Trump’s Courage Inspires Liberals, Even Former Haters Toward National Unity

After the attempted assassination of President Trump on July 13, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he planned to take no role in the coming election—unlike the last one—and would not endorse either candidate. (In 2020, his $400 million in “Zuckerbucks” helped rig the election for Biden.) He went on to say “On a personal note, seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face, and pump his fist in the air with the American flag, is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life…. On some level, as an American, it’s hard to not get emotional about that spirit, and that fight. And that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”

Earlier, Zuckerberg’s company Meta had lifted restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, saying, “In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for president on the same basis.” Facebook’ practice was quite different for the past three-plus years.

Elon Musk, although no hater, wrote hours after the shooting, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” It later emerged that Musk will give about $45 million a month to a super-PAC supporting Trump.

Peggy Noonan is a Wall St. Journal columnist who titled her column a year ago, “May Trump Soon Reach his Waterloo.” Now, returning from the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, she first warns that she is not a “Trumpist,” and expects to vote for neither major party candidate in November. But she continues:

And so, to the Republican National Convention: It was stupendous, a triumph in every way from production through pronounced meaning and ability to reach beyond the tent. It moved me. Madeline Brame, speaking of the stabbing death in New York of her son, and District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “soft on crime” response, moved me. The Gold Star families whose sons and daughters died at the Abbey Gate during the botched withdrawal from Kabul and were later abandoned by the White House moved me. What love—and what an indictment….

And none of that was even the headline. The headline: This wasn’t a divided party, it was a party united. It wasn’t only Mr. Trump’s party, it was an explicitly Trumpian party.

We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-trumpian-triumph-in-milwaukee-republican-national-convention-2024-election-0230db27

The acute social critic Michael Lind substantiated Noonan’s analysis of the new Republican Party in a New York Times guest essay, “Trump’s Transformation of the Republican Party Is Complete,” What is noteworthy is that he includes no criticism of President Trump. As brilliant as he is, Lind has hitherto felt compelled to include sniping at Trump in any writing which might be construed to support Trump’s policies. He did this for the same reason that JD Vance attacked Trump in 2016—because certain social circles demand it.

Either they don’t demand it any longer, or else Lind and others can now summon the personal courage to ignore it. As Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote, “The RNC Shattered the Trump Taboo.”

David Samuels is a brilliant journalist and fiction writer who invented his own journalism, as Tom Wolfe had done earlier. He has repeatedly signed major features in the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, and won every journalism prize. But more recently, he has vanished from all those prestige magazines, to appear instead in the Tablet and UnHerd, because, as he put it last November:

People ask me sometimes how I expect to continue to publish my work in fancy magazines or be offered fellowships at Harvard and Yale if I insist on advertising what I actually believe. The answer is, I don’t. I don’t insist on anything. I don’t care about any of these places anymore, nor should any honest person concerned about the deep trouble that this country is in. The time to have ceased believing in or caring about the world of official American culture is when it became indistinguishable from official Soviet culture, which was at least a decade ago. People who go on pretending that this culture is not morally, intellectually, and creatively bankrupt in order to gain some personal advantage or honor are themselves quite obviously corrupt. While I have plenty of vices, that kind of personal emptiness, rooted in fear of the consequences to one’s career or reputation, has never been a temptation. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/only-one-america-worth-saving-what-now

In July 15, only two days after the assassination attempt on Trump, Samuels wrote a moving evocation called “The Portal; Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and stepping back into American history.” I encourage you to read it. On the one hand, he contends that Trump’s first administration was a failure. But he analyzes what really stands on the two sides this November in such an irrefutable way that all that is left at the end is to ask: “What choice do we have other than to embrace whatever vision of the past and future allows us to continue to be Americans?” Nothing is left but to stand with Donald Trump—to live free or die.