Keller: Trump assassination attempt leaves so many unanswered questions
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
BOSTON - The question about the horrendous events surrounding the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania this past weekend isn't why did it happen.
It's - what took so long?
History of attempted assassinations
Take it from a Baby Boomer who grew up with presidential assassinations and attempts: JFK in 1963, MLK and RFK in 1968, George Wallace in 1972, Gerald Ford in 1975 (twice!), Ronald Reagan in 1981. Before there was disco, there was the domestic terror craze of the 1970s, when dozens of left-wing groups set off hundreds of bombs. (The right took over later.)
Political violence is baked into our cake. Google "US Civil War" if you need convincing.
Then again, maybe this latest atrocity wasn't political at all. John Hinckley Jr. reasoned he could woo actress Jodie Foster by taking out Reagan. It didn't work.
And now that clueless tech visionaries have removed the lid from Pandora's Box by offering every unstable person in the world unlimited access to exhortation to violence and instruction on how to perform it, Saturday's slaughter seems an inevitable consequence.
No one knows what to do about this. And the flurry of cliched appeals from pols about "turning down the temperature" and reversing the nasty course of our discourse, while perhaps well-meaning, are surely meaningless. Dip into X/Twitter or the internet sewer of your choice for ten minutes and you'll get your fill of the immediate descent into toxic partisan finger-pointing and conspiracy theorizing that has followed the shooting.
What happens next?
So while we await actual facts, we're left to ponder the short-term political implications of what happened. Again, no one knows. But here's a few guesses:
Trump will surely consolidate his base.
Some of them, perhaps tiring of Trump's constant efforts to keep them in a state of grievance-frenzy, have been expressing to pollsters a mild lack of enthusiasm about voting. But when someone tries to kill your candidate and your Facebook friends are blaming Joe Biden, that's a motivator.
Trump has an opportunity to win over some skeptical swing voters.
According to Trump-friendly columnist Salena Zito, who interviewed the former president post-shooting, he is planning to use his Thursday night nomination acceptance speech to substitute homilies about "unity" and political "peace" (topics he's been previously uninterested in) for the usual wild anti-establishment vitriol. Smart move, if he can suppress his true instincts long enough to make it stick.
Biden, too, has a chance to capitalize politically.
He took full advantage over the weekend of the opening to act "presidential" and return to the political peacemaker role he played to good advantage in the 2020 race. And his re-election chances always hinged on the campaign becoming another referendum on Trump.
For now, at least, the focus is on the challenger, who is fully capable of appalling swing-voter onlookers.