Politics

On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of condemnations of political violence by U.S. public officials, from federal legislators to state officials. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, “Political violence has no place in America.” But there seems to be plenty of room for violence of the apparently nonpolitical sort: federal immigration agencies have used the recent push for mass deportations to accelerate their long and violent history with high-profile murders on the street and in their detention centers; as of April 23, the U.S. military has killed at least 186 people in a consistent campaign of bombings in Latin American waters; and there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondent’s Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.

The presumed exemption from violence of the elite rests on a broader bedrock of delusion that exists in its most virulent form on the ascendant American right. Last summer, U.S. Representative Madeleine Dean wielded the most unlikely of rhetorical weapons in a debate on the congressional floor: a banana. Across her sat Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, attempting to defend the Trump administration’s tariff policy. After confirming with Lutnick that the president’s baseline 10 percent tariff applied to banana imports, Dean explained that the price of bananas at Walmart had risen 8 percent. To which Lutnick replied: “If you build in America, there is no tariff.” This exchange did not exactly soar to the heights of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it was no less illuminating of the basic political conundrum of our era: that a critical mass of the political leadership of the United States appears to sincerely believe in magic.