Ask A Genius 1010: The Shooting Against Trump, Wishing Trump a Speedy Recovery

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/14

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There was considerable drama at the rally for Trump. A shooting occurred, with multiple shots fired, resulting in a couple of fatalities, including the shooter. 

Rick Rosner: There are two people dead. I attended my wife’s cousin’s birthday party and missed a couple of hours of news. The last update I saw indicated there were two people in critical condition: one audience member was deceased, and the shooter was also deceased.

Jacobsen: Yes, that aligns with what I said and your inquiries. If you check Twitter, they might remove it, but I sent you the links.

Rosner: You sent many pictures, including one of the deceased shooters.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Yes, shot by a Secret Service sniper, in the head, if that is confirmed to be the case. It appears a police sniper shot him in the head. You sent me six tweets, and a few of them seem inaccurate. However, the tweet about the deceased shooter seems accurate at this point. 

Jacobsen: What was your initial reaction to the news?

Rosner: The first thing I tweeted was wishing Trump a speedy recovery. On the bright side, he told fewer lies at this rally than ever. The joke was that the rally concluded after seven minutes. I expect nothing less. 

Jacobsen: What was your family’s reaction?

Rosner: They wanted to know the implications. What happened? Who did it? What does this mean for the election? Many people are drawing parallels between this incident and Teddy Roosevelt’s experience in 1912. Roosevelt served nearly two full terms as president, then sat out an election and attempted a comeback in 2012 as a third-party candidate. He was about to give a lengthy speech when someone stepped out of the crowd and shot him in the chest with a pistol. I am unsure if I have all the facts correct, but something slowed the bullet’s trajectory.

It may have been a folded copy of his speech, which was many pages long. Thus, the bullet penetrated him but not very deeply. I do not believe it passed his ribs. According to one tweet, someone shouted “fake,” but I have not seen that substantiated. Roosevelt opened his shirt to show the blood, to prove he had been shot, if that part is true.

What is verified is that Roosevelt refused immediate medical attention and proceeded to give the speech, speaking for more than an hour before being taken to the hospital. People are comparing Trump to Teddy Roosevelt because Trump also reappeared and raised his fist, and there is a now-famous photo of his face with a couple of trickles of blood down the side, his fist raised, surrounded by Secret Service with an American flag in the background. He is shouting, “Fight.” Nobody was going to let Trump continue his rally speech.

Or he does not give speeches in the traditional sense. He speaks for extended periods, which is not the modern Secret Service protocol. Moreover, as you mentioned, one person is dead, and two are critically wounded in the audience. Many people are tweeting that he has won the election with his defiant fist pump. 

Jacobsen: But my question is, whose mind is this going to change? Are there independent voters who will be swayed by him raising his fist? 

Rosner: It may turn out, according to something my wife saw, that he was not hit by a bullet but by shrapnel from the bullet passing through the teleprompter screen. 

Jacobsen: Does that make a difference? 

Rosner: The pertinent point is that Teddy Roosevelt went on to lose his election, so this does not guarantee Trump a victory. We will see if he gets a bump in the polls in a week or so. 

Jacobsen: What do you think is most likely?

Rosner: He might receive a temporary 1 or 2 percent bump. The press’s attention has shifted slightly from Biden and his gaffes to everything in Project 2025, a 940-page document of a conservative wish list that Trump has disavowed. He claims he is unfamiliar with it, though many people working for Trump were involved in Project 2025. So, if anybody believes that Trump is not associated with Project 2025, nobody who is not a staunch Trump supporter believes that he will not try to implement as much of it as he can.

Trump supporters believe that, too. He is better positioned to implement it because conservatives note that much of this plan has existed since 2017. Why didn’t he implement it before? He did not have the Supreme Court, which he has now. He did not have the Supreme Court ruling that gave him more power. He also had control of the House and Senate, but just barely. And it will probably be barely this time around as well. What else do we need to say about this? 

Jacobsen: Firstly, violence is not the answer. Everyone is unified on that front.

Rosner: Yes, violence is not the answer. In terms of outcomes, if his wound had been more serious, and he had to withdraw, it would allow the Republicans to replace him with a candidate who might attract more independents, like Nikki Haley. MAGA supporters might, in their wrath, show up to vote for her anyway, even if they do not prefer her over Trump. Thus, Trump being forced to withdraw might benefit the Republicans. What was the shooter’s level of training? Did he have a chance other than randomly to hit Trump?

He was a good enough shooter to hit the teleprompter. We will wait to see and get more information. Many tweets suggest that the shooter is a registered Republican. We will find out what his motivation was. I deplore the violence. The only way for something like this to benefit the Democrats would be if the damage to Trump were survivable, but it would lead to questions about whether it affected his cognitive abilities. If he decides to continue to run despite having a skull fracture, that scenario, while undesirable, would be the only way if one were to game it out, which perhaps should not be done because political violence is deplorable.

That would be the only way it might help prevent Republicans from retaking the presidency. Your thoughts?

Jacobsen: It mirrors the principle around censorship of controversial content or a controversial joke. It backfires outside of absolute contexts like a theocracy or a totalitarian secular government. 

Rosner: This is known as the Streisand effect on Twitter and many other places.

Jacobsen: Is this named after Barbara Streisand?

Rosner: Yes, because someone posted an aerial photo of her house along the Malibu coast, and she did not like people knowing what her house looked like, so she sued over it. The lawsuit led to so much more coverage that far more people knew what her house looked like because of the lawsuit than if she had just let it go.

It was like an aerial survey of the Malibu coast, and her house was included, not specifically targeted. Similarly, Google Street View shows millions of houses, and celebrities don’t usually sue Google for showing their houses. 

The universal condemnation of the violence seems unnecessary because some people desire a race war or a civil war. However, the vast majority of responses across the political spectrum have condemned the violence and any future violence. This aligns with the Streisand effect. 

Jacobsen: There was another point I wanted to bring up about it, but I need a moment to recall. Yes! The idea that censorship often backfires. John Stuart Mill articulated a principle around freedom of expression. Whether viewed from an international rights perspective as freedom of expression or the American perspective as free speech in the First Amendment, Mill’s idea is that attempting to censor someone permanently or temporarily deepens the discourse by assuming one’s infallibility.

Mill argued that censoring another person assumes that one’s knowledge is infallible, deprives others of hearing different perspectives, and prevents self-correction. Therefore, allowing all viewpoints is crucial, as no one possesses absolute knowledge. Violence, as in the shooting, is a last resort.

Rosner: Mill’s writings from the late 18th century are relevant today. It would be interesting to see his thoughts on the current situation. We do not yet know why the shooter targeted Trump. He is probably a lunatic, but we do not know the specifics of his lunacy. It could be as simple as seeking fame, though that seems unlikely. It could be that he has been influenced by conspiracy theories suggesting that some shadowy force has captured Trump and is not a true fighter of the deep state.

That is possible. When dealing with a conspiracy theorist or someone who is otherwise mentally unbalanced, the situation differs from what Mill discussed, which concerns whether reasonable people should condone extreme measures to silence someone, whether through imprisonment or political violence.

Jacobsen: To quote Mill, “To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that the opinion is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

Rosner: I doubt the shooter had such thoughts. He likely did not aim to silence Trump’s discourse out of a belief in its incorrectness. 

Jacobsen: There were people on Twitter expressing regret that the bullet did not go two inches to the other side and stop Trump.

Rosner: But those individuals are reprehensible. One might have private thoughts about the outcome of such violence, but expressing them publicly is unacceptable.

Jacobsen: Yes, wishing Trump a speedy recovery is the right stance, as you did in at least two tweets.

Rosner: I wish, I’m hoping, but I don’t believe it. There is a segment of people on Twitter who continually claim that Trump is losing his mind. His father did die of Alzheimer’s, which is true. However, his father was in his nineties, about 15 years older than Trump, and he didn’t exhibit obvious symptoms of Alzheimer’s until much later in life, much older than Trump is now. So, while I would hope that Trump’s mental decline is apparent and concerning, I don’t believe it. He’s a bullshitter, albeit a lazy one.

Beyond that, I don’t think you can definitively claim he’s losing his mind. That doesn’t have anything to do with the violence against him. In general terms, I wish Trump would reveal himself more as the horrible person he is. He revealshimself a lot, but his followers are never persuaded.

There’s a Stephen King novel called “The Dead Zone” that was made into a movie where Martin Sheen plays a character, and Christopher Walken, who comes out of a coma with the ability to tell the future if he touches someone or something, shakes hands or interacts with Martin Sheen’s character. He sees that when this guy becomes president, he will cause a nuclear holocaust. He’s generally a bad guy, but that’s the worst thing about him. Christopher Walken’s character is sufficiently concerned that he becomes a sniper and takes a shot at Martin Sheen but misses. The good news is that when hearing the shots, Martin Sheen picks up a baby and uses it as a human shield. This act is enough to show the nation that he’s a bad guy and doesn’t get elected. Christopher Walken, in his dying moments, because the Secret Service shoots him, knows that he’s done his job and changed the future.

Given a situation like this, one could hope that Trump would reveal himself to be enough of a villain to lose some votes. But that’s a foolish wish because it’s an unlikely event. Firstly, there were no babies handy, and secondly, I don’t think even Trump would use a baby as a human shield. What they did get out of it is a great photo of him defiantly and bloodily holding his hand up against the American flag, which won’t cost him votes and might gain him a few tens of thousands of votes.

Jacobsen: What other important points can we discuss before we conclude?

Rosner: Again, what else can we discuss on this topic before we wrap up for today? I’ve got cottonmouth. One more thing to note is that it’s only been about five hours since it happened, so there’s still a lot we still need to learn. There’s a lot that ultimately won’t matter. I guess it’s better for the Democrats if this guy turns out to be a Republican-crazy person instead of a Democratic-crazy person. Does it change that many people’s votes? Maybe because people like Lauren Boebert, the Congresswoman from Colorado, are already blaming the Democrats. Scott Jennings, a CNN commentator, is also blaming the Democrats. So, even if this guy turns out to be a Republican, many right-wing pundits will blame Biden and the Democrats. There’s a congressman named Mike, whose full name I can’t recall, who said Biden needs to be arrested for this. It’s mostly noise. All the minutiae of the would-be assassin’s life may seem gross to discuss regarding electoral implications, but people will discuss it. Does this take some heat off Biden? It may divert attention away from people waiting for him to make his next verbal gaffe. Anything I say about this is as speculative as anyone else’s. We have to wait and see.

Jacobsen: The end?

Rosner: The end.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.