Rage, gunfire, blame: This is America

It was a hot July day in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the median household income is about $39,000, the population numbers about 13,000 and the vast majority of those people are white. The tragedy happened on a stage bedecked in patriotic colors with an American flag blowing overhead. That stage was set up on a grassy expanse that regularly serves as a home to carnival midways and livestock shows. This is not the sort of place where most people in this country live, but it is the sort of place that some folks like to refer to as the real America. Not the urban cauldrons of countless ethnicities, languages and cultures, but the exurbs and rural communities that call to mind an idyllic fantasy of small-town neighborliness and front doors left unlocked, because everyone trusts everyone.

It was on that stage that former President Donald Trump was standing when, in the first minutes of his campaign rally, shots from an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon pierced the air. One of the bullets clipped his ear, he said, and had him ducking for cover and left his face wet with blood. Other shots killed an audience member, injured two others and left a nation shocked but not surprised. Because this is America.

Secret Service agents moved in swiftly to form a human shield around Trump as he crouched down low. (Don’t we all long for such a protection in a country filled with guns?) Law enforcement killed the shooter. Secret Service uses the word “neutralized,” which suggests that the danger is gone, when the danger has merely been paused. This is America, after all.

When Trump finally stood, his ear and cheek were visibly smeared with blood. His expression whiplashed between confusion and shock, then quickly settled on anger. From the microphones still live at the now-askew lectern, one could hear Trump ask to retrieve his shoes as he sought to right himself. In the tangle of dark suits, one could make out another splotch of red. A bloodied handkerchief? No, Trump had retrieved the MAGA baseball cap which he’d been wearing.

As the agents sought to hustle their protectee to the waiting motorcade, Trump demanded that they “wait, wait, wait.” The agents who’d risked their lives by standing between him and the shooter now paused so Trump could attend to his crowd. He thrust his fist into the air in a gesture of cinematic bravura, and his mouth clenched into a single word, “Fight.” The crowd roared.

Because this is America, it’s impossible to fully understand the meaning, the impact of that single word. A metaphor aiming to inspire tenacity or bravery registers like a call for violence. A fair warning about the dire state of the democracy is interpreted as absolution for terrorism. Facts land like grenades. A difference of opinion hits like a fusillade.

Everything is a conspiracy. All our communications are colored by anger and mistrust, so much so that it’s as though we’re speaking different languages: red state patois, blue state dialect. But the aftermath of the attack on Trump is familiar to us all: the belongings and trash scattered after a crowd ducked from gunfire, the crime scene tape, the disrupted sense of safety, the anxiety, the promise for a full investigation.

It’s tempting to say that Americans exist along a bell curve, where extremists huddle on either end and the middle bulges with good people who just want everyone to get along. But that would be fallacy. We are a nation of roiling resentment, of low-information voters, of self-righteous Christians, of condescending secularists, of disaffected young people, of stubborn old people, of greedy rich, of embittered poor who’d rather see themselves continue to suffer if it means those people — Black, immigrant, refugee, Muslim, gay, whoever — might benefit from some governmental crumbs.

America is angry. It has settled into the kind of anger that contorts the face and tenses the muscles and renders people unrecognizable — even to themselves. It’s the kind of anger that recalls those sepia-toned images of women in shirtwaist dresses and cat-eyed glasses and men in short-sleeve dress shirts and skinny ties from back when political violence took a heavy toll as the country fought over segregation and civil rights, which was really just a fight over the kind of country people wanted this to be. For segregationists, the anger was sparked by having to share space with those who didn’t look like them. They believed that what was rightfully theirs was being taken away while failing to realize that simply possessing something doesn’t mean that it was ever rightfully yours. Theirs was anger over privilege being revoked.

A famous photograph depicts a 15-year-old girl making the lonely walk to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. A mob of segregationists stand behind her yelling, but one in particular stands out. She has short dark hair and her mouth is open wide in a nearly perfect circle so that the full volume of her fury can spew forth. Her eyes are narrowed and her brow is furrowed and the anger is volcanic.

Here we are three generations later. We remain a segregated America in many churches and neighborhoods. We’re still arguing over the kind of country this should be; people are still worried about losing things they’ve never owned. They’re clinging to privileges, denying the ugly bits of history and deeply distrustful of difference. Justice may not move in a straight line, but must it make a hairpin turn?

In the minutes after Trump was removed from the stage and before his motorcade had even departed, the crowd began chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A” in response to Trump’s raised fist. Many in the packed audience were angry, rather than frightened or stunned, and sought to dispense blame for the bloodshed. And instead of looking at each other or at themselves, they unleashed their vitriol into the assembled video cameras.

One man in particular stood out. He was wearing a red T-shirt and a moss-colored baseball cap. His beard was gray and dark sunglasses shielded his eyes. He screamed, “F--- you!” and jabbed the air with his middle fingers with as much vigor as he could muster. His arms were hyperextended and his biceps flexed as the rage flooded through his body. But he wasn’t alone. America is seized up with anger. Convulsing with it.

“Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is [more] important than that right now — unity,” President Biden said.

What should this country be? Surely, America doesn’t have to be this.

Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.