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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
President Biden is calling for national unity after Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The former president was shot near the ear during an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One attendee of the rally was shot dead, two others critically wounded. The gunman was also shot dead by Secret Service. On Sunday night, President Biden gave a primetime address from the Oval Office.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever, period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized. You know, the political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that. Yes, we have deeply felt, strong disagreements. The stakes in this election are enormously high.
AMY GOODMAN: The FBI is continuing to investigate Saturday’s shooting. Authorities have identified the gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who lived in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, not far from where the rally took place. Investigators believe Crooks acted alone but have not yet determined a motive. The AR-15 used in the attack had been purchased by his father. Secret Service snipers shot Crooks dead soon after he opened fire. Part of the investigation centers on how the gunman managed to get on top of a nearby building located about 400 feet away from the stage with a direct line of sight on the stage.
Some Republicans directly cast blame on the Biden campaign. Republican Senator of Ohio J.D. Vance, being considered a top vice-presidential running mate of Trump’s, tweeted, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” J.D. Vance tweeted.
Joining us now is journalist and author Jeff Sharlet. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. His latest book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. You were planning to be at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania?
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, there but for logistics go I. I had planned to go and report the rally, and didn’t work out, so I was kind of keeping tabs on it during the day and watching the misery of the heat and people crying, “Medic! Medic! Medic!” It was really kind of a bad scene already. And then, of course, came the shooting.
AMY GOODMAN: You posted on social media, “Calling Trump a ‘threat to democracy’ is in no way ‘violent rhetoric.’” Can you take it from there? I mean, you have this situation where Trump was injured, his right ear grazed. He’ll be speaking at the Republican convention tonight. One man was killed. Another two are critically injured. The shooter was shot. It is unclear how the Secret Service, clearing the site, which was a large field, where only this building overlooked it, overlooked this building, even as spectators were pointing to him climbing up the side of the building and then on the roof, and saying, “There’s a shooter there.” This is before he opened fire.
JEFF SHARLET: Yes. And I think to connect that to the idea of calling Trump a threat to democracy is the depth of cynicism. And I’ll go and take up Senator Vance’s challenge, too. Trump is fascist authoritarian. That’s a threat he poses. Naming that doesn’t call for violence. It calls for a vibrant democratic response.
And I think, in some ways, what’s dismaying is this kind of tit-for-tat. Was the gunman a Republican, or was he motivated by some delusional version of what he imagined were left ideas? The clear division line here for that gunman, for that kind of action, is between violence and democracy. An assassin is anti-democracy. He is pro-violence.
And Trump is speaking as a candidate for a pro-violent movement that speaks explicitly and frequently and openly — and I didn’t go to Butler, but I’ve been to plenty of Trump rallies, and the invocation of violence is a constant drumbeat there. So, the depth of the cynicism of the idea that defending democracy is somehow calling for violence is kind of a new low for the Trump campaign, and that’s saying something.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play for you, Jeff, a recent comment by North Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who’s running to be governor and is planning to speak this week here at the Republican National Convention. This is Robinson speaking at a church in North Carolina last month.
LT. GOV. MARK ROBINSON: There was a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield. And guess what we did to it. We killed it! We didn’t quibble about it. We didn’t argue about it. We didn’t fight about it. We killed it! … Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful. Too bad! … Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing. It’s time for somebody to say it.
AMY GOODMAN: “Some folks need killing,” Jeff Sharlet. Robinson is expected to be speaking here at the Republican National Convention.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, I was thinking about him this weekend. I was thinking about Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana, recently elevated by Mike Johnson to the Armed Services Committee despite the fact that last year he called for, basically, full-on militia resistance to the Biden administration. I was thinking about the megachurches that I encountered traveling in the country for The Undertow, that are forming militias, that actually are forming militias, that are armed. I was thinking about a church in Omaha, Nebraska, led by a prominent religious backer of Trump, where I was escorted out at gunpoint for asking questions.
So, I don’t like to do the thing like, “You did it first.” Instead, I think what we need to look at and sort of say is that the Trump campaign and this kind of authoritarianism is driven by not just the use of violence, not just the invocation of violence, but a kind of reverence for violence, a redemption through violence. You look at Project 2025, which we’ve all heard about now, and I think one of the things that hasn’t been talked about enough is it begins with four pillars, the principles that they’re moving forward. Number one is protect the children, language that they’re taking directly almost from QAnon. The idea, it’s an invocation of innocence. And again and again at Trump rallies, in Trump’s rhetoric, you hear the idea of their innocence, which therefore justifies any violence in response. Calling that dangerous is not an incitement to violence. It’s an incitement to build a vibrant democratic culture that can push back against that nightmare dream.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you raised the Project 2025. And not everyone may know what it is, this 922-page blueprint, written by the Heritage Foundation, for radically reshaping the federal government along what critics describe as authoritarian and Christian nationalist lines, the document proposing attacking unions, climate action, universal healthcare, abortion access and more. Now, in recent weeks, Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even though many of his advisers helped write it. He wrote on social media, quote, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” However, in 2022, Trump openly praised the Heritage Foundation’s work.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, the denial — Trump’s attempt to distance himself is just silly. But, on the other hand, I also want us to look at it as kind of media bait, because then we’re going to spend a lot of time —
AMY GOODMAN: I want to — Jeff, it’s too important to hear, since Trump is so frequently now denying he knows anything about Project 2025. Going back to 2022, let’s play Trump.
DONALD TRUMP: Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage to lay the groundwork, and Heritage does such an incredible job at that. … This is a great group. And they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for what exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming. That’s coming.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was in 2022. It came. The Project 2025 is out. And even as we broadcast today in Milwaukee, one of the events that’s being held is by the Heritage Foundation. So, if you could talk further about that and compare that 922-page document to the much shorter, less than 20-page Republican platform that has just been put out?
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that Trump’s denials in saying, “I don’t have nothing to do with this document,” that several dozen of his senior former aides have put together, is absurd and silly. But on the other hand, we also don’t have to doubt that Trump is telling the truth in only one regard: He did not read a 900-page document. The document for Trump and the strongman authoritarianism, the document serves Trump; he doesn’t serve the document. And I think that’s what he’s saying. That’s the message his people are getting.
And he’s even able to say some of it he finds ridiculous. One of the things that’s been called attention to is the document calls for banning pornography. Trump’s not going to ban pornography. He has Amber Rose, the founder of OnlyFans, as a speaker at the rally. He’s going to be introduced by Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting organization. Blood and sex is a part of the rally, right?
But if you look closer at Project 2025 and the way that document works and the way it creates a blueprint not for just his action but for what we think of, the thousands of little Trumps that trickle down from the top all through the administration, starting with the replacement of the civil service, which is one of the things that it outlines — you look at the banning of pornography. They’re defining pornography as transgender ideology. So, oh, this is an attack on trans people. They’re defining it as librarians who distribute pornography, librarians who distribute regular books, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Gender Queer. Suddenly those people are subject to criminal prosecution. Now we see the project, and we see how the project aligns with the Trumpist movement.
But you raised the RNC, the Republican platform, 16 pages, which is very, very short. These platforms are usually long, verbose documents, and they’re sort of stuffed with every interest group of the party, and they don’t really mean too much. Trump’s actually means something. Trump actually wrote some of it himself. You can tell because of the all caps. And you can tell because of the language, which distills that 900 pages of the Project 2025 to a very angry and weirdly exuberant vision of vengeance, of pushing back and, very clearly, of Christian nationalism. It talks about religious freedom and defines it as a fight against persecution of American Christians. That’s the vision. In fact, it promises — the 16-page document promises to set up a special organization to save Christians in America. And if you’re saving Christians, by far the dominant group, you need an enemy. You need somebody to save them from. And that’s where we get into the fascist imagination of the enemy within.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Sharlet, we just have a minute. Can you talk about — and we’ve been talking about Reagan in today’s — we’ve been doing an expanded two one-hour shows — edition, talking about the fact that, going back to 1981 — right? — there was an attempted assassination of him. But when you look at the Heritage Foundation and what it’s been doing in presenting hundreds of pages of a kind of blueprint for an administration, they went back to the Reagan administration. Is that right?
JEFF SHARLET: The Heritage Foundation, this major right-wing think tank, really made its bones in Washington by producing a similar document for Reagan in 1980. And so, Project 2025 isn’t without precedent, but what it is is not so much a merger of Reaganism and Trumpism, but sort of the — it’s Trumpism fully absorbing Reaganism, tucking it in to the side, pushing — you know, burying it under the kind of the Trumpish concerns of vengeance, of a kind of a purified nation. And this is not to defend that Reagan mandate, which was a kind of real nightmare vision of America, as well. But that kind of final consolidation of the Republican Party into the Trump party is what this document signifies.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, we want to thank you for being with us, journalist, author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. His latest book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
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