When a man named John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, my family and I were on a camping trip in what is now Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. I was just ten years old, and though we spent a lot of time camping and hiking and backpacking in that area, I distinctly remember that specific trip — warm days of skittering across sandstone with my brother and cold, starry nights shivering in inadequate sleeping bags. We were, of course, blissfully oblivious to the shooting and the outside world in general. There were no cell phones or internet and turning on the radio of the old yellow Volvo that was later submerged in Comb Wash would have bordered on the heretical in my family.
I don’t think we really learned exactly what had happened until we got home, days later. And while I have a very clear image of my family digesting the news, I honestly can’t remember what the general sentiment was. Shock? Dismay? Relief that the president was alive? Sadness at what the world had come to? Fascination at the chaotic aftermath? That certain frisson of witnessing a historic moment? Perhaps it was a mixture of all of it.
Reagan has posthumously been transformed into a gentle, grandfatherly type who cleared the way for “Morning in America,” but in reality he was a polarizing figure who implemented a slew of harmful policies and brought on dangerous cabinet members like James Watt and Anne Gorsuch. He pandered to the wealthy, championed the quackery of so-called trickle-down-economics — which ultimately would decimate the American middle class — broke the labor unions, and smashed environmental, worker, and public health protections to clear the way for corporate profiteering. And during his campaign he aligned himself with the Sagebrush Rebels, the movement that looked to sacrifice the public lands we cherished to the bulldozers, bovines, drill rigs, and uranium mines.
My parents were not fans of Reagan, but I’m sure they were also horrified at what had happened. And I imagine my parents would have worried that Reagan’s shooter was a liberal impelled by ideology to commit that heinous act. Forty-three years later, I’m having a sort of trans-generational deja vu as I have anxiously assumed that the man who shot at Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally was a progressive impelled by politics.
It must have been a relief back in 1981, then, to find out that Hinckley wasn’t motivated by politics at all. He was a mentally ill man possessed by the delusion that he could impress the actress Jodie Foster by shooting the president. Similarly, though little is known about him, it appears that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot at Trump, had no political or ideological beef: He was a registered Republican who once donated $15 to a liberal group’s get out the vote campaign; he was a gun enthusiast, and his high school classmates say he was an intelligent loner, a history buff, and “definitely was conservative.”
Yet in the aftermath of the Trump shooting, even as Democratic leaders condemned political violence, Republicans immediately began blaming Democrats, President Biden, and the news media for, in the words of Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, “inciting an assassination.” Collins even went further, calling for a Republican district attorney to charge Biden with a crime, saying the president “sent the orders,” whatever that means. Not that such charges would go anywhere: Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court just made presidents immune from prosecution for official acts.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP pick, was slightly more measured, I suppose, saying that by portraying Trump as “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped,” the Biden campaign, liberal pundits, and many journalists were indirectly responsible for the attempted assassination. And then there's Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who audaciously accused Democrats of wielding “sick, violent rhetoric” — and she kept a straight face while saying it!
Yes, many Democrats and pundits have warned of the dangers Trump, his enablers, and his followers pose to Democracy and, for that matter, the planet as a whole — sometimes in a sensationalist, fear-mongering way. Most of the time, however, they (and we journalists) are simply recounting what Trump, himself, has said he would do if elected. In other words, we’re doing our job. Maybe some of Trump’s pledges are mere bluster, designed to rile up his base, and so we shouldn’t take them seriously. But judging from the Project 2025 playbook and the GOP platform, Trump and his cronies fully intend to remake the presidency into an authoritarian regime that benefits the rich, the corporations, and, most of all, Trump himself. I mean, who else but a wannabe dictator repeatedly would amplify calls to subject former Rep. Liz Cheney (a hard-right Republican, mind you) to a military tribunal for daring to stand up to Trump?
Given everything Trump did — or tried to do — during his first term and since it ended, and given all he’s promised to do in the future, it’s hardly extreme or inflammatory to call on Americans to stand up and stop him. The thing is, Democratic leaders and journalists are not proposing to do that with threats of violence or by taking up arms, they’re merely pleading with folks to vote against Trump, urging them to use the ballot box, not the gun, to get things done. And if they did even hint at using violence to thwart Trump’s plans, even jokingly, their liberal friends would cancel them for it and the GOP would at least attempt to toss them in the clink.
Meanwhile, Trump regularly calls journalists the “enemy of the people” and praised Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte for body-slamming a reporter who dared ask a question; Trump and his sons mocked Rep. Nancy Pelosi after her husband was nearly killed by a politically motivated attacker; Trump said a “bloodbath” would result if he lost the election; and, by the way, he also said that Biden is “the destroyer of American democracy.” He agreed with the violent January 6 mob calling for lynching Mike Pence. The list goes on and on.
Of course, inciting or threatening or simply exuding violence is a central tenet of the new GOP. And that sort of violent rhetoric is part and parcel of authoritarianism. Remember when Rep. Paul Gosar circulated the anime of him murdering Rep. Alexander Ocasio Cortez? Or the time Marjorie Taylor Greene called Democrats “flat out evil” or wielded a high-caliber sniper rifle in a campaign ad? Rep. Lauren Boebert likes to put guns in her kids’ hands and make them pose for Christmas cards, and Blake Masters, the failed Trump-endorsed Arizona candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022, made a creepy ad featuring a gun that is “not a hunting rifle. It’s designed for killing.” Sure, it was only for killing “bad guys,” but in MAGA World wouldn’t that also include most immigrants, Democrats, and Liz Cheney? Donald Trump Jr. retweets images of Biden bound and gagged in the bed of a pickup truck. And Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, told a podcaster: “We are in the process of a second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Who is spouting violent rhetoric again?
Social media and perhaps just our latter-stage empire times have amplified the rhetoric, inflamed the culture wars, and exacerbated political polarization to a dangerous degree. But the general vibe isn’t unprecedented.
In the late 1980s, as President Ronald Reagan finished his second term and the Cold War neared its end, a right-wing, nationalist furor fulminated in the Heartland. Billboards sprouted along rural roadsides warning of an imminent invasion by unmarked black helicopters carrying United Nations stormtroopers intent on imposing a New World Order on the nation. The New World Order was almost as scary to the right of the 1990s, as the “woke” folk and DEI are to MAGA now. The Patriot/Militia movement rose up from these fears in tandem with the Wise Use movement, the ideological descendant of the Sagebrush Rebellion, that pushed back against environmental regulations.
Wise Use wasn’t as overtly violent as the Patriot movement, but they shared many of the same ideologies. They believed in county supremacy over the states and feds and that the county sheriff is the ultimate law enforcement authority. Wise-Use attorney Karen Budd-Falen (who later worked for Trump’s Interior Department) crafted a slew of ordinances and a land-use plan for Catron County, New Mexico, declaring county authority over federally managed lands and, specifically, grazing allotments. The ordinances were intended to preserve the “customs and culture” of the rural West—by which they apparently meant only the predominantly white, conservative, Euro-American settler-colonial culture and customs, with a big dose of corporate influence thrown into the mix. And the Catron County commissioners were ready to turn to violence and even civil war to stop, in the words of the ordinance, “federal and state agents {who} threaten the life, liberty, and happiness of the people of Catron County … and present danger to the land and livelihood of every man, woman, and child.”
In 1994, Helen Chenoweth—a staunch Republican, Sagebrush Rebel (she held “endangered salmon bakes” to piss off the greens), and an early Wise User—was elected to represent Idaho in Congress. Chenoweth, who would go on to marry famous Sagebrush Rebel rancher Wayne Hage, claimed that U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers were utilizing black helicopters to enforce the Endangered Species Act and that white, Anglo-Saxon males were the real endangered species — a precursor to today’s white-nationalist “replacement theory.” After a militia-follower named Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 167 people, Chenoweth refused to condemn militias and told a newspaper reporter that “public policies may be pushing people too far,” and therefore were partially responsible for the bloodshed.
The National Federal Lands Conference’s Federal Land Update, edited for a time by Hage, regularly ran rants against the New World Order and gun control legislation. A 1994 edition included one touting the “need for the Militia in America,” eerily foreshadowing the current moment:
“What if the elitists in power also used their paid political hacks to manipulate the voting process? We do know that ANY electronic voting machine can be rigged to make sure that only the elitist chosen candidates will win. That’s when it’s time for an alert and vigilant militia to be on guard. Don’t those in power, the elitists, realize that if they continue in their ways there could be some dire consequences?”
Sound familiar? The big difference between then and now is that these threats and calls for the militia to “be on guard” were coming from the fringe; now they are coming from federal lawmakers and the former U.S. President.
In a New York Times opinion piece published shortly after the attempt on Trump’s life, Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, wrote that her father’s brush with death changed him:
My father believed that God spared him for a very specific reason, to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to try to reach some kind of agreement on nuclear weapons. It’s possible that what he and Mikhail Gorbachev achieved might not have happened had he not been shot.
Perhaps Trump will experience a similar epiphany, though I doubt it. It is telling that, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Trump didn’t demonstrate any concern for the safety of spectators — including the one who was tragically killed — or the secret service agents protecting him. As they prepared to whisk him to safety, Trump ordered the agents to “wait, wait,” before punching his fist in the air as he scowled at the audience and the cameras. He didn’t call for peace or unity, but instead incited his supporters to, “Fight, fight, fight.”
THANK YOU, Jonathan. Agree absolutely. Thank you for being honest about who Reagan really was and what he actually did in office — most of which I thought was horrible, though I will never forget how it felt when finally the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union crumbled. Sometimes a near-death experience can change a person's heart.
Unfortunately, Trump is unlikely to have any kind of healing epiphany. Because he has not, in fact, rejected Project 2025; he is just saying, as he often does, whatever he thinks will succeed in selling his product (which is always himself) to the buyer (whoever's approval he is trying to gain). Project 2025 was basically composed by Trump's loyalist staph and his most determined hangers-on, the likes of Steves Bannon & Miller & all those "Christian" Nationalists. (As a person who actually tries to follow Jesus, I sure do wish they'd choose another name. American Taliban would be more accurate.)
I initially heard about the shooting second- or third-hand Saturday evening and did not believe it could possibly be true — even though I'm older than you are, Jonathan, old enough to be able to remember when JFK was killed, and MLK, and Bobby Kennedy, etc., etc. — old enough to know how much blood has been spilled in American political history. I spent much of Saturday evening praying for Trump's survival, and also praying that he would have a change of heart — such things can, and occasionally, do happen: George Wallace, of all people, underwent a change of heart after his own near escape and publicly renounced his racist past. But that is unlikely to happen with Trump. I am afraid for my country, and for the world, and for the whole bloody planet in a way I've never been before — not even during an Air Force childhood, living under the shadow of the Cold War. I am tired of being constantly told that the left is the one spouting all the violent rhetoric.
It bothered me a lot that so many people seemed to forget that others were also shot, and even killed, by that shooter — and that, in the end, he was another messed-up kid who should never, never had access to weaponry like that. I guess at this point I'm just ranting. But I needed to hear what you wrote here, JT. It helped me reorder my terribly scattered neurons. Thanks for keeping up the good work. We all gotta keep our eyes on the prize, and hold on.
Always valuable and insightful. Much like listening to Killer Mike’s track Reagan. “But thanks to Reaganomics, Prison turned a profit, ‘Cause free labor’s the cornerstone of US economics, ‘Cause slavery was abolished, Unless you are imprisoned…” and finishing out the track, “Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ronald, 6, WIlson, 6, Reagan, 6. 6, 6, 6.”
The false equivalency the GOP is using to equate the political opposition to Felon Trump and their outright calls for violence is disgusting. And how the media, even NPR, are in lock-step is infuriating.
Felon Trump and his cult of Christian Nationalists and ammo-sexuals have been planting seeds of violence and hate and should not be surprised then the first tendrils emerge in their soils.