After the shooting: Security questions, loathsome rhetoric and attacks on the press

There is still so much that we don’t know about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which claimed the lives of an innocent bystander as well as the suspected gunman. What a lot of us want to know is why the building where the shooter apparently stationed himself wasn’t secured by the Secret Service. Michael Biesecker of The Associated Press reports:

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania, a monumental failure of one the agency’s core duties.

From the moment that the shootings took place, right-wing figures, including elected officials, have been blaming this on anti-Trump rhetoric from President Biden and his supporters, as if Trump himself was any stranger to dangerously incendiary attacks on his opponents. David Corn has a roundup for Mother Jones, writing that “MAGA was out in full-force to blame President Joe Biden, Democrats, and progressives for this shooting by stirring up anti-Trump sentiment.”

Probably the two worst have been U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., who demanded that Biden be arrested and charged with “inciting an assassination,” and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who tweeted:

Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

I’m also appalled at some of the comments on social media that I’ve seen from liberals and progressives who, from the moment that the shots were fired, felt compelled to declare that it was a fake aimed at ginning up sympathy for the insurrectionist former president. But I’m not both-sides-ing this — the right-wing outburst has come from name-brand Republicans, whereas on the Democratic side virtually all commentary from elected officials, from President Biden on down, has either been sympathetic or has stressed the need for greater gun control.

Another angle that bears watching: rising hatred for the media. In his eyewitness account for The Boston Globe, James Pindell writes that not long after the shooting, some members of the crowd began targeting the reporters who were there to cover the rally:

After Trump had been escorted to his car and people sensed the rally was over and they were safe, the crowd turned on the media.

The crowd was angry. Middle fingers were everywhere. They asked the press if they were happy and blamed the media.

“You did this,” they said to reporters.

I wasn’t sure of their rationale for such a statement, but they were looking for someone to blame. For a moment, it felt like a growing mob. I was separated by a temporary steel fence, but that wouldn’t help much if things turned violent.

That was my cue. I took off my press credentials, unplugged my equipment, and packed everything into my backpack.

If you watched live coverage Saturday night with a skeptical eye, you were wise. Here, if you haven’t seen it before, is “The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media.” In the days ahead, stick with trusted mainstream news sources, and understand that even they’re not going to get everything right.

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