News Brief: Media Baselessly Pins Trump Shooting on Vague ‘Heated Rhetoric,’ Precious Dems Stop Campaigning
Citations Needed | July 17, 2024 | Transcript
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Nima: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes and, Adam, we have not yet kind of debriefed on the fallout, the media fallout from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13. We have seen, obviously, so many things kind of percolate since then, things like, ‘Oh, well, the move to replace Biden, well, that’s dead in the water, we have to forge ahead,’ to the breathless care packages and get-well cards sent by politicians and pundits to Trump after that moment and now in the throes of the RNC, seeing all of these narratives kind of come together. ‘America needs a strong man,’ especially against a weak Joe Biden, a weak and flailing Joe Biden. But there is something else actually, that we really, really want to dig into Adam that you and I have been talking about.
Adam: Yeah, there’s less the rightwing response, which, of course, was going to be this bullshit, strongman narrative, defiance, you know, ‘They are after you,’ not sure who “they” is. There’s presumably some combination of Chinese and antisemitic, conspiratorial bile. But you know, to paraphrase Michael Moore’s 2003 Oscar speech, where he says we live in fictitious times, and we very much still live in fictitious times, but we also live in increasingly fatuous times, very unserious times. And these are not serious people. The Democrats are not serious. The media’s coverage is not serious. And nobody really believes anything they’re saying over the past week. So there was an, obviously, there was an attempt on Trump’s life. By an inch or two, he would have been killed. And that is, of course, something very serious. But of course, there are people who are just cranks. And from all we know about the shooter, he was not a leftist, a liberal even, he wasn’t sitting around freebasing Rachel Maddow getting mad at Trump. He’s just some crank, and there are some cranks and that happens, and, you know, there’s more to be learned. But there’s no indication that this was a politically motivated shooting beyond the kind of normal suite of MRA-type, you know, school shooter grievances. Literally no evidence that this person was somehow inspired by liberals, or talk of Trump being Hitler, whatever kind of heated MSNBC rhetoric they’re now trying to pin this on.
Nima: Or incidentally, something that J.D. Vance said about Trump previously.
Adam: Yeah, and conveniently this worked out for Democrats, specifically those in the Biden camp who are trying to run out the clock before the convention, and they’re even trying to accelerate the nomination process under the sort of auspices of lowering the temperature. “Lowering the temperature.” Not being so divisive. So you have this, you have this perfect storm of media horseshit, about civility politics, about sort of Biden canceled a lot of events over the past few days. He was going to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, but canceled that in Texas. I guess that would be offensive to Racist Americans and to be super sensitive, right? Well, sensitive–
Nima: In their time of need.
Adam: And of course, this works to Biden, who, of course, is having a hard time campaigning, is giving interviews where he’s not really coherent, and wants to sort of run out the clock and so–
Nima: And they pulled like political attack ads, things like that as well.
Adam: Right, and then some Democrats. Now, to be fair, it’s anonymous and it’s sporadic, but many Democratic insiders who are in positions of power, these aren’t just sort of random concern trolls, they have said that the Democrats are effectively giving up on this campaign. Now I don’t, that’s probably too cynical, but I think that’s a general vibe emitting from Democratic orders at the Biden White House, because they basically gave up the Biden reelection campaign, rather, because they gave up on running, has kind of conceded that they’re going to send out this zombie candidate who has absolutely or has yet to articulate any plan to actually come back and beat Trump, because he is down, and he’s down significantly in every single model, except for the out of the norm, 538 model, but the Economist model, you know, Nate Silver, New York Times, all has him losing quite badly. And so the last few days has been marked by liberal smarm and then, of course, there was a wave of liberal handwringing about so-called heated rhetoric.
Nima: Right, so we saw, almost immediately, the editorial boards of both the New York Times and Washington Post kind of come out with this ‘We need to tone things down’ message. The New York Times ed board, on July 13, that same day of the shooting, released an editorial entitled “The Attack on Donald Trump is Antithetical to America” and in it, the editorial board writes this:
This much is clear: Any attempt to resolve an election through violence is abhorrent. Violence is antithetical to democracy. Ballots, not bullets, should always be the means by which Americans work through their differences.
It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.
Americans also must be cleareyed about the challenge that is confronting this nation. Saturday’s events cannot be written off as an aberration. Violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.
That’s the New York Times. The Washington Post, at the same time, put out this editorial entitled “Turn down the heat, let in the light,” and it similarly talks about the heated tones of both sides and how we need to turn down the temperature on our rhetoric and be our best selves and use this horrific event to come together as the full-fledged kumbaya democracy that we can be, Adam.
Adam: Yeah, and so obviously, this rings hollow for a lot of reasons. Number one, it’s deeply ahistoric. You know, in the 1970s, there were plane hijackings and bombings almost once every couple weeks. Obviously, the qualifier “political” before “political violence” is incredibly suspect, and should raise some alarm bells, because the US, top five US export is violence, somewhere between oil and soy. We do violence all the time. Obviously, we talk about Gaza a lot. 20,000 dead kids so far, probably more, not to mention those who’ve died of disease and other preventable illnesses. And so there’s sort of preciousness around violence. And of course, it’s not that violence is such that bothers people. It’s the fact that it’s both random and unsanctioned, and most importantly of all, against someone in the club, and I get that.
Nima: Who it’s targeting, exactly.
Adam: Yeah, and that can be scary, but just as it’s scary to be subject to the capriciousness of US bombs in Gaza, where you can be killed at any minute for simply existing as a Palestinian and so, not to mention, again, massive incarceration state all the other, you know, sort of bombing of Yemen, all the other sort of violence the US exports and does routinely on a daily basis. And so the second a bullet grazes Trump, everybody becomes smol beans and precious and very sort of sensitive. An article in Vox describing Democrats stopping their effort to try to coup Biden because of the assassination attempts–again, I have no fucking idea what one has to do with the other. It’s all just kind of vibes–wrote:
The former president’s near-death experience has rendered some Democrats even more pessimistic about Biden’s chances. And yet, Saturday’s tragic events have also led many to give up on persuading him to step aside.
The precise rationale for this surrender varies between lawmakers. Democrats who spoke with the Washington Post’s Robert Costa said, in his summary, ‘it’s time for the country to stick together, and that means Democrats sticking together as well.’
So, Democratic elites who again send 2,000-pound bombs to level entire fucking city blocks in Gaza and routinely throw Black people in jail by the hundreds of thousands, ruining countless communities and lives. Suddenly, a bullet grazes Trump, and they’re so goddamn precious and forlorn. They can’t be, they can’t do politics right now. ‘We need a break.’ They need to work on, they need to have self-care. Give me a fucking break. Are these adults? Do they need a binky? I have binkies. I have children. I can give you some binkies. I can go to Capitol Hill and give them to you. What the fuck are you talking about? If Trump is really this existential threat to democracy, which I think in key ways, he is, such as it is, and Biden is flailing, and, of course, I’m ideologically motivated to get Biden up the ticket for the simple fact that he’s committing, he is currently committing, and has committed a genocide, or has been an assistant to a genocide, and I’m trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, fair enough.
These are important things that ought to be done. These are important things that can impact potentially millions of people’s lives. And the idea that somehow we’re going to kind of punt and stop campaigning for weeks, we’re going to, we’re going to kneel the ball in the second quarter of the game on every down out of respect because the other team had, you know, had a moderately injured player. This is not seriousness. This is fatuous. This is unserious. These are not serious people. Now, of course, some would say, well, they’re not really, this is pretextual. That their their concessions, their lack of campaigning, is pretextual. Their rallying around Biden is pretextual because, in the context of the shooting, because they just want to run out the clock to the DNC, okay, fine, but we certainly don’t need the media to play along with this fake indignation. And the worst culprit was Biden. On Monday, he gave an interview with NBC Lester Holt, who began the interview by asking, what is one of the smarmiest, stupidest, fakest questions I’ve ever heard in my life. I cannot believe that adults have to act like this is a real thing. So let’s listen to that question, and then let’s listen to Biden’s completely incoherent and defensive answer.
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Lester Holt: Well, let’s talk about the conversation this has started, and it’s really about language, what we say out loud, and the consequences of those you called your opponent an existential threat on a call a week ago. You said it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye. There’s some dispute about the context, but I think you appreciate that words matter.
Joe Biden: I didn’t say crosshairs. I was talking about focus on. Look, the truth of the matter was, what I guess I was talking about at the time was, there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.
Lester Holt: Yeah, the term was bullseye.
Joe Biden: It was a mistake to use, or I didn’t. I didn’t say crosshairs. Bullseye. I meant focus on him. Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on, on his, on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told at the debate. Focus. I mean, there’s, there’s a whole range of things that, look, I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one. I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election. I’m not the guy who said they wouldn’t accept the outcome of this election automatically. You can’t only love your country when you win. And so the focus was on what he’s saying, and I mean the idea.
Lester Holt: But have you taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced?
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Adam: So clearly, any rational fucking person knows that this shooter, well there’s no evidence, there’s zero reason to believe that he was reading, again, as a deranged 20-year-old shooter. I don’t think he was looking through the minutes of a Biden donor call.
Nima: For the time that Biden made that reference. [Laughs]
Adam: You know, as Zoomers have a tendency to do they usually read through obscure donor call minutes of the President. Saw the bullseye and said, Oh, my God, I now have to–even, even though he meant media bullseye, as in, to sort of focus their attention less on his age and more on Trump’s policies.
Nima: One of the more common analogies to make.
Adam: Yeah, one of the more common analogies people make in marketing, fucking meetings all the time, political meetings all the time. But no, everyone has to pearl-clutch. Everyone has to, ‘But you [said] bullseye, he could have been interpreted this. Raise the temperature.’ What are you talking about? This is the fakest thing I’ve ever heard, nobody actually believes this throwaway line in a donor call, somehow was the Manchurian Candidate, you know, Queen of Hearts, or whatever, that made this killer just become enraged with partisan anger. And what the fuck are we talking about here? Like, nobody believes this. But again, there has to be this–there’s a few things going on. There has to be this faux-both sides, because, of course, with Gabby Giffords in 2010, there was the, Sarah Palin had targets on various members of Congress. Now, I thought that was bullshit, by the way, at the time, and I still do, because sometimes there’s just people that have issues, and it has nothing to do with what politicians say.
Now that doesn’t mean that people can’t incite violence. Again, I think there are plenty of shooters that have, we have evidence. You know, they cite Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro. I know there was some, you know, Bernie Bro who shot up a congressional baseball game. I’m not saying there isn’t politically motivated violence. Of course there is. But sometimes people are just cranks, and that’s, that’s what it is. And a lot of people who shoot up schools have their own personal psychological reasons, and there’s obviously, can be a mix of all the above, but there’s no evidence in this shooting. Again, this is someone who’s a registered Republican, who was a conservative, from all accounts, from interviews with his high school friends and other friends and family members, someone who just likes shooting guns.
There’s no evidence this person cared about Biden. There’s no evidence he sat around consuming, you know, MSNBC and The Daily Beast and, you know, the Krassenstein brothers and occupied Democrats getting super mad for some sort of partisan reason. Zero evidence for that. So why the fuck are Democrats going around acting like it’s incumbent upon them or they have some unique responsibility to lower some vague temperature? Because what they’ll say is they’ll say, Oh, well, they talk about Trump like he’s Hitler. So if you talk about Trump like he’s Hitler, naturally people are going to sort of take matters of their own hands again, even though we have no evidence that happened here. Well, okay, but if someone’s saying things and acting in a fascistic way, what are we just not supposed to say anything now, like, how does that make any sense? How is this not just heckler’s veto? So now any nutcase with a gun can sort of completely alter the course of how we talk about politics. Again, there’s no, there’s no evidence they’re even linked. It’s just defensive vibes.
Nima: If the life of a fascist can be threatened, then we can’t talk about fascism. That’s effectively the argument.
Adam: Yeah, again, the whole, the whole thing is so silly, because the one thing Democrats had going for them, and I don’t even mean this to be facetious, but was Orange Man Bad? Orange Man Bad was, like, the one thing liberal media was good for, and Orange Man is bad. Of course, Biden also bad for a number of reasons, up to including genocide, but for the purposes of just the rhetoric, right, they weren’t going to make existential critiques of capitalism or substantive critiques of even the Republican Party. But Orange Man Bad was the thing they did, they did quite well, and then now we can’t even do Orange Man Bad? That was the one thing you proffered to this political conversation. So what are they going to run on? Okay, well now Biden is making these, supposedly making these kind of totally silly backdoor deals with congressional progressives to offer these half-assed, warmed-over leftovers from the Build Back Better bill from three years ago, which you didn’t even campaign on then, clearly not really in good faith, and some Supreme Court reforms. It’s like, oh, okay, but you can’t even do the thing where you talk about the unique threat that Project 2025 poses, that the Heritage Foundation taking over the entirety of the federal government poses. So I guess we’re just punting on every play now, okay, all because of what, some precious liberal West Wing appeal to lowering the temperature? It’s like, buddy, the temperature is already there. Whether or not you acknowledge reality is independent of that. And also, this person wasn’t really from all from, again, from all accounts, all reporting had nothing to do with any temperature. He’s just some guy who wanted to, you know, shoot someone, to, probably to be famous, or because he had, he had his own issues. So we’re gonna let this random fucking guy determined the course of the 21st century?
Nima: Well, also, because this allows the media to be able to revert to their bothsides-ism appeals, rather than just kind of looking milquetoast in the face of a presidential campaign with like, serious implications, the media gets to go back, kind of, you know, fold back into itself, and be like, See, we told you, this is all about lowering the temperature. You know, one op-ed that I didn’t mention that maybe did this in the most refined way was the Wall Street Journal, which on the 14th of July wrote this:
Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.
We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: ‘The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy — he is not.’
Adam: Well, the Wall Street Journal perhaps may have some motivated reasoning for downplaying that–
Nima: [Laughs] You think?
Adam: Which is that Trump is good, Trump will probably cut corporate taxes to, you know, basically nothing. Which is the first thing he did in 2017 when he came into power. It’s the first thing Mr. so-called Populist did, is he cut corporate taxes significantly.
Nima: There’s actually a whole record of an entire presidential term that is not being addressed in the incumbent’s campaign currently, and now recently, of course, because of the assassination attempt, even mentioning that record, Adam, is seen as rude, right? Heated, heated. We can’t run on that. We have to hit the showers, Biden, it’s done.
Adam: When Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was beaten by somebody with a hammer, Trump, the next week, maybe even the next day, was making jokes about it.
Nima: Was, like, selling Trump hammers, yeah.
Adam: Yeah. Like, clearly, again, Trump shows up with an automatic rifle, and the Democrats show up with one tie behind their back and a butter knife, and then this happens, and then they give up the butter knife. And now they’re just, now, they’re just kind of slapping at them, and it’s like, okay. I mean, again, this is why a lot of people interpret this as the Democrats not really caring about winning, really, and probably being okay with a lot of Trump’s radical platforms, especially around immigration and tax cuts. So nobody seems to care. I mean, the fact that they’re still sticking with Biden, despite the fact that he’s swamping in the polls, or at least there’s a kind of half-assed effort to remove him, indicates that sort of seems like, yeah, it’d be nice if we won, but it’s not, there’s not, like, a lot of urgency.
Nima: [Laughs] But I have no concept how to do that, so we’ll just keep doing the, you know, Mr. Burns thrashing of a lifetime, and just hope that things go our way.
Adam: Yeah, because we’ll rotate out, we’ll rotate out to WestExec and Amazon and McDonald’s, and, you know, maybe we’ll be back in power in four years with fresh blood. And, you know, just nobody seems to really care. It’s kind of just whatever it’s like, It would be nice to win, but now we can’t even talk about Trump in any kind of existential way.
Nima: Right. Because that’s just heated, that’s just too heated, and we see where that goes, because clearly registered Republicans who have serious issues are pouring over the minutes and also taking their cues.
Adam: And they’re taking their cues from obscure comments that use very generic, colloquial, martial analogies about bullseyes and storming the gates and, you know, making sure they don’t miss their shot. You know, all these things that people say in everyday conversations are clearly Manchurian Candidate trigger words–
Nima: That’s right.
Adam: Or sleeper cell assassins that were radicalized by Chris Hayes.
Nima: Okay, well, we are going to continue to keep our eye on this, of course, the heated rhetoric and bothsides-ism is something that we have covered for quite some time, and to see it in such stark relief right now is all the more dispiriting, Adam, but I’m glad we were able to chat it through. That will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you all for joining us. Of course, you can follow the show on @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded. We will be back very soon with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed. Until then, I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, July 17, 2024.
