What should have been said after the Trump shooting

Now that the Republican National Convention has wrapped up, with the usual scare tactics, strongman promises, and all-purpose incendiary rhetoric on display rather than the leavened message many observers — for some inexplicable reason — thought might follow in the wake of last weekend’s shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, it should be clear that Democratic Unity Statements had their expected effect. That is to say, at best they had no effect at all, at least in terms of “lowering the temperature.” At worst, they meant Democrats, in a critical moment, abandoned the public conversation on gun violence to Republicans yet again.

But why do Democratic leaders keep saying such things? And what could (and should) they be saying and doing instead?

To get some guidance, we turned as usual to our messaging guru, Anat Shenker-Osorio, who walked us through a detailed analysis of this past week’s messaging breakdown, laid out a set of principles by which such failures could be avoided in the future, and spelled out exactly what Democrats need to be saying if they want to triumph over Trumpism in November.

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Why, following the Trump assassination attempt, did Democrats decide to unilaterally embrace “unity,” issue these milquetoast statements, stop campaigning, and take it on themselves to turn down the temperature when it was pretty clear that any overtures to unity on the Republican side were going to be, at the very best, very short-lived. And that’s exactly what’s happened. So, why are they doing that? What’s going on? What should they be doing?

So I think that, first of all, I’m going to start with a not-at-all ancillary wording point, which is that in the question, you said the “assassination attempt.”

First, I’m going to push back very hard on that phrase, because as we know as I like to tell people that words mean things. And the word “assassination” exists inside of a very particular semantic frame. When we say “assassination,” what comes to mind is Lincoln. What comes to mind is JFK, what comes to mind is MLK.

It conjures a scene in which a heroic individual has been intentionally targeted by their opponent in order to end their ability to pursue their platform. And that is the right-wing narrative that’s developed. That story says that Trump is a hero. He is a strongman. He prevailed, barely scathed by this bullet, and look at him, he just got straight up and look at how strong he is and so on. And that this occurred because of overheated, demonic, terrible rhetoric on the part of Biden and the Democrats.

It is just as accurate to call it a “shooting.” Tragically, in our country, we have some concrete definitions of what constitutes a “mass shooting,” and a common one says it has to be four or more people. How sick is it that we live in a place where there’s an official designation? So with one dead and two injured, this isn’t a mass shooting in that sense, but it’s clearly part of a broader pattern of violence. And I will even say politicized violence.

That’s another loaded phrase, though, in a lot of ways. True?

Yeah. And I mean, if ever the inherent violence of our language was more noteworthy, and I’m just noting the word “loaded” right here.

And at the risk of not immediately answering your question, which I promise I will, what is actually going on here, and it’s absolutely vital for people to understand, is that MAGA Republicans in essence, when they say this occurred because of overheated, inappropriate, violent political rhetoric credit where due, they’re right.

It’s their rhetoric. And it’s absolutely vital to remember that this year and every year, prior to July 13th, comes January 6th. And prior to January 6th comes Charlottesville. And in between those things come ads where they are showing their great, great love of every kind of weapon and their language about having to fight like hell and not giving up this country and going after the left and going after the woke.

A bloodless revolution if you let us.

Exactly. And so it is, in fact, the case that this horrible event was caused by intentionally violent rhetoric, and that is the rhetoric of MAGA Republicans. And so what’s occurred here is that they set and they stoked the fire and they got burned.

That is what this is. And so for the Democrats, to go back to your question, to kind of pre-capitulate, essentially, to use authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder’s language to obey in advance. That’s what Democrats have done. They have obeyed in advance.

And they do it in a very particular way, which is that they wall off any conversation about root causes, the things that you’re talking about, the rhetoric, the history. It’s a real thoughts-and-prayers kind of approach. Why is that specifically happening?

So I think there’s this endless desire to not get criticized or to avoid having criticism stick. They don’t want to be criticized as socialists. So they’re like, “We’re not socialists. We’re capitalists.” They don’t want to be criticized as too pro-immigrant. So they’re like, “We’re also going to crack down on the border.” They don’t want to be criticized as seeking to defund the police. So they’re like, “We love the police. We’ll put the police in our ads. We’ll tell you how much more money we’re going to give the police.” They don’t want to be criticized as having weaponized the DOJ. So they’re like, “Here, you can have Hunter Biden.”

So they don’t want the criticism that this shooting is the result of their overheated language. So they’re going to genuflect and say, “We hope you get well. We are so sorry. We are so sad for you. Let us send your ear a get-well card.”

And it never, ever, ever works. First of all, it never stops the criticism. It never stops attacks from the right. I mean, why would it? The criticism has nothing to do with the content of what they’re saying anyway.

Why do they continue to believe otherwise? Because there’s no evidence for it that I’ve ever seen.

They do polls, and polls will say things like, “People think America’s too divided. People think the rhetoric is too hot. People think incivility is at an all-time high.” And, yeah, people think all of those things. And so Democrats are like, “Oh, people want civility. Oh, people want platitudes. Oh, people want “bipartisan solutions.” And so that’s the reason why they do it, not recognizing, I guess, even though it’s exactly the same impetus every single time in every single situation, that it’s not going to stop the attacks. The attacks will continue. It’s not going to buy them more credibility with anyone who would believe the attacks.

They fear that if they tell the truth — the truth being that the heated, violent, angry, awful rhetoric does absolutely exist and has come to a head in our politics, and that’s because of MAGA Republicans — they’ll just be accused more of the same thing, not realizing they’re going to be accused of it anyway.

They’ll be accused of turning up the temperature at a time when it needs to be turned down.

Apologizing actually lends more credence to the attacks because it becomes the only story. The only story is they say, “You punched us,” and we say, “We’re so sorry you got punched. We’re so sorry you got punched. We’re so sorry you got shot. We’re so sorry you got shot.” That lets listeners who are conflicted and who are in a massive sense-making moment accept their origin story.

Because whenever something like this comes completely and totally unexpectedly out of nowhere, we come into what we call a “persuasion window.” People are trying to figure out what this means, why it occurred, what should happen next, and who’s to blame.

So what should have been said out of the gate? What would have been a better response?

I’ll start with a principle, and then I’ll articulate it into a message.

First of all, as always, we have to, no matter what has just happened, make clear that we face a choice between two competing futures, that this election is a crossroads, it’s a fork in the road, whatever journey metaphor you want to use.

And you want to say, “Yeah, this election is about choosing between competing futures, a future in which we have leaders who respect our freedoms, respect our families, and want to implement common-sense gun safety so that this happens in no place, at no time, to no person, and a future where MAGA Republicans continue in their very well-publicized project to control us, to decide our futures for us, and to unleash more violence time and time again.”

The next principle is that we have to avoid feeding both-sides sentiments.

That’s when we use what are called “hedge phrases.” Hedge phrases are what you hear all the time in mission statements. “We are committed to a culture of,” or “we work to create,” or “we seek to empower.” It’s the verb before the infinitive.

So what that sounds like in this context is “We need to remember to act peacefully.” “We need to recommit to a democratic process.” “We need to pledge to condemn hateful rhetoric.”

What happens when you say that? You’re tacitly saying to the listener, “Oh, we’ve behaved badly, and we need to revisit our conduct and alter that conduct.”

Yeah. The implication is we all have to do this, including everyone who is not part of this and not responsible and would never have wanted this kind of thing to be possible.

Right. In contrast to saying, for example, “As people always committed to the democratic process, we abhor violence in any circumstance and in any place.”

I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t say, “This is terrible.” It is terrible. True things are true things. You should say true things.” But there’s a huge difference between saying “We should recommit to a democratic process,” which implies that you weren’t in one now, which is a lie, to saying “As people who have always adhered to a democratic process, obviously, this has no place.”

And that’s another principle: seize the moral high ground. Really do it, don’t just issue an empty statement — actually use this as an opportunity to demand something that is extraordinarily popular, which is an assault weapons ban. Almost all kinds of common-sense gun reform, when you ask about them — Morning Consult just released new data on this — are wildly popular things.

And so this is an opportunity to seize the moral high ground and to present a popular solution and to get yourself a merited penumbra that we care about everyone, including our opponents.

So what they should say is “This should never happen. We are coming together, and we believe that every single lawmaker who loves this country very much should join us in passing an assault weapons ban in the name of this never happening again, in the name of the safety of every single one of us, including people who are running against us. We’re doing this for our opposition. That is how much we care about this, how much we care about them, how much we care about the process.”

So if I’m understanding this correctly, the kind of unity that was expressed, unfortunately, saying, “We’re sorry for what you did,” is just giving away the narrative. What you’re talking about is expressing a sense of unity that says, “We have figured this all out, and we want to help everybody.”

And we invite you to get up here. The advantage of presenting an assault weapons ban is they can invite Republicans to vote for it, and then Republicans can expose themselves for exactly who they are.

I mean, it’s somewhat shocking, actually, that in every previous instance of, I won’t call it mass shooting because, like I said, in our country, we’re pathological enough to have a definition of that that’s not met here. But I will say marquee violence. I think this qualifies as an instance of violence that happened in a community that got noticed. In every instance of marquee violence, there are always calls to pass gun legislation, except in this one. Doesn’t that suggest that we don’t care about these victims? Doesn’t that suggest that somehow it’s fine if it happens to this man who was actually killed in defense of his own children?

And isn’t that kind of creepy and weird?

I want to believe — and this is based on pure hope and conjecture, this is not like insider intel — that it’s because they’re coming back into session, I believe, Monday, and announcing this before they come back into session is just going to invite a week of Republican pushback on it and would hinder the ability to do what I’m describing, which is like, “We’re introducing this,” and then you get the optics of House Republicans blocking even a floor vote. Like, “They won’t even let us talk about this.”

But the first 100 days plan that Biden announced in Michigan on Friday, which then completely got eclipsed — that included an assault weapons ban.

Though they haven’t brought it up again since.

Which makes absolutely no sense. Should have been part of that Lester Holt interview.

Since the Republican convention happened this week, immediately following the shooting, that gave a lot of Republicans a lot of airtime to say all kinds of things, and much of it is right back to the messaging that we saw before, plus, obviously, they nominated a pretty incendiary vice presidential candidate who has said a lot of things that have been, you could say, pretty violent.

It’s please all, please none. That is the fundamental problem. And I don’t know if you remember that Aesop fable, but to me, what’s ironic — and I should say obviously I don’t think Aesop intended this — is that the animal they’re riding when they go to market is a donkey. Which of course is the Democratic Party mascot. In fact, that whole parable could just be like a short explanation of Democratic Party messaging, which is that if you’re looking for the thing to say that doesn’t offend anybody, you’re also not going to please anybody.

Thoughts and prayers.

Thoughts and prayers. If that is what you think your objective is, is not to anger anybody, then that’s what you’re going to come up with every time. If you want to serve a meal that no one is going to hate — plain noodles or whatever — no one is going to like it either.

And the entire political philosophy, at least of mainstream Democrats, is to find a thing that doesn’t actually touch a nerve. And the trouble with that is the only way to actually break a signal through the noise, is to excite your base, and then, by the way, persuade the middle because that doesn’t occur unless your base is actually acting as that choir, and to get that to happen you have to touch a nerve.

The only way to prebunk, debunk, or rebuff, depending on where in the process you’re saying it, the odious, horrible things that your opposition repeats over and over again is by actually saying something that stands out.

Did anyone get it right who you’ve seen? Is any Democratic figure speaking to the press this past week or making any kind of statement on social anywhere? Even people who’ve been speaking to this over the years?

Not a leader but an organization. Everytown put out a statement that I thought was really excellent. And, as you would expect, given who they are and what they stand for, they did a great job of framing this as yet another instance of violence in our country that doesn’t belong, that we don’t want, and that we can stop by putting in place rules that the majority of us want. Like I thought that was really, really smart and strong.

And that’s another principle right there: the next thing you want to do is to avoid making this instance of violence exceptional.

Obviously, there are unique elements to this, but attempted shootings of this kind with this kind of weapon are sadly commonplace in our country. And to exceptionalize it is to feed that right-wing narrative that I talked about before.

And that’s another principle. You do not amplify right-wing hatred.

There is an understandable impulse. And actually, interestingly, the reaction to J.D. Vance being the VP nominee also has this impulse in it. The impulse is, “We’re going to show you all the times that they said horrible things. Look, horrible thing. Look, horrible thing. Look, horrible thing. Look, horrible thing.”

And it is true that we want to make clear, as I said earlier, that they are the narrators of the horrible things.

But we have to do that carefully because if we expose people to too much of it — and this is frustrating, and I realize it’s counterintuitive — what we know over and again is that fear is not a rational emotion, and people do not make good decisions from a fear basis. When people are feeling really afraid, they want Daddy.

And that brings us to yet another principle: you don’t want to feed the hunger for a strongman.

That’s part of why fear has been such a big part of the Republican message.

That’s why. Political violence is a deliberate strategy on the part of authoritarians. And so the fact is that in this case, they detonated a bomb and they got hit by some of the shrapnel; they’re in the business of detonating bombs because that is politically advantageous to them.

Creating a sense of fear, a sense of chaos, a sense that “We alone can protect you. We alone can stop this from happening. We alone can bring order. We alone can stop this.” So we have to tread lightly into how much, yes, we need to call them out.

We can’t be exposing people to an endless cycle of, “This horrible thing, and this horrible thing, and this horrible thing, and this horrible thing.” I can tell you right now from the focus groups that we just have had since the shooting — we have these all the time, and whatever just happened is what we talk about first, regardless of what we had on the plan — what’s been interesting about them is, to my surprise, people have not volunteered anything about this. At the beginning of the session, we have open convo, which is like, “What are you thinking about? What’s top of mind? What news has really penetrated for you?” People have not volunteered this. They have not wanted to talk about it.

Not that they didn’t know, but they’re so resigned. And to the extent that they’ve been willing to talk about it at all, where they’ve gone is that this means there’s going to be violence on Election Day. That there’s going to be more violence. And, sadly, what it has meant for some of our participants is, “I’m not going to say anything about politics. Like, I’m not going to talk about it on my socials. I’m not going to talk about it with people. I’m not going to talk about it. I live in such-and-such place. People have guns. I can’t be I can’t be getting into an argument with my neighbor about this.”

This is extraordinarily beneficial to the right because we know that the more people hear about Project 2025, the more they hate it and the more it overcomes whatever unwillingness or reluctance they have to vote for Biden.

So, overall, what is the right message here? What should Democrats be saying?

It’s this: No matter our background, zip code, or political party, most of us believe that violence has no place in our political process and weapons of war have no place in our communities. Voters in this election have a chance to reject a MAGA movement that feeds, grows off, and promises more violence, and choose instead a country where no one fears for our lives or our loved ones, a country where we ban weapons of war so they’re not used against elementary schoolers or politicians, moviegoers, or concert attendees. A place where the people who represent us respect our freedoms to live without fear of gun violence, to cast our votes and have them counted, and to decide for ourselves what our futures will hold.

And that’s it. That’s the message.

Photo by Bryan Olin Dozier/Anadolu via Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.