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After the shocking news of the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, I received a phone call from my cousin who by no means supports Trump as a politician. His tone was deeply somber. "I don't like Trump, but I don't want the man dead!" He told me.
My cousin isn't an anomaly in his feelings about this tragic moment in American history. While we sometimes have our political differences, I know that he and most voters like him who despise Trump aren't sociopaths who wish death upon Trump.
In our hyper partisan environment, where politicians use inflammatory language and preach to an emotional voter base about how their opposition will bring the end to our nation, it becomes easy to take the worst individual from one side and make them the poster child for the entirety. But the willingness to commit an incredibly evil act to assassinate a president and murder innocent bystanders in the process is not a transferrable character flaw that you can place onto an entire voting bloc.
I am a strong believer in personal responsibility and being accountable for your actions. The shooter's decision to take another person's life, no matter what media he consumed or who he voted for, was his choice alone. It took several conscious decisions to end up pointing a gun at Trump's head, and the idea of shifting all blame for pulling a trigger onto President Joe Biden's reckless comments or a media outlet's false framing of Trump is antithetical to the personal responsibility mantra.
I am no fan of Joe Biden as a politician; I think his policies are often flawed. I believe he's the embodiment of Washington D.C. corruption, and he's had a disastrous term as president. But I'd never wish for his death or become gleeful if he faced a similar scenario as Trump—and neither would most Independents like me or Republicans. We've let the media elite who control narratives and reckless attention-seeking bureaucrats give the impression that the average voter on both sides is far more immoral and divided than we really are.
We consume content that reinforces that your enemy can't just lose but must be crushed in every manner. It's almost inevitable that some unstable person would interpret this as a physical call to action to save our democracy that's supposedly under threat.
We've been edging closer to something like this for quite some time, and it only takes one man's willingness to die in infamy to change the trajectory of history.
But I refuse to believe the homicidal desires of one man in Pennsylvania are the desired outcome of the average Democratic voter. I presume in the coming days we will be inundated with selective social media propaganda videos of cheerful Democrats praising the monster who pulled the trigger, or Democrats who are disappointed that Trump still breathes. Make no mistake: These are going to be shared to manipulate you into believing this is the consensus emotion. It isn't.
While I don't expect overtly biased outlets like CNN to change their tune, this doesn't mean that the American people must follow their lead: We can choose a better pathway.
We have a choice: accelerate toward vengeance or find a way to unify over the unacceptability of violence as a response to political disagreements, full stop. Thomas Mathew Crooks made his choice and paid with his life. Now, it's time to make ours. Let's not have this terrorist change who we are and how we see each other.
Adam B. Coleman is an author, and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Find his writing at Adambcoleman.substack.com.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
