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Chapter 1: What recent events highlight political violence in Trump's America?
I've studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most, you take a look at the people, Abraham Lincoln.
This is Donald Trump comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln and JFK.
The people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they're the ones that they go after.
The president became the likely target of an alleged shooter who charged a security point armed with guns and knives. For a moment, the White House Correspondents' Dinner continued, the president and his guests seemingly unaware, until the Secret Service pulled Trump from the stage and formed a human shield around him.
The mood has obviously changed with this sudden development of potentially shots. when it appears to be shots fired at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. We saw more and more law enforcement officers racing up the aisle straight towards the president. We were told, get down, get down, and that's when everyone got under the tables. We've been here before.
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Chapter 2: How has Trump compared himself to historical figures like Lincoln and JFK?
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Gunfire erupting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The former president was rushed off the stage right now with Secret Service. He's being escorted into his vehicle.
This is the third alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump in two years.
I don't care how many people you have, how good they are. They can be the greatest people. You have the greatest security in history. If you have a whack job who's got a brain, but it's a little bit distorted or a lot distorted, they can make trouble.
I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to 7am.
Chapter 3: What was the significance of the White House Correspondents' Dinner incident?
Today, Sydney Morning Herald columnist and former assistant managing editor of NPR in Washington, Bill Wyman, on America's surge in political violence, what's behind it and is Trump both a target and provocateur? It's Tuesday, April 28th. Bill, you've written about how political violence is always alive in America, hidden just out of sight.
So did the events at the White House Correspondents' Dinner come as a surprise to you, or was there almost a certain inevitability that this was bound to happen again at some point?
That's such a good question. What always happens to these things, it is surprising, of course, it's shocking just by definition. And at the same time, just increasingly, I think we all sort of feel, uh-oh, here we go again. We've seen this movie before.
As listeners probably know, though, the Washington Hilton is a very tragic place in American political history because that's where Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated not too long after he took office in, I guess it was early 1981, right? People might not know it's just a kilometer or two from the White House. It's in basically downtown D.C. It's a very distinctive curved hotel.
So in a weird way, it's not that surprising because it is a very high profile event. This is the third sort of high profile sort of grand guignol one we've seen of Trump. But a lot of these happen and they basically could happen any time American president is under under fire. And boy, I'm sure it's the same in Australia, but it really wasn't that long ago that presidents could walk the streets.
You used to be able to drive. I remember as a kid just driving right in front of the White House. But of course, that street is now closed down. And there used to be Harry Truman, which was what, in the late 1940s, early 1950s, used to go on a constitutional every morning with reporters.
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Chapter 4: How does political violence in America reflect on Trump's presidency?
So there was a time not too long ago when presidents actually moved about in a much more easy way.
So this is the third assassination attempt on Trump in less than two years. There was so much focus on Trump's response to the Pennsylvania attack when he pumped his fist and shouted, fight, fight, fight. But how would you compare and describe Trump's response this time round? And do you think that President Trump and the MAGA world will try to capitalize on this politically?
Well, yes. I mean, that's definitely true. That's just what they do. The funniest thing is that one of the things that the right wing in America does very, very well, and that Australia's, I think, tries to emulate sometimes is, boy, do they get on message.
And so amusingly enough, the message of this is not the dangers of guns or dangers of gun violence or the problems with mental health in America and people who have mental health problems getting access to guns. None of that. The issue, they said, is, oh, we need a ballroom.
It's drone-proof. It's bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That's why Secret Service, that's why the military are demanding it. They've wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons, but today's a little bit different because today, We need levels of security that probably nobody's ever seen before.
We need to build the president's ballroom so that he'll be safe, which is, uh, sophistic on a whole bunch of levels. And, um, but it is funny, some enterprising people online were sort of marshalling all the tweets of all these kind of Republican tastemakers who were just totally in lockstep doing that. So that's the main one you're going to see.
But what we're seeing now is them immediately take advantage saying, oh, we need to build this ridiculous ballroom in a space that he basically illegally tore down the east wing of the White House. So it becomes pretty silly pretty quickly in America right now.
Yeah, it is quite a segue to go from assassination to ballroom construction. But what does all of this say about the state of Trump's presidency right now?
Well, that is another sobering question. The complexities of violence in America are very asymmetric in a lot of ways. Again, we don't really know because I'm sure the Secret Service could say, look, let us tell you how many near shootings Barack Obama, for example, or George Bush had to nearly endure. Barack Obama just had a flood of attempted assassinations that were thwarted by them.
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Chapter 5: What historical context is important for understanding political violence in America?
But it also does seem that political violence is escalating. We had the Charlie Kirk assassination, which to my mind is even worse because it was successful in the sense like he was the figurehead of this big college student organization that seems to be a little bit impaired now since he's been gone. Oh, my God.
Go, run, run. Political violence in America taking a dark new turn tonight. Popular right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk is dead. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?
There were a couple of politicians in Minnesota who were shot. But I think we also have to lay some blame on the feet of Donald Trump and the right, whose rhetoric by any standard has gotten horrific over the past 10 years. And things happen virtually every day that you can't even imagine.
The things he says about the media, enemies of the people, traitors, execute them, kill them, the violence that he's used American military power to summarily execute people at sea. Right now, he's overseeing a war that was not approved by Congress. And not only do you hear this rhetoric on the right, no one on the right says tone it down, which is a corrective that used to happen.
Coming up, could we see more assassination attempts? Bill, political violence is nothing new in America. Could you give us a bit of the background to it, the history of how prevalent it's become?
Yeah, it is. It's funny. People might or might not know that four United States presidents have been assassinated. Abraham Lincoln was probably the most consequential. It was a terrible, terrible event in American history. A few others you might not have heard of. William McKinley, James Garfield. And then, of course, the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
Which kicked off a lot of violence in the 60s. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, his brother Robert Kennedy, that was another. I think you can say those three are the most consequential in American history because it basically took out three of the liberal and American, in the American sense, the three great liberal leaders in America who could have had very consequential political careers.
And then it does seem like we're just seeing more of it.
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Chapter 6: What role does gun culture play in the rise of political violence?
There's just a lot of guns in America. The truth is that actually a lot of people that stay in America just collect guns. They just buy them and buy them and buy them. So it's not like everyone in America has a gun, but a lot of Americans have a lot of guns. And people are very curious, why can't America get gun control done? And part of the reason is that anytime it comes up,
All of those people get motivated by what used to be the National Rifle Association and right wing, and they go out and buy more guns. And so one of the reasons the left doesn't even bring it up anymore is that the sort of gun lobby and the right wing likes it because all it does is spur more gun sales and scare tactics about Americans are going to take your guns away.
So it's a huge problem in America.
So, Bill, aside from the guns, though, what else do you think is behind this surge that we're seeing in political violence?
I think it's fair to say the one-two punch is the incredibly violent rhetoric that comes from the right wing. And there's just a lot of it. Now, there's a thing in America, as in Australia, there's what they call whataboutism. And people say, well, what about when someone said this on MSNBC? Or what about when someone said that? And it's like, yes, whataboutism.
On the left as well, you have some people saying intemperate things. But the prevalence of it on the right, the tolerance of it, the way that it's not apologized for and that it's amplified by what we call the right wing media sphere in America. And that starts, of course, with Fox News.
I mean, this is an insurrection. And what we need to do is either leave the U.N. or we need to bomb it. It is in New York, though, right?
Yeah, it is.
Could be some fallout there. All right. Maybe gas it?
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Chapter 7: How has rhetoric from political leaders influenced violence?
And if I can just give people one example that I think just stays with me, one of the most notorious ones was the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. brutal, brutal physical attack on him. Nancy Pelosi is an elderly woman, okay? Her husband is a very elderly person. They live in a very, they're rich, so they live in a very expensive house.
And the guy broke into the house and went after this 85 or 88 or 83-year-old man with a wrench or something, just beat the bejesus out of him. And he was obviously a Trump supporter. And Donald Trump's son literally tweeted out very weird jokes about it. Like Donald Trump himself was in San Francisco once.
He was doing a speech and he kind of smirked at the crowd and he goes, how's Nancy Pelosi doing?
And we'll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco. How's her husband doing, by the way? Anybody know?
you know, which was obviously a mocking reference to the tragedy in your family. And so you kind of see stuff like that that I think can fairly be laid at the feet of the right wing in America. You see a lot of it.
Given this disturbing tone of the debate and everything that's happened, do you think that we'll basically see more assassination attempts, more acts of political violence in the near future, given how divided America seems to be?
I have to say, I hope not. And it's one of those things where you kind of don't want, you know, hopefully we'll look back at this conversation a year from now and say, OK, boy, that was the last one. Right. But we're just going to have to see what happens. I mean, there's a lot of stridency in American politics right now.
There's going to be a very consequential midterm election coming up in November, which is what, about six months away now. And the interesting thing about that is that. Donald Trump is a very strange person. He seems to be a very tactical politician and he's not really a strategic politician.
And so he gets himself into positions where he wants to do things and he basically does them and worries about the consequences later. Well, part of the consequences of his tariffs and this ridiculous war with Iran right now is that there are some very bad political makings for him coming up in the next six months.
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Chapter 8: What predictions can be made about future political violence in America?
And you have to figure they're going to cause inflation and gas prices to spike over the next six months, which will hurt him politically. And then Lord knows what he's going to do. You know, maybe people are going to say, look, and unless you really start going after disrupting the election in some way, you're going to lose the Senate. You know, they're certainly going to lose the House. Right.
I mean, everyone basically agrees with that. I mean, it seems to get tossed up right now. But six months ago, it looked like a no-go. So we might be seeing a midterm election for the ages, which is going to increase the tension and the rhetoric. And let's just hope it doesn't increase into violence as well.
Bill, it's been great talking to you. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me.
Also in the news, former PM Malcolm Turnbull has lashed out at his party's decision to preference One Nation in the Farah by-election. Turnbull says it's a retrograde move that would have been inconceivable during his, Tony Abbott's or John Howard's prime ministership. He argues that racism and division is One Nation's M.O. and as a result they should be preference last by the Liberal Party.
And McDonald's has won a court battle to build a 24-7 restaurant in a Melbourne street dubbed the world's coolest in 2024. Northcote locals argued that McDonald's didn't fit the vibe of the area. Council last year rejecting its application to build.
But that's now been overturned by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which says the application can't be knocked back simply because it was made by a fast food giant. I'm Nicole Johnston and this is 7am. Thanks for listening.
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