America’s Resilience Shines Through Tragedy: Explaining the Assassination Attempt for Kids and Other Perspectives
Journalist: Amid Horror, America’s Heart Shines
Moments after he’s shot, “Trump rises in sync with the agents, his face now smeared in blood,” recalls Salena Zito at RealClearPolitics.
“I hear him say, ‘Fight. Fight. Fight.’ He raises his fist in the air, pumping, it seems to me, at least twice,” and “I hear the crowd chanting ‘USA! USA!’ ”
The audience came “believing they were doing their part in something bigger than themselves,” in support of Trump because “he communicates that they matter and that they are seen.”
The rally was “the heart of America,” which “was pierced, but not shattered.”
Trump’s raised fist “echoed Ronald Reagan’s gesture after he was shot in 1981 — leaning out the window and waving to let people know that we will recover from this.”
Dad: Explaining Assassination Bid to Kids
News of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump “came during dinner,” recounts The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey, and he couldn’t “resist” flipping on the TV.
“Our two youngest children, 11 and 7, joined me” — their “emotional antennae picking up immediately the strange seriousness of what we were watching.”
The 7-year-old’s questions were “hard to answer”: Why did they want to shoot Trump? Why is everybody screaming and ducking down
What does it mean that the Secret Service’s job is to “take a bullet, if necessary”?
“I struggled to explain,” but “imagine how much harder it would have been to explain” that a former president “had been killed. I thank God that I didn’t have to. I pray I never do.”
Liberal: Young Voters Leaning Right
“A mounting number of polls suggest that young voters are shedding their Democratic attachments,” reports Daniel Cox at The Liberal Patriot.
Pew finds that 47% of young voters “lean towards or identify as Republicans,” while 46% “identify as Democrats”; that jumps to “over six in ten” GOP-IDers among young whites.
“Biden is a big reason why”; “since the 2020 election” his youth support has utterly “collapsed.”
There’s “little evidence that the GOP has rehabilitated its image with young voters.”
It seems to be “benefiting more from broad pessimism about the country’s trajectory.”
Still, “if the Republican Party remains competitive with young voters it’s difficult to see any Democrat prevailing in November.”
GOP watch: Vivek’s ‘National Libertarianism’
Reason’s Stephanie Slade chats with Vivek Ramaswamy, who says: “The most important debate for the country to have is the intra–Republican Party and even intra–America First debate between the national protectionist and national libertarian wings.”
For one, he argues, “if we were really serious about decoupling from China in those critical sectors, that actually means more, not less, trade with allies like Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam” — since “there’s no way to actually decouple from China in those areas that are critical for U.S. security interests, at least for the foreseeable future, without near-shoring those supply chains to allies.”
Whereas: “To protect American manufacturers from the effects foreign competition,” you’ll have “to extend the time period it’s going to take to actually decouple from China.”
From the right: The Return of 1968?
“The parallels between 2024 and 1968 have seemed eerie,” notes Eli Lake at The Free Press; then on Saturday “an assassin’s bullet came a hair’s breadth away from killing the Republican nominee and front-runner in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump.”
Since “radicals are already planning street disruptions in Chicago,” as at the ’68 Dem convention, “the political implications are clear. A violent convention next month that reminds Americans of the horrors of 1968 will seal the fate of a damaged Democratic presidential campaign.”
After 1968, “student radicals formed the Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist organization.”
If “Trump wins a second term in November, will the already enraged fringe of the American left go quiet? Or will they seek the bullet over the ballot as they did more than half a century ago?”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
