New York Times politics writer Jonathan Weisman made Sunday’s New York Times with a typically snide take on the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in “The Attempt to Kill Donald Trump, Caught in Real Time, Stuns the Country.”
After chiding the fast-moving conspiracy theories in the age of social media, Weisman brought up, but quickly denigrated, the idea that the online left was spouting conspiracy theories regarding the shooting, while chiding the right wing..
Within minutes of the first televised images of Mr. Trump grabbing his wounded ear on Saturday, voices on the left were calling it staged, though they were hardly household names.
Not long after, far bigger names on the right, including Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, a finalist to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, had settled on the argument that Democrats had set the stage for an attempted assassination by framing the 2024 election as a battle between the forces of democracy and the soldiers of fascism. Of course someone was going to take a shot, these conservatives said.
Before anyone knew a thing about the man who had pulled the trigger, Mr. Trump’s most senior surrogates, including Mr. Vance and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, were blaming President Biden and Democrats.
Weisman worked in a little inaccurate gun-control propaganda (an AR-15 is not an “assault weapon,” the word used for fully automatic firing), then lamented that Republicans dug deep (or perhaps just checked Twitter) for obnoxious anti-Trump comments from supposedly obscure personalities on the left.
Democratic leaders, including Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, broadly condemned political violence. An AR-15-type rifle was found near the man believed to be the shooter, which could have fueled more Democratic calls for an assault weapons ban, but the party’s leaders held their tongues.
But in the internet era there is always someone who doesn’t.
Republicans dug deep to find more obscure voices on the left, such as London Lamar, a Democratic state senator in Tennessee, who framed a different message. Ms. Lamar wrote, then deleted, “the extremism from the MAGA regime has brought us to this moment,” but not before conservatives had grabbed screen shots and sent them flying around the internet.
Hmm. The Times didn’t find Democratic state senators “obscure” last year when it made heroes out of them after some were expelled after a decorum-wrecking gun-control protest on the statehouse floor. More obscurity:
An obscure aide to Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, became a casus belli for some on the right for suggesting, “please get you some shooting lessons,” even as actual members of Congress were lobbing their own fire bombs from the right.
Metaphorical “fire bombs,” of course. And would a Republican aide get the benefit of that adjective “obscure,” the subtext being that such anecdotes (which just happen to reflect badly on Democrats) aren’t newsworthy? Incidentally, Thompson’s aide resigned, so perhaps praising an attempted assassination is a big deal on Capitol Hill.
Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, her boss Thompson sponsored legislation that would have denied Secret Service protection to politicians convicted of felonies, a partisan trick that would have applied to a single person -- former President Trump.
Weisman’s trademark snide tone came through:
Arch conspiracy theories came from heroes of the far right, like the activist James O’Keefe, who suggested that the Secret Service was somehow in on it through the “Deep State Intel Community.” X posters and internet sleuths even named the shooter -- incorrectly. The man was in fact a soccer journalist in Italy.
