Paul Campos ponders whether we have simply moved on from the shooting in Pennsylvania because frankly everything surrounding Trump is always so unhinged, so scripted from pro wrestling forms, that we all sort of looked at that, went "holy shit" and then went back to our lives.
Trump has always been a chaos agent. That has been part of his appeal to a certain nihilistic person (usually male) who just wants to watch the world burn, because they lack the imagination to think about warmth. Like many a neurasthenic Democrat, I wondered if the photo of him raising a fist to the crowd was the final nail in the coffin of America's long experiment in democratic governance.
However, I'm not so sure. (Hell, I'm not so sure about anything anymore.) I do wonder if the swirling chaos around this man will inure people to this recent event, especially since the shooter seems to be cut from the same cloth as Dylan Klebold or Adam Lanza rathe than John Wilkes Booth or Gavrilo Princip.
Maybe I'm wrong (again, I feel unmoored from decades of study of this shit by the uniqueness of this moment, these moments), but I my gut says that whatever bump Trump gets from being shot at will be indistinguishable from the same bump he might get from the convention.
Yes, he should build a bit more of a lead after the convention (unless it becomes the MAGA freakshow), but whose mind - again - was changed who had voted for Biden in 2020? Who looks at the chaos that swirls around Trump and wants to return to that?
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