Faced with a political conundrum – what to say about Donald Trump in the wake of a failed assassination attempt over the weekend – liberals have turned to the one thing they know best – silence.
President Joe Biden, who Mr Trump has gone after personally and viciously throughout this campaign and the last one, called for a cooling down of rhetoric. The Democrats temporarily pulled ad spending. The President cancelled a trip to Texas celebrating the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
And in an interview on Monday night with NBC’s Lester Holt, the president struggled to make a coherent case for his candidacy as the veteran journalist pushed him on language he’d used that could, potentially, inspire violence.
Criticism of Mr Trump, whose third campaign for president is as filled with hateful invective and racism as the past two, has been muted. And with the Republican National Convention now underway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, media coverage has turned positively rosy – the announcement of Ohio Senator JD Vance as Trump’s running mate is inspiring headlines like this one from Politico: “Early reviews of Vance as the VP pick are in – and they’re raves.”
On MSNBC, the liberal cable news channel which is obsessively followed by liberal politics junkies, President Biden’s favourite show Morning Joe was preemptively cancelled on Monday out of fear that a guest or host might say something untoward, according to CNN reporting. Reporters like the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, a Trump specialist, have tried to reset the clock on the former president’s behaviour.
“You have not seen, for instance, merchandise selling off of what just happened, whereas when he was indicted or when he was convicted, that happened almost immediately,” Haberman told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Sunday.
It’s not just the US, either. Papers around the world led Monday’s coverage by focusing on Biden’s conciliatory tone. “Biden urges US to reject ‘extremism and fury’ after Trump assassination attempt,” the Guardian’s top headline declared on Monday morning, a sign of the careful way even other countries are treating the assassination attempt.
The shooting presents media and political figures in liberal and some left-wing circles with a difficulty of discourse – because Mr Trump is the victim, or one of the victims, of the attack, there appears to be a feeling that treating him as the candidate he is, ideology and all, presents a challenge.
For his part, Mr Trump is playing up the shooting as a moment of change, at least for now. A credulous article in Axios on Monday morning reported that Mr Trump is turning over a new leaf.
“Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility,” Axios founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote. “Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language – and now realises words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.”
Yes, imagine.
The former president told The Washington Examiner that his convention speech would, rather than target President Biden, look to unity.
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” Trump said. “The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.”
Not everyone is being quiet. Writers on the left such as The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted aren’t bothering to take the possibility of Mr Trump’s change of heart seriously.
“Trump’s assassination attempt has only emboldened his preexisting victim complex, which has convinced him he’s the target of systemic political persecution, and not criminal prosecution,” Olmsted wrote on Monday.
Olmsted is right. There’s little to no reason to believe Mr Trump. His rhetoric and politics have been thoroughly focused on division and hate for nearly a decade, and that’s not counting the years before that when he was a prime instigator and backer of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory which held that then-president Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Even a Trump speech that reads as conciliatory and uniting will be surrounded by a convention full of speeches by extremists like Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and other social conservatives.
But that likely won’t make a difference. There’s a long tradition in the US of liberal capitulation to the right-wing on messaging whenever there’s the slightest whiff of divisive politics having actual consequences for the politicians who do the most to encourage violence.
It’s part of an inexplicable urge to see your political enemies as better than they are – think of how US media has rewritten the history of the George W Bush administration to portray the 43rd president as a decent man whose failures were the result of good faith efforts rather than the corrupt, war-hungry executive he was.
Today, his lackeys are talking heads on liberal news networks by virtue of their distaste for Mr Trump – former communications director Nicolle Wallace even hosts her own mega-popular two-hour block on MSNBC.
The current liberal silencing is more of the same. Mr Trump must be untouchable, despite his policies and general persona, because he was the target of an unhinged shooter. But liberals in the media and politics would do well to remember that it doesn’t serve democracy at home or abroad to bite back criticism.