We need to talk about the violent hatred for Donald Trump
It strikes me that the boiling hatred for Trump, which has now expressed itself in two dreadful, almost murderous events, speaks to a culture whose roots are deeper than we know, and more difficult to discern than we would like. It’s a culture of simmering intolerance, a culture of grievance, a culture where one expresses one’s angst less through the old civilised norms of discussion and disagreement than through the wail of implacable rage and the instinct to destroy that which offends you. Is it possible the attempted assassinations of Trump are not really ideological acts, like the slaying of MLK or RFK, but rather are the militant wing of our amorphous cancel culture? An apocalyptic expression of something that is now almost mundane: high society’s burning hostility to that which deviates from the narrative of correct-think? Perhaps the unprecedented double attempt on the life of a presidential candidate feels both alien and familiar because it is shocking but also… not shocking. Right?