One Nation, Under Fist

Trump's violent new parable

I published the essay below the Monday after the assassination attempt. That evening, the party of Trump closed the opening night of its convention in emulation of Trump, thousands of fists raised high. Television networks, already anticipating Trump’s coming victory, were pivoting toward a kind of acquiescence. The crowd, reported one correspondent, was presenting a “unified front” against violence. “Fight, fight, fight,” chanted the unified front, fully freed at last from words and their tired old meanings. This felt new to them. On stage, one-time Trump critic Amber Rose, a soft porn model with 24 million Instagram followers, explained her conversion: “I’m a mother.” The names of her two sons, “Bash” and “Slash,” are tattooed across her forehead. She used to think Trump was a hater. Now she knows it’s “all love.” Bash and Slash. Love and hate. Fight and fist, peace and freedom. Here, then, is the new language of the Trumpocene.

*

I was in the library when it happened. I’d planned to report from Butler, Pennsylvania, had priced out the trip, but on Thursday my plans changed. There but for failures of logistics go I. So I went to the library instead, to work on a very different project, a book about books that never get finished, that remain undone. The utopian possibilities of a story without an ending. One name for such a story—only one of its many names—is democracy.

The undone stories I was writing about when the shooting happened were those of two mid-century Eastern European writers Bruno Schulz—shot to death by one Nazi as a revenge on another Nazi, who’d taken Schulz as a personal slave—and Isaac Babel, shot to death by one of Stalin’s firing squads, after falling out of favor for, in a sense, refusing to acknowledge Stalinism as the final word.

I’d been checking in on Butler, Pennsylvania throughout the day. “Medical emergencies left and right at the Trump rally,” declared a reporter on scene, “calls of ‘medic, medic, medic’ among the crowd.” And that was before the shooting. Just the heat. Just quickening incineration of our world. I congratulated myself on not being there.

In the library, at a desk in the Russian literature section, I wrote the ending of my chapter: “The men in uniforms order him into the car. It is time to go. He knows he is vanishing. His books will soon be pulled from library shelves. His image will be scratched out of photographs. His name will blotted out, unspoken, undone, as if he had never been. She—Antonina—knows he soon will not. Be, that is. Have ever been. At which point, he says to her the words I’ll find 85 years later: Words too good, for the sake of this book, to be true. Too bland and thus too terrible to not be: ‘They didn’t let me finish.’”

An alert on my phone, from TruthSocial, Trump’s ersatz social: Did it say "shooting”? It may have been too soon. Did it say “fist”? Not yet. But something was happening. I clicked: the moment just past, replaying, the crackle, the hand, the blood. I called home. “I think Trump just got shot,” I said. What? my wife said. “THEY SHOT TRUMP,” I said.

From another desk, a student: “Ssshh! I’m working!”

At my desk, hearing myself, not the fact of the shooting but my inadvertent attribution: they. “They shot Trump.” At the time, nobody knew who was shooting. Later, of course, we learned, that it was that boogeyman archetype of titillated American nightmare, a “lone gunman.” A term haunted by a hundred Westerns, Shane, High Noon, Pale Rider. An Oswald, a Hinckley, and now a Crooks.

“Why not shoot a president?” asks English Bob, another lone gunman—his specialty being picking off Chinese strikers for the railroad—in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, Unforgiven. Trump, of course, is not a president, but a former one. In the minds of the believers, though, he was something else all together before Saturday: anointed. And now, in the minds of the believers—and even in Trump’s own cunning brain, if rumors are to be given credence—anointed by blood. English Bob, contemptuous of the assassin Charles Guiteau, who, as the movie opens, has just shot President James Garfield—another case of a Republican shooting a Republican—contrasts what he views as the insignificance of a democratic leader compared to a royal one: “Now, if you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen, your hands would shake, as though palsied…. You would stand—how should I put it—in awe.”

Consider Trump v. United States, the powers of a king now granted to the presidency, in anticipation of Trump’s return. Consider the sermons preached in Christian nationalist churches across the country on Sunday, declaring Trump spared by God for a higher purpose. Consider the widespread contemplation of the millimeters between life and death for Trump on Saturday, the public pondering of a breeze that might have ever so slightly altered the bullet’s course, or a tremor that might have troubled the assassin’s hand.

“It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” Trump “truthed,” and—

Well. Fuck me. Just as I was writing that, I thought it best to fact check myself. So I went to Trump’s Truth page, where I learned moments after the fact what will already be “old news” by the time I hit publish on this essay. Case dismissed. The documents case against Trump. The case for democracy.

I’m writing this in the Dartmouth College library, again, only now I’m in its basement, to which I came to write in the company of a particular mural, José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of Civilizations, completed in 1934. It spans the building; here is a detail, the view from my computer.

Trump, meanwhile, says he’s found God. Or, not found, exactly, since saying as much would mean acknowledging how little the divine had ever meant to him, beyond its utility as his handmaid. But now, he says, he’s really feeling it. He called a rightwing reporter to tell her he’d thrown out his convention speech, a “humdinger,” he said, and was going to replace it with “unity.” In this effort he is already being supported across the networks, unified in their commitment to “dialing down” the “rhetoric,” reaching back to the rightwing fantasia Trumpism replaced, Reaganism, for an imagination of one nation, under God. Even some of Trump’s critics stand in—how should I put it—awe, over the images from the shooting, that fist in the air. “Definitive proof of life,” declared a liberal writer for The New Yorker. “He is looking out far beyond what the camera can take in—at the public, at the future—and he is defiant.” Another liberal, at The Atlantic, declared the image “legendary”: “The man. The blood. The flag. The fist.”

The fist, indeed. It was the fist that came down this morning as I wrote this, wiping away the strongest, clearest case against Trump. Nobody but fools had any longer harbored hope that Judge Aileen Cannon would permit a fair trial, but this dismissal is something different, indeed. In practical terms, it was unnecessary. Judge Cannon had already delayed the case long enough for Trump to dismiss it himself upon his return to power. The latter seemed likely, and the former would then be certain. In which case, this dismissal doesn’t change the outcome. But we are no longer in the land of process and outcome. Now it’s legend-time. The fist: legendary. The dismissal: epic. Dude.

I think of an undecided voter—or rather, a non-voter, a woman who hadn’t voted in 28 years, since she’d pulled a lever for Bill Clinton—who told a reporter that after “the fist” she was inspired to return to what Biden, the night after the shooting, would accidentally call the “battle box”: “It’s Trump,” she told the reporter. “I look at him and I feel proud.” Cut the quote there, and it’s the Lee Greenwood “Proud to be an American” anthem that walks Trump onto the stage at his rallies. But this patriot had more to say: “He’s like: ‘Screw you. I can’t be stopped. I still have another ear.’”

Screw you. I can’t be stopped. Get this woman—she works at Dollar General—a new job as a Trump speechwriter. What mustn’t be said anymore, though, is that Trump is a threat to democracy. That, Senator J.D. Vance informs us, “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” MSNBC, known by Trumpers as MSNDC for what they see , correctly, as its Democratic lean, was persuaded; on Monday morning they pulled the pro-Biden Morning Joe off the air, lest a host or a guest “make an inappropriate comment.” Insufficiently unified.

Naming Trump a threat to democracy is not violent rhetoric. Even if one disagrees with the assessment, it remains firmly within the realm of opinion rooted in evidence, Trump statements about “terminating” the Constitution or being a dictator on “day one,” Trump actions such as pressing his vice-president to break the law and the Georgia secretary of state to “find” just the right amount of extra votes needed for him to win.

Then there’s Biden’s comment, in a call with donors, that it’s time to put a “bullseye” on Trump, or that he’ll “beat him like a drum.” Those are violent metaphors; they’re also very obviously metaphors. Clumsy ones, reflective of the ways in which violence and machismo suffuse American English, much as we still speak of cancer in terms of war decades after Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor showed us how such dull language obscures rather than reveals suffering and its possible solutions.

The distinction between violence within the rhetoric of liberalism and Trumpism is this: Democrats employ clunky metaphors meant to suggest an intensity of focus; Trumpism traffics in bloody parable. I’ve been thinking of one Trump used at the rallies I reported in 2016. “There’s a story I tell,” he’d say. “This is when we were strong.” Then he’d proceed with a fully fictional account he called “history,” set in 1919, as a U.S. general fights Muslim rebels in the Philippines:

They catch fifty terrorists. . . . Today we read ’em their rights, take care of ’em, ba ba [the audience boos], we feed them the best food, make sure they have television, we give ’em areas to pray, it’s a wonderful thing. We’re wonderful people. We’re wonderful, wonderful, stupid, stupid people [laughter]. So General Pershing, tough, tough guy . . . fifty terrorists . . . what happens is he lines ’em up to be shot. [A man shouts, “Yeah!”] Lines people up to be shot. . . . And as you know, swine, pig, all of that is a big problem for them. Big problem. He took two pigs, they chopped them open. [Trump chops his hand.] Took the bullets that were going to go and shoot these men. [Holds up an imaginary bullet pinched between thumb and finger.] Took the bullets. The fifty bullets. Dropped them in the pigs, swished them around [swishes] so there’s blood all over those bullets. [Cheering.] Had his men, instructed his men [voice rising] to put the bullets into the rifles [thumps lectern]. They put the bullets into the rifles and they shot [he shouts the word; another man shouts, “Yeah!”] forty-nine men.

He tells it again, puts the imaginary bullets into an imaginary rifle and shoots his imagined forty-nine Muslims. “Boom.” He leans forward, squints, and runs his words together: “a-pig-infested-bullet-in-each-one.” A woman shouts, “Yeah!” Then, Trump says, they dumped the bodies into a mass grave—he waves his hand across the podium, sweeping the corpses in—and threw the gutted pigs on top of them. They took the final bullet—he holds it up again—and they gave it to the last man. “And they said, ‘Here, take this bullet’ ”—he mimes handing it over—“ ‘go back to your people’ ”—he jabs a finger at the last man’s “people,” and yet another man shouts, “Yeah!”—“ ‘and explain what we just did!’ ”

This is not a metaphor, it’s a parable, a story intended to express a deeper truth, a religious truth of what is and what should be. Such are the tales Trump tells. But just as often they’re stories of victimization; persecution, of “bad hombres” who climb through open windows at night, of “innocent” wives disturbed from their sleep. Often they are graphic, featuring machetes and baseball bats, disembowelments and decapitations. They are not metaphors; Trump presents them as “facts,” true stories of the violence perpetrated against “innocent” Americans. How does one answer such violence? With even greater force. With “retribution.” “Military tribunals.” “Execution.”

Project 2025 opens with four “pillars,” its principles. Number one is “protect our children.” What would you be willing to do to protect our children? In Butler, Pennsylvania, a man died protecting his, a nobility that nearly anyone can imagine. But what if, instead of throwing your body between the bullet and your child, you knew the names of the killers? What if you could preemptively save the children? Would not the violence that followed be a form of virtue?

Such is the bloody imagination.

Much has been made of whether the shooter’s politics were left or right. The more critical dividing line, here, though, is between violence and democracy. We may never know which political party the shooter, at the time of his crime, actually favored, but we can be certain of how he felt about democracy: He was against it. He was pro-violence and anti-democracy. And he was not alone. Those who trend the hashtag "#onejob, as in the shooter had only one, are—mostly out of anxiety, out of the fear that tricks you into thinking violence is funny—speaking against democracy. But so, too, are those who now croon “unity,” the cynics like Senator Vance, vying for a seat on the ticket, and the fools, like the MSNBC executives censoring their own programming in the vain hope that a Trump restored to power won’t do so.

Those who claim calling Trump a threat to democracy is violent rhetoric are doing a kind of rhetorical violence to democracy, screeching it to a halt, making of an ever-moving idea a static one, writing a banal and brutal ending onto a story that’s meant to keep going. The historian David Waldstreicher comments that for fascism and its enablers, “democracy is not a process, it’s just another word for the nation”—and the fist, under which it trembles.