Yesterday was unprecedented for more than reason. So now what?
When I woke up yesterday morning I immediately saw the news about the politically motivated shooting of two Democratic Party elected officials in Minnesota. In the moment that it took me to wrap my head around the nature of the shooting, I remembered “Oh yeah, it’s June 14th.”
We still don’t have 100% of the story, but it sure looks like this was a Trump supporters’ violent attempt at countering the millions of peaceful protesters that were scheduled to take to the streets against Trump later in the day. And this of course came just days after the Trump regime tackled a United States Senator to the ground just for kicks.
I don’t yet fully understand what any of this means or where this goes next, and neither do any of you. We’re in truly uncharted territory, even for the Trump era. We’ve seen shameful politically motivated violence from Trump supporters before. We’ve seen massive peaceful protests against Trump before. But this all feels different, more uncertain. Trump is, after all, unhinged enough to have sat there half asleep at a military parade while a large chunk of the country took to the streets to make clear how unwanted he is.
This all feels very fluid right now. It’s possible that yet another shoe will have dropped in the brief time between when I’m writing this and when you read it. It’s equally possible that nothing will come of all of this, and by Monday we’ll be back to the status quo – whatever that’s supposed to look like these days.
In any case, we did good yesterday. We managed to generate massive headlines and coverage about how hated Trump is and how unpopular his attacks on immigrants are – and we managed to do it without giving the media an excuse to pretend it was some display of violence on our part. As usual, the violence came from the other side. Some people still believe in democracy, it seems, and some never did.
