The low road, the high road, and the way the wind blows

Reflections after a terrible day in America.

It still hasn’t quite sunk in yet. I mean, you could say that about the entire past decade of American politics — or at least the nine years since Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce what seemed like an impossibly uphill bid for the presidency. But I mean specifically: it hasn’t quite sunk in that Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt yesterday, as I’m sure all of you are aware.

It doesn’t help that I’m here, for 24 more hours, in Las Vegas, which is not the best place to keep oneself grounded in reality. I’ve spent enough time in Vegas to have experienced my fair share of strange and/or newsworthy events from here, from earthquakes to sports championships to (this was only six weeks ago!) Trump being convicted on a series of felony charges while I was in the middle of a poker tournament.

As compared to some of those events, the dramatic happenings in Butler, Pennsylvania didn’t quite penetrate the surreal space-time fabric of the Las Vegas Strip. There were murmured conversations about it — one group of guys getting happy hour drinks seemed almost titillated by the cable news footage at the sushi counter where I got an early dinner. But the overall reaction was typical Vegas: shrug it off. It helped, certainly, that while there was plenty of misinformation — no, the shooter wasn’t a “Chinese man”, and no Trump hadn’t merely been injured by glass fragments from the teleprompter — there was never much doubt about Trump’s condition. He’d been grazed on the ear by an assassin's bullet but emerged unbowed by it.

We probably shouldn’t shrug it off. How a lunatic — identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20 years old of Bethel Park, Pa. — came so close to killing Trump is something there can and will be a lot of questions about. If the wind had blown slightly differently, Trump might have been killed, or severely injured. By the same measure, there are worlds in which Crooks was felled by onlookers or by snipers before he got any shots off — or had gotten a flat tire on his way to the rally. History unfolds in mysterious and often highly contingent ways, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to a ballot design problem in Palm Beach County, Florida that probably cost Al Gore the 2000 election.

However, I’ve always though there’s a lot to be said for the mentality, evident both here in Vegas and back home in New York, that The Show Must Go On. Be grateful for the good things in life, and don’t let the Bad Guys win by getting entrapped in a violent political doom cycle if you can possibly avoid it. You — yes you, reader — have some say in the matter, so take the high road. Violence begets violence, and hatred begets hatred. I saw some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen on Twitter yesterday, from Democrats asserting that the whole thing was staged to Republicans who blamed Joe Biden for the news. America is obviously in a difficult place, but there is a sort of autoimmune response that political partisanship inflames that always makes everything worse.

OK, fine, let’s briefly speculate how about this influences the election

The assassination attempt came at a pivotal moment in the political news cycle, with the Republican National Convention set to begin in Milwaukee as Democrats also face a crisis about what to do about Biden. It would be easy to say something like this: “Gee, this just proves how unpredictable politics are! Just one Black Swan event after another! We probably ought to remain humble about our ability to predict the future!”

Notwithstanding that political violence is hardly a Black Swan — there have been a number of terrifying events in the very recent past, and we may have been lucky to avoid an assassination attempt like this until now — I endorse that sentiment up to a point. But I think it’s also kind of a cop-out. The premise of this newsletter, which some of you are even paying me for, is that I’ll be as honest with you as I would with a friend that I’m getting a proverbial beer with, even if that means being willing to draw inferences from incomplete information (and quite possibly being wrong). 

The impact of events like these may be highly uncertain, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some directional impact. At Polymarket, for instance, Trump’s chances of winning have spiked to roughly 70 percent from 60 percent before the shooting attempt. It’s fine to say “I refuse to speculate” — but does that mean you think the consensus is misguided?

Personally, I have no basis to think the consensus is wrong here. You can get cute if you like and try to draw historical analogies, like to the assassination attempts against Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 or Ronald Reagan in 1981 (which produced a sharp but short-lived boost in his approval ratings). But I think that’s barking somewhat up the wrong tree. In the present moment, this at the very least makes Trump much more sympathetic and undermines the implicit premise of the Biden campaign to restore order and stability to America

It perhaps also unlocks a permission structure to vote for Trump among a certain type of voter. Elon Musk and Bill Ackman officially endorsed Trump in the wake of the shooting, for instance. I don’t think this is a particularly important development on its own, not least because Musk and Ackman were pretty obviously in the Trump camp to begin with (even if they hadn’t admitted it publicly, or even to themselves). But those Americans in the pox-in-all-houses mindset — and there are a lot of them — might find it easier now to pull the lever for Trump. And Trump fans will now walk over glass for their martyr. Plus, Trump’s chances of winning were probably underrated to begin with by polls and models, including the Silver Bulletin model, that didn’t account for Biden’s feebless as a candidate. 

There are, however, two major sources of uncertainty. One is whether the Trump campaign will take the high road or the low road. In rare possession of the moral highground, will Trump ask the nation to come together? Or, like one of his potential VP picks, Senator J.D.Vance of Ohio, will he plunge us further into darkness, blaming his political opponents for the attempt on his life? The high road is probably the more electorally rewarding course, believe it or not, especially given that Trump was winning to begin with. But candidates with authoritarian tendencies can obviously seize on moments like these also.

The other question is what this means for whether Democrats will replace Biden as their nominee — something that would probably improve their chances of defeating Trump. The early indications are that the White House will use this as another excuse to deflect the question and hope to run out the clock. But the White House is pretty clearly interested in what’s best for Biden’s ego and their own sense of self-preservation and not what’s best for the country. If Trump’s position is strengthened by this, even marginally, that’s all the more reason to gamble on an option with higher upside.

Of course, the Biden campaign’s hand might still be forced. If nothing else, the events in Pennsylvania are a reminder of the frailty of the candidates, something that the White House would probably rather that voters not think about. And if there’s some sort of sympathy bounce for Trump, on top of a convention bounce, the polls could get really ugly for Biden, forcing another round or two of reconsideration. But it’s going to be difficult to interpret movement in the polls, and the White House will surely cherry-pick their way around the data to argue that Biden must not be replaced. I’m still not sure the impact of June’s debate is fully priced into the polling averages — there haven’t been a lot of high-quality state polls, in particular. But now we’ll have the effects of the shooting, Trump’s VP pick, and the Republican Convention layered on top of it.

Uncertainty tends to freeze people in place, especially when abetted by fear. They sometimes become convinced that they’re trapped in a doom loop from which there’s no escape, even when there’s an exit ramp that they’re too myopic to recognize.

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