We are seeing calls for toning down the rhetoric from Trump and Biden. But we are also seeing more of the same. Monday, Trump wrote this on his Truth Social site, after listing a litany of grievances for his legal troubles:

The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had this to say:

I have so many questions about how this 20 year old was able to nearly pull off assassinating Pres Trump by himself. This reeks of something a lot more sinister and bigger. There are too many things that do not make sense. I don’t care what anyone says about me saying this, because everyone knows we are all thinking it. Fine call me a conspiracy theorist. I don’t give a damn. The insane left have been fantasizing out loud about killing Trump for years.

So there may be a veneer of civility, but it wipes off quick. Personally, the calls for unity seem more practical than genuine to me. We are at a moment when anything less from leaders seems crass. But they are who they are.

That leaves it to the rest of us to be discerning, and careful.

“The challenge for all of us as individuals is to recognize that we are not spectators at a train wreck here,” Wintemute warned. “We are on the train and each one of us has to be willing to act to prevent political violence.”

If there is unity to be found, it’s around that one simple building block of democracy — use votes, not guns.

Wintemute believes it’s incumbent on all of us to be clear and loud in that rejection of violence, so I’m saying it again because some of you aren’t going to like what I say after this.

For the record: There is never a circumstance in which violence is an acceptable political choice.

But silence is not unity

The United States is at a crossroads — this election will determine the course of American life for generations to come.

Nothing has changed in the Republican platform. It still calls for 10 million people to be deported, a position backed by years of Trump calling immigrants “animals.”

Republicans are still planning on closing the Department of Education, leaving states to decide what they teach, or don’t. Louisiana now requires the Ten Commandments to be placed in every classroom, a creeping spread of a Christian nationalism that has little tolerance for religious diversity — or any diversity for that matter.

Republicans are still antiabortion. Though the platform is toned down, the effects of those beliefs can be seen in the healthcare deserts for women that now exist in great swaths across the country. The abortion issue aside, that leaves women in dire and sometimes deadly situations when pregnancies go wrong.

Republicans are still calling for mass firings of government workers, promising to replace them with political loyalists. Do we want a QAnon believer deciding our Medicare rules?

There is still an existential threat to democracy that we cannot be afraid to address.

As abhorrent as this shooting was, it may not be the last act of political violence we see this year.

And violence cannot be the reason that those fighting to preserve civil rights, safety nets and freedom of choice are cowed into silence.

The must-read: FBI hunts for Trump rally shooter’s motive; Secret Service scrutinized
The California angle: Harris Outdoes Biden in 2 State Polls but Has Her Own Weaknesses
The L.A. Times special: 20-year-old who almost killed Trump was a bright student, had a job and belonged to a gun club

P.S. I’ll be in Milwaukee this week for the Republican National Convention, so wish me luck — and send me your thoughts on what you’d like to see covered. So far the big news is the selection of J.D. Vance for the Veep slot, but lots more to come!