Regardless of whether Trump reforms himself, getting him out of office won’t solve the troubles he has helped to reveal and foment
his tweets had crossed the line, let alone the chant. Temporarily thrown, Trump backpedaled and disavowed the sentiment, but then he began to launch attacks on the city of Baltimore and its African American congressman,even taunting Cummings when Cummings’s house was burglarized. Then came the mass shootings.
To judge by some of his recent statements and tweets, Donald Trump is discomfited. Even before this weekend, he had engaged in what appeared to be an effort to compensate for his provocations by—ridiculously—championing the cause of the rapperwho had been arrested in Sweden on suspicion of assault.
Unfortunately, regardless of whether Trump reforms himself, getting him out of office won’t solve the troubles he has helped to reveal and foment. In an angry and atomized country of 329 million, it has become easier than ever to set off crazy people. Well before Donald Trump came to office, a growing number of angry subcultures already appeared to be erupting in violence at their fringes.
The point isn’t that all actors or sins are equal or that Trump is no worse than his predecessors in his provocations. Rather, it’s that in a hurting country increasingly divided along political, religious, racial, and economic lines, all public figures will have to recognize that the power of anger, normally so crucial as a political motivator and bonding agent, seems to be carrying with it a growing expense of blood. We can talk about greater restrictions on gun sales, and we need those.
The solution cannot be to look away from inequity or to give a pass to those we perceive as malefactors. Justice usually requires a fight. But in a time of untreated mental illness, growing social alienation, and ever more deaths of despair, we may have to find a new balance between playing to people’s enmities and playing to their hopes, even as we recognize that politics means doing both.
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