Shots fired at Trump: Please God, let us stop hating one another this much | Opinion

The shooting attack on former President Donald Trump Saturday night at a Pennsylvania political rally was wrong. It was an act of evil. Full stop. It should — and will be — condemned by Americans of conscience.

Trump survived and is apparently fine, though bloodied. We are grateful. A spectator was killed, though, and (as of this writing) two others are reportedly in critical condition. All the victims — including the countless spectators who directly witnessed the horror — have our firmest prayers and our deepest anger at whatever misguided person perpetrated this act.

Our prayers should not be just for those victims, but our country.

Now is a critical moment: Americans and their leaders can and should work now to put a lid on the boiling cauldron of our national polarization. Because events could get much worse, and very quickly.

What happened on Saturday night was a shock, after all, but it wasn’t a surprise.

America has been moving toward a moment of ugly political violence for at least the last decade. We had hoped that maybe it had peaked and then cooled off after Jan. 6.

Obviously that’s not the case.

And it seems clear — even in these first hours — that we have collectively arrived at a hinge point. It’s possible that the gunshots will keep ringing out long after Saturday night. We fear now a season of political violence that few Americans living have ever witnessed.

We are on the edge of catastrophe. There is no way to sugarcoat it.

There have been other significant incidents of political violence in the last 50 years. The assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. The Oklahoma City bombing. 9/11.

Those were horrible moments. Frightening and terrifying.

But those moments never threatened to pull the country apart. Even after Oklahoma City — where 168 people were killed by racist white nationalists — it never seemed quite possible that we might turn on one another and make it all somehow unimaginably worse.

Those moments of horror happened before social media.

Within minutes of the shooting on Saturday — before even the most meager details rolled in — we saw politicians and activists online immediately begin to cast blame, to insist on a narrative, to actively work to set American against American, to add to the rage instead of subtract from it.

Some of these activists and politicians, it must be said, were notable and influential and folks — some of them elected — from the Kansas and Missouri region. We will not name them for now, because this genuinely should be a time for us all to pause and ask how to cool down the temperature. The finger-pointing can wait.

Instead, we are hoping against hope the pot-stirrers have a second thought in the next day or two. That they show us some leadership and try to help us get back on the path to peace.

Because the alternative is unimaginably worse.

Let this be the moment where Americans walked up to the abyss, looked over the edge, then turned on our heels and walked away. Let us try not to always treat politics with such apocalyptic fervor. Let us not hate one another this much.

We don’t know anything about the shooter, but the effect of his attack on Donald Trump was wrong and evil. Please, God: Let us not compound that evil in the days and months ahead.

This story was originally published July 13, 2024 at 9:08 PM with the headline "Shots fired at Trump: Please God, let us stop hating one another this much | Opinion."