The simulacrum of violence

Trump's assassination attempt

I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but the reactions I’ve seen on the internet have been really wild. People I know and trust claiming that the assassination attempt on Trump yesterday was staged, a hoax, meant to improve his ratings.

I mean, I guess it’s possible. But I don’t understand what the benefit really would be for him. He isn’t trailing in the polls, he doesn’t seem to be behind in meaningful ways, the discourse around Biden’s age is eating away at the current President. (Mind you, I have no interest in supporting Biden or any of these colonial ‘town destroyers’ as the Seneca would say).¹ But I’m trying to wrap my head around what the benefit would be for Trump. Sure, he gains support from his base because they can claim the “left” has incited hatred against him. Sure, he can say that only he can protect this country from people like the shooter (and any other boogeymen he invents). But he is already saying that, and it is already working. He doesn’t need more support from his base. He needs support from moderate centrists. (Is that right, people?)

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I don’t understand what he has to gain from staging such an elaborate hoax. If it was a hoax, it was very well orchestrated. And I simply don’t believe that his people have the finesse to pull something like this off. If it was a hoax, the incredulity people feel is also contextual, also part of the climate of fake news and bombast and hyperbole that Trump himself has turned into a form of art. So I guess it isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

More likely, in my view, is that Trump did narrowly escape an assassination attempt. The shooter was a young white man. Perhaps he was disaffected with Trump’s message. Perhaps he was afraid for the future of the country. It really won’t matter what his motive actually was because Trump will harness and mold it to his own benefit.

But what I find more interesting, and the reason for this missive, is that I don’t understand how such violence is immediately imagined as staged. I find it fascinating that people would think that such violence could not be real. A simulated world. A simulated form of violence meant to sharpen Trump’s chances of winning a second term.

The violence in this country is not a simulation. It is its foundation. It is its core. The violence of America is in its “blood and soil,” in its roots. It is a country that cannot escape its own violence. It is that violence. Such assassination attempts are not an anomaly, but simply the individual expression of the very violence that this country needs to survive.

I guess what I’m saying is that colonialism is the violence that pervades this country, and one or another assassin is only revealing the underlying structure that makes this country what it is. It is not a simulation, even if it turns out to be a hoax, but the bare truth of what has always been the air that feeds the lungs of America. (Let the Agamben waft through the previous paragraph).

I guess what I’m saying, too, is that while a man can attempt to kill Trump, Trump has inflicted and would and will inflict unimaginable violence upon the world. His violence is in the policies and rhetoric and incitement; in the lives no longer able to access healthcare and education and kinship and futurity. Any US president is a man constituted by violence, but this man clearly has a desire to slake his thirst with more and more and more. So I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t want to conflate the individual for the systemic. Trump may not be individually killing people, but his policies and rhetoric and disdain for life has led to the elimination of thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

People may focus on the simulated aspect of this violence, but I prefer to remember, to imagine, or to sit with, the very real. The underlying structure, the bones.

I don’t think it was a hoax, and even if it were, the violence is not in a man attempting to kill Trump, but in Trump’s promise of a life with no future for thousands upon thousands of people. And yet, we cannot let go of the theatricality of the moment.

I don’t have a conclusion, and I’m not going to go back and edit this, but wow, what a world we live in.

Photo by Sean Ferigan on Unsplash

1. In a previous version of this post, I had written, “as the Mohawks would say,” but Town Destroyer was coined by the Seneca, though it is used by all Haudenosaunee people. Thanks to Rosy Simas for pointing this out to me.