You might have missed it, but someone else decided to fire a hail of bullets at the White House. Freddy Gray writes in The Spectator on America’s strange shrugging reaction:
Another weekend, another failed and frankly pathetic attempt to kill the President of the United States. On February 22, a Sunday, Secret Service shot dead an armed 21-year-old male called Austin Tucker Martin, who had entered the Mar-a-Lago complex, although Donald Trump wasn’t there at the time.
On the Saturday night of April 25, the 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried and failed to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington DC. And we all saw what happened there.
Earlier this month, in an incident the news cycle quickly moved past, Secret Service shot an armed individual at the National Mall.
And then yesterday it was the turn of 21-year-old Nasire Best. (One can’t help thinking of Trump’s famous line about immigration: “They’re not sending their best.”)
Gray points out that even the president seems to have gotten used to these events and issues blandly similar responses to them. He doesn’t quite diagnose it. Obviously in some ways, one attempt inspires copycats. But the copycats inspire less and less public outrage. It’s hard to summon the same level of anger, especially as these assailants haven’t come as close to their target as Thomas Crooks did in Pennsylvania.
I worry that the left and center-left have developed a distorted reflex in which the rule of their partisan enemies is seen as entirely illegitimate, and so therefore it licenses extra-legal action. There is no longer a case where “the elected government” and its institutions are seen almost universally as “ours” and needful of defense in any circumstance. In the case of legislators, this mostly means contemplating Constitution-rending measures like Court-packing or nullification. In the more addled, it means contemplating the direct action of violence itself.