John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and now Trump. America is no stranger to attempted and successful political assassinations, but something feels different about this time. On July 13, former President Donald J. Trump survived an assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, PA, that left one bystander dead and two others seriously injured. The shooter, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, PA, is now dead. While Crooks was a registered Republican, and the FBI has yet to identify a motive, the Republican Party has wasted no time in pinning the assassination attempt on Democrats and the left. In response, Democrats and Biden are putting up little defense, capitulating to the right-wing narrative and issuing vague pronouncements against “charged rhetoric” and “political violence.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins The Marc Steiner Show for a breakdown of how the political ground is shifting beneath our feet—and what it portends for the election.
Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.
Someone tried to assassinate and take out Donald Trump. There have been numerous assassinations and attempted assassinations in our country. I remember a lot of them individually when I was younger, what I felt when John F. Kennedy was gunned down, and when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Robert Kennedy, different times.
And while we’ve always had a divided nation, in many ways, something about this time seems different. The closest I can get to that feeling is the feeling I had when I was a Civil Rights worker in Cambridge, Maryland, Mississippi, and further south. It was terrifying at times. It’s as if that spirit now dominates the entire country, and our divide seems to run deeper than ever.
So let’s take a look at these assassinations — And attempted assassinations —Then and now, with my good friend and colleague, Real News editor Max Alvarez, joining me in studio.
Max?
Maximillian Alvarez: Man, brother, it’s wild to be speaking to you from a very different world than the one that we all inhabited just last week. But as always, it’s an honor and a pleasure to be with you, brother, and to be doing the work that needs to be done.
I know that we are all reeling from the political reality that we were thrust into this past weekend, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, as you said, attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle. He opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, this Saturday, July 13. He did not fatally wound the president, but he did kill one attendee, Corey Comperatore, and he critically wounded two other people who were attending the rally.
Now, I want to really emphasize for folks listening that we are going to be doing everything we can in the coming days and weeks to get y’all the coverage that you need to know how to act in this moment. We are here to use our journalism, our tools, our skills, our resources to get you the information you need to act, and we’re here to provide you with the context and perspectives that will motivate all of us to act with well-informed purpose, conviction, courage, and love, and that’s our real goal.
And so right now, at this very moment, our incredible colleagues Taya Graham and Stephen Janis are literally on the ground in Milwaukee covering the Republican National Convention, where, as we’re recording this on Monday afternoon, July 15, Donald Trump just named J.D. Vance his vice presidential candidate. We’ve got Stephen and Taya on the ground covering the RNC, covering this political scene as it is being reshaped in real time in the wake of Saturday’s failed assassination attempt.
And so I say that to encourage folks to follow Stephen and Taya’s work, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on social media for up-to-date, breaking updates on that coverage, which we’ll be publishing throughout the week.
But as we go further into this terrifying moment, myself, Marc, Stephen, Taya, our other incredible Real News colleagues, we’re going to be doing everything we can to get y’all the coverage, the perspective, the voices, the context that y’all need to navigate this moment and to not be paralyzed by fear and despair, but to be moved to action, which is ultimately our final goal and our real purpose for being here.
And so with all that up front, I just wanted to clarify for folks that this is more of a shorter episode of The Marc Steiner Show, where Marc and I really wanted to share some reflections after this historic weekend on the moment that we are in, the reality that we are in in this country, and to also, as we so often do on Marc’s incredible show, to give folks some deeper historical perspective here.
And that’s what I was really, really looking forward to talking to you about, Marc, even though all of this is incredibly terrifying, depressing, unnerving. I couldn’t help but think about what you were thinking about in this moment and what it must be like to experience all this as someone who has witnessed many instances of political violence in this country in decades past, things that only feel like historical footnotes to my generation. But you lived through the attempted Reagan assassination, the MLK assassination, JFK.
So I was wondering if I could turn the mic back around and start there and ask if you could talk us through like A, what’s been going through your mind these past couple days as you’ve been witnessing what the rest of us have.
But also if you could compare this moment to other moments of high-profile acts of political violence, especially in the United States itself. What was different from what we’re witnessing now compared to what you witnessed when you were a younger man? What was different about you? What was different about the country, and how does it compare to where we are now?
Marc Steiner: The first thing I think about with all this is that we live in an incredibly violent country to start with. We’ve had Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John Kennedy all assassinated, our presidents in the United States who’ve been taken out way before. And those were the 19th century, other than Kennedy.
And we saw Gerald Ford get almost taken out twice. It’s not something new. George Wallace, on the right, was paralyzed. So it’s not a shock.
I remember really well where I was in each one of those times. Not Garfield, McKinley, and Lincoln. I’m not that old, but [both laugh]…
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, you remember where you were when Lincoln got shot?
Marc Steiner: I do. So let me tell you about it [both laugh].
But I remember very vividly when Kennedy was assassinated. I had been expelled from public school and was up going to school in Massachusetts, and the guy who ran the school was an anti-Nazi resistance fighter in World War II, a German guy, Hans Maeder. And I remember one of the guys running down the hall, yelling, Kennedy’s been killed, Kennedy’s been killed.
Then the bell rang, and everybody had to go up to the main house. And Hans shut the school down for 10 days, sent us all home to contemplate what that meant after we all met together and talked about it. We were all stunned and shocked.
I think the one that really hit me the most was when I was living in DC in 1968, and I had just started working for the Poor People’s Campaign, and I already worked for Liberation News Service, which I helped found. And it was when King was assassinated. I remember hearing wailing in the neighborhood, and then the entire city erupted.
So this is not new, but what’s happening here, I think also, is that Trump’s rhetoric is really violent, and he’s pumping it up. Oh, Max, let’s talk a bit about that, because you were just talking about what he, in fact, was saying before this attempt on his life.
Maximillian Alvarez: Right. I just want to really encourage all of our listeners, viewers, readers to proceed with… Let me back up. To be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, we are in an intense, in many ways, unprecedented moment. Like Marc said, political violence is not new in this country, but history never fully repeats itself, and we are fundamentally in a different era, a different age, a different time than we were back in 1968, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as we go on here.
But I think that people need to not be beaten into subservience and beaten out of critical thought at this moment, because obviously that’s what’s going to happen to a lot of folks, and it’s because this is such a fraught moment where everyone’s very worried about saying the wrong thing, feeling the wrong thing, or not even knowing how to interpret their own feelings about this.
The vast, vast, vast majority of, I think, people in this country do not want to live in a country where political violence is normalized. But, of course, plenty of people in this country do, and a lot of them are part of the MAGA movement.
That’s not to say that all Trump supporters are cut from that cloth. I know many Trump supporters who are just as horrified at the thought of political violence as anybody else. I’ve been texting with them all week. My own dad voted for Trump in 2016, and he’s not someone who’s champing at the bit for blood and not calling for that. It’s a big country. There are a lot of people in it, and a lot of people do not want to see this.
But, of course, Donald Trump himself has been cultivating this bloodlust and this thirst for violence for years. And at this moment, when Trump himself is the victim of an attempted assassination, of course, everyone is concerned for his safety, concerned about what it says about the country that we came so close to another assassination of a former president.
But I was very curious, as I was hearing all the media responses about… And even from Joe Biden’s presidential addresses this weekend, talking about how we need to turn the temperature down on the political rhetoric in this country and blaming this kind of violence on rhetoric from the Democratic side, folks from the Republican side saying that, this is what happens when you call Donald Trump a fascist, when you say he’s a threat to democracy, and so really, trying to put the blame on the liberal left and the Democratic Party.
But if you go and listen to the speech that Donald Trump was giving in Pennsylvania this weekend before Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on Trump and the crowd, he was doing exactly the same thing that Trump always does. He was talking about, “Millions and millions of people in this country who don’t belong here.” He was talking about people flooding the country over the border, he even said like from insane asylums. Really continuing to ramp up this rhetoric that “they” have stolen our country, “they” have infested and invaded our country, and we need to steal it back.
He explicitly pointed out Joe Biden as the one, the worst president in American history who let all of these “undocumented” or “illegals” into the country to overrun it. That was seconds before the gunman opened fire. And so it’s absurd to think that this rhetoric that people are saying needs to be tamped down is not, in large part, coming from Donald Trump and his supporters himself.
And so there is a discussion to be had about civil discourse. I’m not so cynical as to think that we don’t all ourselves have some personal responsibility to bear for the level of discourse in this country, but I’m also not so naive as to believe that if we all just start treating each other a bit nicer, all of our problems are going to go away. They’re not.
And Trump and his movement didn’t just come from nowhere. They grew out of, as we’ve covered for years here at The Real News, long, simmering resentments, feelings of loss, humiliation, rage, retribution. Trump knows how to tap into that. He has tapped into it for years for his own political gain.
And now, suddenly, the violence is touching him and his supporters in the most immediate, shocking way possible. We can’t just pretend as if this is all the Democrats’ fault or Trump himself has not played a major role, and that the Republicans will not continue to play a major role in fomenting the very division that they are now asking people to tamp down.
Marc Steiner: I think that we’re in a very dangerous place. As we said before, history doesn’t repeat itself, but in some ways it mimics, and you can also learn from what happened before. And I think that there are two points in history that deserve to be looked at in terms of what we face now given the violence that’s occurring in this country and the violence those periods had as well.
And I’m talking about the end of Reconstruction in America, which unleashed 90 years of abject violence against the Black world in this country, when it was destroyed. When Black political power was growing, and it was literally destroyed, violently destroyed.
And you also have to look, I think in 1933 Germany, when a minority right-wing party took over the country, and I think that, in some ways, we’re facing something as dangerous as that. Not the same, but as dangerous. And I was thinking about what Trump looked like after the attempted assassination, and the look on his face, and the blood on his ear, and what that is doing to excite the people around Trump who want to see him president.
It is so hard because also the left in the United States right now, at least electorally speaking, isn’t very strong. So you’ve got this right-wing demagogue, who is not that bright but extremely shrewd, and has the right people around him, and a neoliberal president who is just fumbling the ball.
And I think we’re at a point where if the right does take over the United States, if this assassination attempt fuels the masses around Trump, we could be in for a really dangerous future.
And, look, I’m not one of these guys who moans and cries about stuff like this and go, oh, woe was me. I’m just looking at what’s happening in our country. I’m seeing the divide. I’m talking to some of my neighbors who are pro-Trump, and I guess think that we have to really be on our toes, that…
You cover, Max, for Real News, you do a lot of incredible coverage of growing union movements in this country. It takes that kind of organizing, that kind of work to stop the right from seizing power. That’s the place we find ourselves in now, and I think —
Maximillian Alvarez: I think —
Marc Steiner: Go ahead. Go ahead.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I just want to, yeah, underscore two parts about that. One, this is why I think the work that we do at The Real News is so politically important, because what we try to do is get to the human faces and voices and stories behind the headlines, behind all the social media avatars and chatter and political sloganeering.
We try to show people to people, and we try to remind people that their neighbors, their co-workers, their fellow parishioners, their fellow community members are just as human as they are, and just as deserving of dignity, and security, and freedom as they are. And I think I will always have optimism in our fellow human beings that that solidarity can always win out if we do the work to find each other on that level.
And I use the example of some of the folks that we’ve gotten close to over the past year and a half by reporting on the tragic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the last election and where the majority of people in town are still in support of Donald Trump, including folks who I now call close friends because I’ve been in their homes, I’ve reported on their lives and the tragic circumstances that they’ve been thrust into ever since this train derailed in their backyard.
I don’t care who they voted for. It’s like if you run up to someone caught in a burning car, are you going to ask them who they voted for before you pull them out kind of thing? That’s what a great journalist, Steve Mellon, on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that’s how he put it to me, and I thought that was a very apt comparison.
But anyway, the reason I bring that up is that I was texting with people that I’ve interviewed in East Palestine about what’s been happening this weekend and about how we were feeling about it, and I think two things that came out of those exchanges is one, this moment is different compared to the ones that you referenced in the past, other high-profile instances of political violence, attempted assassinations, and successful assassinations of major figures, including current and former presidents.
One thing that’s truly different about this is that we are not operating on a shared plane of reality here. And I don’t want to be romantic and say that we always were, but we are operating less on a shared plane of reality than, I think, we ever have been.
And you could see that from the moment the shots rang out. No one saw the same thing. It was like people have been conditioned by the echo chambers that they live in, the media that they watch on their TVs, on their phones, the people that they talk to, the preconceptions they have. Just the questions, the reactions, the conspiracy theories that flowed immediately from this video circulating online. It was just so clear that we didn’t even have a shared base of reality to even talk about what we were going through, and that is an incredibly dangerous place to be.
And what I was texting back and forth with one East Palestine resident was like, imagine if we hadn’t met in person. Imagine if we hadn’t connected on that plane of shared reality from the labor reporting I was doing, from just caring about you guys as a family going through something awful and getting to see that side of you. If I hadn’t seen that side of them, if they hadn’t seen that side of me, the socialist nutjob coming from Baltimore [Steiner laughs] covered in tattoos and piercings, imagine what we would all be thinking of each other right now.
And the fact that we were saying like, look, I love you, I don’t want this to ruin our relationship, but what are you thinking about this? Even just starting from that place gave me a lot of hope that we aren’t as far gone as it can feel right now.
But that means we’ve got a lot of work to do to really reconnect with our fellow workers and to educate one another on who is really at fault for the things that are making our lives harder and who isn’t, and who’s exploiting our anger and fear for their own gain, and who is deliberately trying to pit us against one another so that we don’t work together to find common solutions to our common problems?
And frankly, as we’ve been very open and honest about here at The Real News Network, we do not believe that the political establishments and the people who literally benefit by separating the population into two categories, two parties, liken and convince us that we’re basically a separate species, there’s a sinister force that work there that deliberately pushes us apart, deliberately makes us feel like we are not on a shared plane of reality, let alone a shared plane of humanity.
And, yeah, Trump has been very liable for that. He has been stoking that fire for years. He is not the only one. That’s just the reality of the world that we’re living in.
But the point is is that, yeah, the more alien we appear to each other, the more we let politicians and pundits tell us what our fellow neighbors and countrymen and fellow workers are instead of just talking to one another ourselves, the easier we are to divide, and conquer, and exploit, and to fight that…
And, Marc, I want to toss this back to you to ask, if you could tell us some lessons that you’ve learned, particularly about how you can bridge those divides through organizing, through common struggle, because I think that is a really, really critical point to make here.
So in those moments of deep despair when the country was reeling from these other assassinations and attempted assassinations, where did you find hope? Where did you find power and a way to respond in a way that felt meaningful and purposeful?
Marc Steiner: It’s all very difficult. One of the things I was thinking about was, years ago, when I was a community organizer in South Baltimore, and we organized a Tenants Union Group in a neighborhood that was deeply divided by race.
There’s a street that runs down the middle of South Baltimore called Charles Street, goes way through town, and it divides the Black and white worlds. The Black world was Sharp Leadenhall, the white world was South Baltimore. Almost all the men worked in the same dry docks, the same shipyards, but lived in segregated worlds. And we organized them together in a Tenants Union to fight the same slum landlords.
One of the things that happened though — And this is what I say, well, organizing can change a lot. Whether it’s union organizing, community organizing really does have an effect. That’s how you build a movement. We actually turned George Wallace precincts into McGovern precincts, door to door. That’s what it takes, because people naturally will ally if you bring them together, if you help people find their commonality.
And I think that we are deeply divided in the country at the moment. I’m not sure how we bridge that, given the present political situation.
And it’s so different than what happened before. When King was assassinated, I will never forget it because I was living in DC, and the rebellion erupted. But we were also organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, and we were organizing people in Appalachia to join Resurrection City.
And it bridged these… I don’t know how to describe this, but it was like when you were organizing this, and I’ll never forget the night when a white guy in a Black and white group together, white guy stood up, and he said — He used the N-word, and he said, if that’s what these N’s are marching for, I’m going to march with him. And one of the Panthers walked over to him, put his arm around him and said, yes, brother, we are marching together. And after that, the guy stopped using the word, by the way.
But what I’m trying to point out here is that people, we can come together. It just takes real work to make that happen.
And right now, we are faced with a real danger that has been building in this country for the last 50 years, which is a deeply organized right wing that could seize power in America. That’s what we’re facing. That’s that picture of Trump with blood dripping down his face, with his determined look on his face being pulled away by the Secret Service.
And I think we’re facing a really momentous moment, and I am not quite sure, at this moment, how we get out of it.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I mean, that’s the task that’s at hand, right? You’ve got to fight. You can’t just roll over and let history run you over, right?
And I think that there’s a real lesson there in how we got here in the first place. I think since Trump came down that freakin’ golden escalator in 2015 [Steiner laughs] so many people in our country and so much of our political culture has just been dominated by this nostalgic desire to “return to normal”.
And that’s what we heard through all the first Trump presidency, and it just seemed to compound, everything seemed to be getting worse. It became a catch-all for all the things that were changing. All of our favorite celebrities were dying, the political status quo, not just here in the United States but in countries around the world, was getting turned upside down, and COVID hit.
And it just feels like the bad news and world historical changes have been nonstop. The world has continued to break record after record with heat and extreme weather, and so on and so forth.
And so I think Trump became this symbol for a lot of people, not just a symbol of change for the people who supported him, but a symbol for the people who did not support him of this change that they did not want, the change to their lives that they weren’t ready for and wanted to turn back the clock on.
And that’s, of course, impossible. You can never turn back the clock, you can never “return to normal”. And yet, that’s still the hope that so many of us in this country have apparently had.
And I think that that has made us uniquely and woefully ill-prepared to meet this moment right now because we have just been hoping that the “system” as such or the elite power brokers in the Democratic Party or in the courts were just going to take care of things for us, and we were going to be able to get back to normalcy/complacency, whatever that meant for us.
But as this nightmare cycle of news over the past few weeks and months, from the Supreme Court rulings to Trump’s guilty verdict in May, now, that verdict and all other verdicts being thrown into question because of the Supreme Court rulings on presidential immunity. Just today, as we’re recording, a Trump-appointed Judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed the criminal case against him for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Again, I say that to say that all these hopes that people had that the system would hold Trump accountable, and that he and his movement would quietly go away because of the wrongs that they had done are now, I think, really at a moment of rude awakening where they’re not only realizing that Trump is not going away, but after we all saw that picture you referenced of him, holding the fist up with blood on his face, everyone thought the same thing, which is that, holy shit, he’s going to win.
And what this is going to mean for his movement is going to be so galvanizing and potentially terrifying that it really instilled, I think, a lot of anxiety and fear in so many people, rightly.
And meanwhile, as if he were just this metaphor turned into flesh, like he is the literal physical embodiment of a necrotic Democratic establishment that is so manifestly unfit to take on Trump and Trumpism, yet refuses to relinquish its death grip on power, we are all watching in real time as Joe Biden and his campaign are crumbling before our eyes.
And right now, senior Democrats are out there telling the press that they’ve “All resigned themselves to a second Trump presidency.” And so that’s fomenting a lot of resignation, a lot of despair, a lot of people accepting that we are powerless at this moment. We’re not as organized as the people who are taking advantage of this moment, and that’s just the way things are. And the powers that be aren’t going to come and save us.
But that’s not acceptable. That is simply unacceptable. There is too much at stake for us, for our children, for our planet, for our future to just roll over and give into fear and defeatism right now. Now is the time for bravery, and I think history is calling upon all of us to be brave and to instill bravery in others.
And that can look a lot of different ways, but the organizing piece is really crucial because that’s a kind of bravery that you’re referencing that we see every week here at The Real News. We see that bravery in exploited workers banding together, building collective power, exercising their rights, and changing their circumstances.
We see it in peace activists, and people of conscience around the world, organizing to try to build power and disrupt the war machine. Or cop watchers, putting their bodies on the line to hold the police accountable.
This is the kind of bravery that really pushes one to take that step out of accepting the status quo and our place in it and step into the fight to change the world for the better.
And that’s where I really stress that, folks, wherever you are, however you’re feeling, you’ve got to do something. You’ve got to organize. You’ve got to seek out and find the places where you can come together with others and actually do the work of building power.
Don’t just feel like you only have the options of voting, or screaming online, or maybe going to a protest. Again, all these things are important, but you have more power than that. You just have to build it. You have to channel it. You have to exercise it and organize it collectively.
And so what I would say to folks out there listening — And this is the last thing I’ll say, and then, Marc, I’d love for you to close this out — Is right now, you got to seek out and you got to find the places and institutions in your community where there is at least some infrastructure in place that allows people to gather and work together to address their shared concerns.
That can be unions, could be community organizations, faith-based institutions, churches, sports leagues. I don’t care. However small and decrepit and in need of repair these institutions are, they’re better than nothing, and they are the budding infrastructure that we need to come together and start getting ourselves and our neighbors organized and working together.
And once you start — Because you’re not going to just snap and suddenly have an organizing infrastructure to fight the rise of fascism or to provide mutual aid and support as things keep getting darker and more dangerous, you got to build it. You gotta build that kind of organization. You got to exercise that muscle and practice building power.
This is what our dearly departed sister and legendary labor organizer, Jane McAlevey was always saying. I think people really got to take that to heart, because going towards the election, and even beyond, you need power. You’ve got to build power. If you want power to bend to your will, you got to have some power to make them question their decisions. Right now, as atomized individuals screaming into the void, we have no power.
And so if you want to address and stop those feelings of powerlessness, then you gotta take that initiative and you got to find the places in your community where you and your community members, your neighbors, your coworkers, your family members, your friends can start doing that work. Because it’s not going to come from nowhere, it’s going to come from us and people like you.
Marc Steiner: That’s absolutely right. I think that, as we close out here, that the key is, I said earlier to it all, is organizing and pulling people together. This country is deeply divided, but it’s on a very thin line. And folks who are on one side can get to the other side pretty easily, but it takes organizing and work to make that happen.
And I think that’s one of the key things that we’re trying to do here at The Real News is also bringing those stories of people who are actually crossing that line and working together to make some changes and to build a new world.
So it’s always a pleasure to sit here and talk with my dear friend and colleague Max Alvarez, and keep listening to his stuff because he’s got the pulse on the workers of America here for The Real News, and that’s important, and we’re going to continue to look at this election, and look at where we’re going, and to do our best to cover it for you, and to get out there and fight for our future.
So I’m going to wrap this up. And once again, Max, it’s always great to have a conversation with you, and I thank you so much for bringing my butt down here to do this today with you.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you, brother. It’s an honor to be in the struggle with you.
Marc Steiner: And I want to thank Cameron Granadino on the other side of the glass for running this program, and our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, who just makes us all sound incredible, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show and our others shows possible.
So please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you want us to cover. Write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I’ll write to you immediately once I get your email.
And once again, Max, always good to be with you on the air, always. And we’ll bring you more about this election and the struggles around this country and how we can win this fight together.
So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, take care, and contribute to The Real News.
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