The convention in Milwaukee starting tomorrow is going to be interesting. Wisconsin law forbids municipalities from enacting any gun laws stricter than state laws, which means that outside of the hard perimeter set up by the Secret Service it’s completely legal to sling an AR over your chest. Wisconsin is an open carry state with no permit required (though one is required for concealed carry).
“We are prohibiting citizens from possessing tennis balls and water bottles while allowing them to carry fully loaded AR-15 assault rifles into the security perimeter of a major political event,” Milwaukee Alderman Robert Bauman told Newsweek .
…superseding state law that prevents local officials “from prohibiting the possession or carrying of legal firearms.”
This was not a good thing before yesterday’s events. It’s a really, really bad thing now. So they’re not allowed to carry guns into the convention buildings. But they absolutely can on the streets, sidewalks, and parks outside where lots and lots of revved up people, convention-goers and protestors alike, will be congregating. All I can say is “yikes”.
We’re definitely going to see a big push for gun control from Trump, and probably from a lot of the rest of the Republican party. Republicans love gun control. Every time this century they’ve had a substantive criticism of any Democrat, the reason has been that Democrats are too permissive with guns.
A preliminary analysis of all the official condemnation statements shows that if it comes from a Democrat or a reputable news service, he’s “former president Trump”. If it’s from a Republican, it’s “President Trump”.
Yes, and he was among his “own people”, who, according to comments he made during his insurrection, would not harm him. But he was among his “own people” and he was shot, anyway. That will mess with his mental health, I think.
I think this could have a dual effect of firing Trump’s base but also leading swing voters to want an elderly statesman who can calm things down. Who knows which effect will be bigger but I don’t think the Trump base has been lacking in passion this year and there are quite a lot of undecided voters who are skeptical of both candidates.
One thing I am confident of is that this is going to weaken and possibly end the move to remove Biden. This is really not the time for the Democrats to roll the dice with a hugely contentious switch and Harris is probably a more polarizing figure than Biden.
Right. He is llucky and only a psychopath would stick around fist pumping his image up without regard for others when he’s the target of an assassination attempt.
No America that man is not your badass protector. He expects America to take the bullets for him. Is he sorry about the dead guy attending his rally?
“You know, Mr Trump, you can’t allow the liberals to kill you. You’re the greatest human who’s ever lived and we need you to make America great again. So to protect yourself, you should make a public announcement that you want to ban all guns. Make sure to say that a lot at your rallies. Your supporters will love hearing you say that. They’ll even be yelling your name. It’ll sound like boo but they’re really saying Tr-ooooo-ump.”
In slang it means soft, as in lame, weak, and/or lacking intestinal fortitude. Just like the Democrats who are backing down instead of putting the blame right on Trump for increasing political violence.
You pretty well cover my thinking. I don’t understand the posters who are ready to give up and concede the race to DJT because this happened. As you say, the MAGA base is already fired up and has been for the last year or so.
The GOP convention starts this week and I fully expect this event to result in even more vitriolic and hateful statements made from the podium directed at Democrats and President Biden. We already have a member of the House and a sitting Senator who have blamed the administration for their “hateful” statements about DJT for causing this. The irony is typical of the modern GOP. Every accusation is a confession as we are used to saying.
I don’t have any way of knowing how this will impact the race and we have no real metric to tell us how this will play out. There hasn’t been a successful assassination attempt on a candidate running for POTUS in over 100 years. My expectation is that undecideds and independents will be quickly exhausted and turned off by the nastiness I expect is coming from the GOP in the next few weeks and days. I don’t see how that will help DJT’s campaign.
Look, the people who noticed Biden’s age is affecting his ability to debate and campaign aren’t wrong. The people who estimate huge political fallout from the Trump shooting aren’t wrong either. But all of these people fail to apprehend what the Trump camp has been successfully leveraging for a while now - the present-day news cycle is so fast and furious that highly consequential events will be hazy in 2 weeks and gone in 4 weeks.
This story will be gone by September. Maybe due to our short attention span, maybe due to getting overshadowed by something even bigger, but nothing that happens in July or August will make much of a difference in a media climate like this.
If you’re reacting to all the right-wing firebrands posting “we are now officially in a state of war”, well, I invite you to review them posting exactly the same in response to, well, everything. The guys who were in a state of war when Trump got convicted, or indicted before that, or defeated before that, going all the way back to Obergefell and beyond, have not reached an double-plus-extra state of war.
Maybe this rhetoric stochastically reaches another nutjob, I don’t know what happens, but I do know these people cannot possibly get any more angry or unhinged.
Republicans right now are finding every shred of evidence, real or made up, that the Secret Service, it’s female Director (look for a DEI hire narrative), and ultimately Biden are somehow responsible for this. Hearings will start next week.
The narrative will be that Biden was frustrated that his weaponized justice department wasn’t getting the job done, so he riled up his base and cut funding for Trump’s secret service detail, waiting for the inevitable.
Whether or not the shooter was actually “Biden’s base” won’t matter. This is going to dominate the news cycle for months, painting Biden to be the real fascist.
This is the Trumper playbook. Take every accusation and turn it around.
This is going to be effective. Apathetic republican voters who have been sick of Trump making headlines for all the wrong reasons will now be fed headlines about what a victim he is, and how Biden is just as bad if not worse. This will absolutely have an effect on the election. IMHO, of course. But mark my words.
D’oh, my bad. I should have said UNsuccessful assassination attempt and was thinking of Teddy Roosevelt.
The point I was trying to make was this - there is no way of knowing how this will help or hurt DJT’s standing in the polls. He survived but RFK clearly did not.