Volcanoes are erupting in The Philippines, but on-fire Australia received some welcome rain. The Iran war cries have been called off and The Donald’s military powers are about to be hamstrung by the Senate. Meanwhile, his impeachment trial is starting, and we’re all on Twitter for a front-row seat.
What Could Go Right? A Nation Tested
After the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, what does it look like to acquit ourselves well in this moment?
Emma Varvaloucas
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A Nation Tested
Everything and nothing has changed since former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt on Saturday.
Last week I wrote that I was worried about the general mood that Trump had already won the election with over three months to go. Then came a 20-year-old misfit with a gun, and an iconic photo that elevated the presidential candidate almost instantly to the status of quasi-religious myth. The prediction from many quarters was certainty. Yes—this is the final nail in the coffin of a Biden election win.
Maybe. Maybe not. At the risk of repeating myself, the election hasn’t happened yet. In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson makes the case ($), based on history, that (failed) assassination attempts don’t dramatically alter the course of events.
Multiple commentators wrote that this moment was a “test” for the United States, although it’s unclear whether the test is if Americans would be at each other’s throats or if they would re-elect, on the basis of sympathy, someone who fantasizes about jailing political opponents ($).
On Sunday, with some notable exceptions, our leaders and lawmakers led with civility. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” President Biden said in his national address. “UNITE AMERICA!,” Trump posted on Truth Social. He also told the Washington Examiner in an interview that he was rewriting the speech he planned to give at the Republican National Convention (RNC) tonight to focus less on Biden and more on unity. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said. Conservative TV personality Tucker Carlson told Axios that he thinks Trump’s change of heart is real. “Getting shot in the face changes a man.”
Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have another signal after tonight’s RNC speech, but we still won’t really know if a second Trump term would be a new Trump, more authoritarian-wannabe bombast, or a serious play at altering our institutions from the inside. If the latter comes to pass, it will be yet another test.
At my count, then, that makes three tests: limiting this week’s damage, averting the risk of a second Trump term, and keeping ourselves awake and engaged in the case of another three-alarm democracy fire.
Ordinary Americans have roughly passed the first one. As of now, there has been no further violence of any kind, and specifically not of the kind that Americans fear and disapprove of most—violence between the “two sides.” (Although that might be the wrong thing to focus on: American historian of Europe Timothy Snyder offers a different read of how violence may spread on his Substack, writing that the history of the far right “tells a different story, one in which violence often refracts within and around a political movement that endorses it.”)
The general response to the shooting has been decent and pro-democratic. It might be most colorfully represented by a friend of a friend who livestreams his political opinions from his porch in New Jersey every night on Facebook. “I am pro Trump,” he said after news broke of the assassination attempt. “Do I think that Bush, Obama, or Clinton should be assassinated? Fuck no. . . . I wouldn’t wish that on any president or former president.”
That decency might seem like a low bar, but according to experts, it’s an important one. In an interview on The Good Fight podcast, Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave suggestions on what we can do individually to limit a spiral of violence. Vote, she said, donate against candidates who use violent rhetoric, and consider running for office. You can also be a norm-guardian, so to speak, of your own social networks and community, by setting standards for “what’s okay and what’s not okay.”
That includes indulging in conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracy theories have bloomed on the right and the left—Democrats set it up versus Trump staged the whole thing—but have been, fortunately, tempered by hard-to-spin facts. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican, and as far as we know, not passionately involved in politics, aside from a small, one-time donation to a liberal campaign group in 2021.
What about the second test? “The dream of autocrats is for you to silence yourself, doing their job for them,” The Progress Network Member Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on X this week. Many have pointed out that Democrats may struggle, as Biden’s campaign continues, to cool down heated language while still expressing the threat to democracy that Trump represents. As a person, Trump certainly deserves our decency and our sympathy, as does former fire chief Corey D. Comperatore, who died at the rally while trying to protect his family. But the political reality remains the same. One way forward, writes Ben-Ghiat, is to talk about policy outcomes, not personalities.
And the third? Most of what I’m seeing around me now is exhaustion. People not wanting to talk about the weekend; people expressing emotional overwhelm; people opting out of the whole messy thing.
When events difficult to grapple with, like this one, occur, as they have been with regularity in the States now for years, almost inevitably advice is published to take a break from the news, which is good common sense—to a point. Go touch grass, absolutely. But we also need to build our distress tolerance. These times don’t call for tuning out. They call for us to reach inside ourselves, and find our grit, resilience, and strength. They call for us to renew our vigor and our commitment to America’s democratic project. They call for us to think deeply and seriously about how we might each contribute well to this moment, and moments to come.
Further reading: Aside from the pieces linked to above, I have found the following ones clarifying in a week in which everything seems jumbled.
- David Frum in The Atlantic: “The Gunman and the Would-be Dictator”
- Yuval Levin in The Free Press: “The Assassination Attempt—And America’s Choice”
- Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch: “Enemies of Democracy”
What Could Go Right? S6 E13
Does there need to be a change in the way we approach mental health and therapy? Zachary and Emma speak with Abigail Shrier about the evolving landscape of mental health narratives among younger generations. Abigail’s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, challenges the orthodoxy that more therapy is the solution to our rising mental health problems. From the use of trauma as metaphor to the impact of therapeutic trends on adolescents, we explore how societal perceptions and parenting styles shape attitudes towards resilience, responsibility, and the pursuit of personal growth. The conversation explores the overdiagnosis and overmedication of children and adolescents, the impact of therapy culture on young people, and the need for a more balanced approach to mental health. | Listen now
By the Numbers
13%: The share of US workers earning under $15 an hour, down from 31.9% in 2022
70: Rwanda’s current life expectancy at birth, up from 56 in 2006
5.7%: Morocco’s multidimensional poverty rate as of 2022, down from 40% in 2001
112: The number of countries where the death penalty has been abolished for all crimes, up from 48 in 1991
Quick Hits
🏭 “China’s carbon dioxide emissions are on track for a first annual decline since 2016,” reports Bloomberg. It may mean that the nation’s emissions peaked in 2023 and will enter into long-term decline, say analysts. ($)
⚖️ A ban on female genital cutting has been upheld in the West African nation of Gambia after lawmakers began discussing the possibility of reversing it almost a year ago. It would have been the first country in the world to reverse such a ban.
💰 In 2000, 75 percent of the world had a net worth of less than $10,000. In 2023, it’s less than 40 percent, per the latest UBS Wealth Report. “Never before in human history has there been any meaningful migration out of that [lowest] bracket,” comments Axios.
🗣️ A Massachusetts man with cancer has regained his ability to speak, breathe, and swallow normally after undergoing a full larynx transplant. Full larynx transplants are rare and almost unheard of for cancer patients. This one was part of a clinical trial attempting to make them a more standard option.
📉 This year, the fewest people were shot on Independence Day weekend—the time of year, says The Trace, when gun violence is at its highest—since 2019. It’s a sign that the social unrest that defined the pandemic years is ebbing.
🧬 Some recent scientific discoveries: the answer behind why women’s bones stay strong during breastfeeding may lead to new treatments for osteoporosis; a “molecular switch” has been found as a cause of lupus; and how pancreatic cancer triggers a gene change.
💊 The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson has decided not to enforce its patent on a tuberculosis medication that tens of thousands of people in South Africa are reliant on after the South African government opened an investigation into its pricing practices. The medication will now be offered at a 40 percent lower price.
TPN Member Originals
(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)
- Launching The Edgy Optimist | The Edgy Optimist | Zachary Karabell
- The Republican party platform | Tangle | Isaac Saul
- Trump survives an assassination attempt | Tangle | Isaac Saul
- The economic policy implications of a Republican landslide | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias
- US media and the 2024 election | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat
- Thoughts on AI, jobs, wages, skills, the future, etc. | The Geek Way | Andrew McAfee
- Why you should want to be alone | The Atlantic ($) | Arthur C. Brooks
- What was neoliberalism? | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias
The DOE’s Mike Goff on powering the US with more nuclear energy | Faster, Please! | James Pethokoukis- The shrinking West Bank | Nonzero | Robert Wright
- This is a test for America | Yascha Mounk | Yascha Mounk
- Ukraine can still win this war, says Poland’s FM | GZERO | Ian Bremmer
- The troubled-teen industry needs safe and effective treatment | NYT ($) | Maia Szalavitz