Momentous events tend to sear lasting images into the collective consciousness. People of a certain age remember where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated, when the first moon landing occurred or when they first heard of the attacks of 9/11.
Saturday offered a set of horrible and disturbing images and feelings surrounding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
More important, however, are the images that never occur because tensions were eased and disasters avoided.
As the one who suffered injury on Saturday, former President Trump is in a unique situation to lower the nation’s partisan temperature. So far, he seems to understand this role.
On Sunday, he told the Washington Examiner he wanted to focus on drawing the country together.
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he told the Examiner. “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now. …
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said.
History offers incomplete echoes, at best. But it is worth remembering one of the greatest mollifying speeches of all time — that of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to a majority Black crowd in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Riots swept much of the nation that day, but not in Indianapolis.
The comparison is not perfect. King had been killed, not merely wounded. Racial injustices do not equate to political passions. The tensions of 1968 do not equate with today’s situation.
And yet, history still offers lessons. The nation today is on a precipice, where the wrong words could inflame vengeance and more violence. Already, wild conspiracy theories and hatreds fill social media.
In the past, Trump has seemed more inclined to stoke passions than to quell them. Today, the stakes are higher than ever.
President Biden, in an Oval Office speech Sunday, urged the nation “to lower the temperature in our politics.”
Those were appropriate words from a president, but only Trump has the power to influence his own followers to lay aside their own animosities.
Kennedy said, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country …”
More than 56 years later, those words still seem fresh. They still resonate with a worried public.
Trump told the Examiner that the reality of his brush with death is beginning to sink in.
“I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?” he said.
He posted on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
He also said he had received well wishes from people of all walks of life and all parts of the political spectrum.
He noted that his convention speech will be “a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.”
No one should expect what remains of this year’s presidential race to be waged with any less vigor and passion than what has been seen so far. But we hope Trump’s comments since the awful events on Saturday signal a change in tone from both sides.
Americans of all stripes are appalled at the attempt on Trump’s life. The vast majority of them revere the freedoms enumerated and protected by the Constitution, and they honor the integrity of the election system.
The best instincts of the electorate need to be reinforced and reassured, even as the fringe elements need to be pacified.
We hope that tone will be the lasting impression left by this week’s Republican National Convention.