It has now been about 48 hours since Thomas Matthew Crooks, a socially isolated 20-year-old, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, lightly injuring the former president, and fatally wounding an attendee at his rally.
A lot has already been said: about the danger of an escalatory spiral that will take this country ever closer to the brink, for example, and about the need to abjure all forms of political violence. A lot, for now, remains in the realm of speculation: the effect that this event – and Trump’s defiant reaction to it – may have on the upcoming election and, more pressingly, how someone like Crooks could have come within a literal inch of killing the most famous and controversial man in America. But one important question has, in the avalanche of media commentary about the assassination attempt, so far been mostly ignored.
It is in moments of tragedy or upheaval that the true state of a nation is often revealed.
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