Angry Planet - On Presidential Assassins and the RNC With Rick Perlstein

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/Ronald Reagan carried a gun in his briefcase when he was president. According to Edmund Morris’ pseudo-historical memoir of Reagan, Dutch, Reagan got the gun in Iowa. “It is a fact … that RR did acquire a 1934 Walther PPK .380 pocket-sized police pistol early in his stay in Des Moines and kept it lovingly the rest of his life,” Morris wrote. “He even toted it in his briefcase as president.”Reagan was obsessed with the idea that he was a target of assassination and had been since his days as the president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s.That’s just one of the bits of ephemera from this episode of Angry Planet where we’re joined by historian Rick Perlstein who is on the ground at the Republican National Convention. On Saturday, a gunman took a shot at former President Donald Trump. He missed, clipping his ear.What can the lives of past assassins, both failed and successful tell us about Thomas Matthew Crooks? What is the duty of the historian at this moment? Is political violence on the rise in America or is this all business as usual?Join us as we ask these questions and attempt to find some answers.You Are Entering the Infernal TriangleGunman’s Phone Had Details About Both Trump and Biden, F.B.I. Officials SayA Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump‘Stay Strapped or Get Clapped’Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners Matthew here. Just a quick show note up at the beginning. So this is something that always kind of happens when you're doing a podcast about reactive breaking news. We recorded this on Tuesday. I edited it on. Wednesday. And on Wednesday evening, kind of Thursday morning, some more newsbrook. We got more information about Thomas Matthew Crooks. It kind of confirmed some of the things that we were talking about in this episode. Kind of just more stuff about his background and his steam messages. It appears early indications are that he was kind of looking for a target of opportunity

and that the Trump rally happened to be the closest thing near to where he lives. I would point you to the New York Times reporting on this. that kind of broke as I was finishing the edit here. Anyway, everything else to hear is great. I just wanted to add that little bit of context right up at the top. Into way we go. You know what I've been forgetting to do, Jason is? Yeah.

Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. Welcome to another conversation about conflict. Oh, that fucked it up. I screwed it up already. I know. Great way to start. Welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. It's kind of the NPR read, right?

Like the low voice. Oh, very nice. Yeah, Terry Gross here. Thanks. That's just what we needed. Rick Pearlstein's joining us. And he is a writer, a historian. And he is in Milwaukee, of all places, because that's his job.

It's my needle village. Back in the Milky Way. Is that really what they call it? I've never heard that. Yeah, just a little bit of Milwaukee lore. There was a drive-thru called the Wisconsin Frozen Custard, which is a thing called the Milky Way, kind of was a nickname for Milwaukee. And that was the inspiration for a happy days. Nice bit of 1950s nostalgia intruding on the 70s.

Right. Exactly. I don't connect, Matthew. You know how I... You know, nostalgia for one, for one's youth. leads to all sorts of problems. Perhaps that is why we're here where we are in America writ large. Yeah, so actually that's a great way to ask. Where are we in America right now?

Yes, we are in that place where the longing for relapsarian innocence, you know, potentially creates mountains of corpses, right? Also called fascism. No, we're not there yet. But we have you know, kind of incipient fascism, let's call it. And we're in a terrible place. I mean, it's just the, the, the, you know, kind of multiple systematic and institutional failings kind of intruding and imploding one upon the other, you know, I mean, what would,

obviously in any other country or any, in the eyes of history would be considered something like a constitutional coup in the, you know, in the, in the form of, of, you know, this young, low-level judge deciding that the president, you know, will be able to keep his own nuclear secrets, right? Yeah. Technicality. I mean, that's exactly the kind of stuff you see, you know, Varmar-era, you know, jurists, you know, dealing with, you know. You know, I mean, what was the other, the other latest apocalyptic thing that just, well, I mean, In Chicago, we have 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas coinciding,

which has kind of created this 150-year biblical plague. You know, we'll call that a symbol. But yeah, and, you know, the intrusion of political violence, not just in the form of, you know, this assassination attempt, but, you know, almost kind of institutionalized. I mean, you might say that, you know, the guy who walked into the, you know, Walmart in El Paso and shot, you know, everyone he thought, look, Mexican, you know, was an act of political violence, a kind of stochastic terrorism inspired

by the rhetoric of the president or the tree of life shooting, you know, or the way county election administrators are quitting in droves because they're, you know, terrified of threats. You know, one of the one of the things Ellsberg writes in his book on nuclear wars, you know, people say nuclear weapons haven't been used since, you know, 1945. But he says, no, they're used all the time, right? You use them, you know, you use violence. It's the threat of violence. That's work it does. And violence and the threat of violence, you know, saturates our everyday politics. So that brings us to, you know, not something that's kind of unheard of, you know. I mean, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, of what America looks like now is what, you know, the, you know, Reconstruction era to Jim Crow era, to civil white, high civil rights, massive resistance era south looked like, but, you know, nationalized, you know, the, the, the florid conspiracy theories, the fetishization of violence, the longing for this, you know, supposed, again, relapsarian, innocence when everyone kind of

knew their place. and of course the factlessness of the forces of good in fending it off. So that's the big picture, 30,000 feet, which brings me to your doorstep. Well, I just had a horrible parallel pop into my head. Tell me what you think. Welcome to my world. Okay, all right. Well, here's what just popped into my head.

Paul von Hindenberg, president of Germany, dottering and on the edge of, dementia right was the one who let Hitler into the barn right and Fritz von Poppin

who wasn't necessarily dottering but you know kind of had the same kind of thing top of mind that you know someone like Jamie Diamond

does which is that basically once we get the sky in power we can control them we can use him we can ride the tiger and maybe he'll eat us last oh we are in deep shit

but yeah Trump is not Hitlerian, right? Like I... Trumparian. You know? Trump, yes, and Hitler was not Trumparian, right?

I mean, Trump has qualities, you know, in a state where there's, you know, three guns for every person or whatever, that, you know, Hitler didn't have going for him, you know? And Hitler wasn't Hitler,

you know, until he was Hitler, right? So, I'm not going to give you, I'm not going to allow you that. Fair now. That's fair. I mean, I was, uh, now he has this Reichstag fire and he has arisen. Okay.

Let's, let's focus on this. It is very bizarre to me, um, already on Tuesday, because we talked about having you want to talk about the assassination. Um, and you and I talked a little bit back and forth. Attempt. Attempt. Attempt. Attempt.

Sorry. Um, not like Paul McCartney in the videos. No. Uh, and I'm wondering. how this thing is being processed, what you are seeing at the RNC, how this thing is being processed and kind of mythologized and what the symbol means to people right now? It's being processed as providential. I mean, it's being, you know, sluiced through this profoundly religious imagery, and you

hear, heard people say that. I mean, the guy who gave the benediction at the end, you know, said, you know, Donald Trump was, you know, saved for this moment. You know, I could send you guys an email I just got from the, you know, not a personal email, but a promotional email from the in-emittal Roger Stone, who told the story of the time, you know, Donald Trump supposedly survived a helicopter accident in 1989. And that's when he knew that in 1989, Roger Stone knew this. That's when I knew, he says, that Donald Trump was destined to become president, right?

and this, you know, magnificent image of him, you know, raising his fist, you know, surrounded by, by the way, if you look at the rest of the image, you know, these kind of hard men in black, right? I mean, they kind of have a fricor vibe about them and the flag, right? And, you know, other ways, you know, just kind of a way to, you know, think about. Biden and the Democrats. You know, one thing that happened last night was as people were kind of leaving the hall. These guys were holding this really creepy banner, which, whose semiotics I haven't yet, you know, found a way to parse.

And the guy was wearing a t-shirt that said, Hey, Joe, it was an assassination attempt. And this was a response to Joe Biden saying, I think he says something like, I have my own theories, but let's wait for law enforcement to, you know, give us the lead about what we can say about this before, you know, saying anything rash. And this was just the classic right-wing move of saying, no, we have perfect moral clarity, mannequian. How else is it being processed? Well, of course, I don't know what the coverage was like, but, you know, there was this movement, you know, kind of two-thirds of the way into the proceedings where they kind of showed down.

Donald Trump on camera on the video screen of the in these affairs. I like to call him the telescreen down in the bowels of the arena. Like, you know, kind of use like this, you know, this, this cameo from spinal tap that made it in the cutting room floor, you know. And he's down in the bowels of the arena. And as soon as it shows up, first of all, he's got, you know, a bandage on his ear that's like, you know, is as big as a, you know, an ear muff, you know. And that reminded me, I mean, you see all these resonances of how John Connolly had his arm in a sling for like the next like three years after surviving the Kennedy assassination and was mocked for the kind of political opportunism of that.

But, you know, as soon as you see him and, you know, there was just this astonished gasp and applause. And then eventually he kind of made his way to his box. and as soon as he actually appeared, you know, everyone rose. And I guess, you know, our own version of the salute is the cell phone rising to record the movement. And I was right next to kind of where the Texas gallery is. And I don't know if you guys have been to Republican conventions, but Texans always wear a uniform with cowboy hats. And they were all basically standing reverently.

at attention. And there were three or four more speakers. You know, Donald Trump didn't speak. Lee Greenwood introduced him, you know, with that incredible fascist anthem. I'm glad to be an American, proud to be an American, which, you know, the lyrics are just absolutely astounding. It's been around for 40, 40 years or so, which kind of shows you how long these energies have been coursing. And if tomorrow all the things were gone, I work for all my life. And I had to start again with just my children and my wife.

Like, at least I have the symbolic compensation of the American flag in this body of mythology of this kind of glorious prelapse area and past. And not what they have in a normal civilized country, which is if you wake up and everything you have is gone, you can count on social insurance and the provisions of solidarity to take care of you. But here we have eagles and flags. And so he comes on and he sings and says, you know, Donald Trump was raised up for this moment. And the next three or four speakers, the poor folks had to endure every time they showed up on stage, people chanting, we want Trump for two minutes. So, yeah, Nuremberg rallies come to mind. And yeah, I mean, it's absolutely read through a providential lens, 100%. And the energy is different than at other Republican national conventions.

No? No. It's exactly the, well, I mean, that's my piece that I have, which will be, you know, kind of up by the, probably by the time people are able to hear this. That energy was different, but that was only kind of the last, you know, 20 minutes or so. It was the same kind of early in a convention, kind of pro forma, you know, speech after speech after speech. and, you know, very thematic. And, you know, I mean, it's, it was, you know, not particularly interesting. You can kind of, everyone knows that they're going to be T-shirts that say vote for the felon, you know, or whatever the hell. You know, nothing, nothing surprising, really.

I remember at the 2004 convention, which now is 20 years ago, which I'm embarrassed about, but it's the one I went to, that, you know, they kept moving the chairs around so they could get people who are not white down in the front for the cameras? Oh yeah, they do that. That's all very, very routine and boring and, you know, kind of. And that's still happening even now, yeah? That was, that was the thing that I talk about in my piece, the Reagan's pollster Richard Worthling kind of figured out that they weren't going to get any white votes for a guy who had opposed to, you know, 1964 Civil Rights Act, but they can kind of preserve, I mean, a lot of black votes, I mean, yeah. But they could preserve a lot of white boats from people who felt

guilty about voting for someone who was against the 1964 Civil Rights Act if they surround him by as many black people as possible. So he would, you know, he started the tradition of Republicans giving speeches and black churches and that sort of thing. Where's, where is the coalition that Democrats counted on, like, including black people? All I've been reading about is that, you know, people who traditionally like Democrats, now hate the Democrats or just don't care about the Democrats. I mean, well, I mean, I think that one of the important things that you have to deal with in this moment is the fact that we all have to kind of throw out the rulebook and our incumbent understandings of what has happened and what is happening and what will happen. You know, I compare it to like, you know, everyone remembers how to ride a bicycle.

And everyone also remembers what it feels like when the chain slips off and you're peddling and pedaling and pedaling and the thing you're familiar with doesn't work. Right. So, I mean, as far as, you know, members of the minority, members of the coalition, I mean, I think a lot of this just, there's this wonderful writer named Joshua Cohn, who's just kind of came out, he was a substacker named Eddermintemtum. And he's been basically saying for a year that, you know, if you really kind of blow away all the noise and figure out the signal that the electorate just sees Biden as. in feeble and infirm. And, you know, that's why so many Democrats did so well in 2012 that the issue environment actually is quite strong for Democrats. And, you know, he points out that the watershed for this was the Afghan, you know, perception of a bug out, right? which was just kind of like read publicly as,

wow, this guy who we had kind of supported as a steady hand on the tiller isn't competent. So, you know, that affects all the parts of the Democratic coalition. I think I actually have a piece in the baffler. It's kind of a joint conversation with a historian named Gerald Cedarra, who is from Northwestern. And he's an expert on Hispanic Republicans. And we talk a lot about why these kind of coalitions and these kind of voting blocks are up in the air. And, you know, you can only kind of speculate.

I mean, it's like the wheat, the dust hasn't cleared, you know. And, you know, there's just way too much kind of glib, you know, take mongering out there. and, you know, you just have to throw your hands up in the air and say, everything's different now. Eddingermentum, I think, is his name, and it's at edigurmentum. News. A remarkable writer. He really cuts through the BS and a lot of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, why do you think we've gotten ourselves, what do you think the news environment has gotten itself into this position where it is take factory, it is pungry, it is opinion. I see a lot of people complain about the news media and talk about how they're canceling their subscriptions. And inevitably, what they're complaining about is the op-ed section. Right. I mean, I think a lot of it is, you know, classic medium is the message stuff. I mean, just to be really cliche about it, this is how the algorithms have trained us all to think, you know, engagement through conflict, you know.

And just no. you know, it's just one more set of institutional failures where there's no incentive, no reward, no kind of foundation, no roots, no sturdy kind of, the sturdy kind of stage, right, for thoughtful, deep empirical work. I mean, it's just literally there's no money in it. You know, one of the kind of, you know, of the sort of, you know, of the, you know, of the, myriad, you know, things going on. I mean, you can just kind of pull something out of the air. You can say, what does it mean that, you know, one of the, you know, five or six conglomerates that runs publishing has set publishing, which is, you know, the parent company of my publisher, is trying to sue the internet archive out of existence and took, you know, 500,000, I think, or 50,000 free books that you can rent. You can, you can borrow, like, out of a library off the internet, right? What does it mean that, you know,

Another publishing conglomerate, I forget which one, you know, tried to revive the progressive publishing imprint Pantheon books by hiring this magnificent figure named Lisa Lucas, who really was trying to reinvent publishing to make it kind of relevant for, you know, the 2020s and got celebrated and then the cover of the New York Times magazine, you know, and they just later off and shut down the imprint, right? My own publisher, Little Brown, you know, was downsized. And, you know, the people that went were the serious nonfiction editors. And that's just the way of talking about, you know, the media environment. You know, and jackass can knock down a barn like San Rayburn said, you know. But the idea that you can have carpenters who can get to patiently, you know. And one of the, you know, I would contrast this to, you know, people always ask to me to make parallels to the 1960. And they always want me to make kind of dumb glib parallels.

But here's a real interesting comparison, which is that in the 1960s, people knew that they were going through extraordinary times that they needed to figure out new ways to write and think about it. So we kind of saw things like the invention and the new journalism. You know, we saw new kinds of fiction, you know, new kinds of film. New, in-depth kinds of thinking about, you know, kind of America's imperial role and all this rich, rich stuff. and that is something we just don't have now. We have the take factory. Do you think that like we've actually, American culture has in a way run its course?

I mean, we are no longer creative. We are no longer developing anything new. I think lots of wonderful things are probably happening all over the place. I would push back and say. I always say the will to create the amazing things are indomitable. We've already mentioned one in this conversation. right and grementum over at substack.

Exactly, exactly. People will always be doing amazing. So I deeply deeply believe this. I mean, just got it on a level of culture. You know, I went to a freaking street festival in Chicago and, you know, saw this band called Phenom, F-I-N-O-M, these, you know, two young women who sounded like yes for the kind of like generation, ironic, you know, kind of generation-Z, you know, kind of tween generation. So much creativity, so much magnificent.

But those guys were probably beginning, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like getting contracts on capital records in 1970, you know, but they're playing street festivals in, you know, 2024. So, I mean, it's, to me, it's just, there's probably amazing stuff going out there, but, you know, the problem is the kind of institutional, you know, modes of distribution, you know. Yeah, the fragmentation. I mean, you have to get so lucky with substack. You have to get so lucky. You don't just have to be good. One more thing where you have a winner takes all economy, right? A neoliberal model. You know, I mean, I'm probably going to. going to do a substack, and I probably can do it because I have, you know, an audience that I've

built up. But I never like substack because it's this neoliberal model. I'd much rather work for a collectivity in which people are trying to create an institution helping each other, editing each other, you know. But, you know, those, those are high margin enterprises, low margin enterprises, I should say, you know, I mean, the fact that something like, you know, Vice, you know, which has been so important in covering the far right and kind of embedding kind of courageous reporters within kind of neo-Nazi spaces or something like the intercept, you know, is kind of like imploding. So the fact that this is happening now, you know, I mean, I'm not a 60s fetishist, but in the 60s, you know, you saw people building these kinds of institutions, not them kind of dying. I think that there's a tendency for people to read, to see a podcast. in their generation.

And then forget that an apocalypse is a change. It's a great change. And the world keeps going on and culture shifts and energies go elsewhere. You know, four of the most talented writers at Weiss that I worked with started a collective that's doing very well, 404 media. He was, one of them was the first guy with the news of the 18-10. T-Hack this week. So like, good things are still possible in America. Because people are good. People are straight. But, you know, it's just like, you know, the long, slow, steady damage of neoliberalism, shall we say, you know. And, you know,

maybe the left, you know, maybe liberalism. And, you know, just the devolution of all sorts of institutions into, you know, a vision of a war of all against all. I mean, that's J.D. Vance's vision, right? You know, the idea that, you know, liberal democracy, well, we try that. And let's just dominate. All right, angry planet listeners. We're to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this.

All right, Angry Planet listeners. Welcome back. We're on with Rick Pearlstein. I... Here we are. To the assassination stuff. Yeah, let's pivot to Assassins, if we can then.

Yeah, I meant to see the Sound High musical that I didn't get to it. You know, there's a, I don't even know where we, where, what, I think there's like cams available on YouTube. Well, it's kind of funny. You can kind of see like, you know, kind of like undergraduate, you know, kind of, you know, kind of like dad's super eight version. Yes, exactly.

That's actually, that's how I originally saw, saw it was a, um, a campus performance in Texas. was my first introduction to it. Then I ended up, like, tracking down the Neil Patrick Harris version. Anyway, I'm not going to go on a musical theater tangent right now. Presidential Assassins, loom large in American history, both successful and failed. We had a failed one on Saturday. We'll talk about, like, a meta-level about whether this question even matters in a second.

but I am curious, what do presidential assassinations typically, attempts typically mean for the candidates that survive? Do they mean anything? Well, the one I know best is Ronald Reagan's. And, you know, that guy, Edmund Morris, wrote a really shitty, irresponsible book about, you know, Ronald Reagan, Dutch. the one thing that he did really solidly was right about how the assassination, his survival of it, and his behavior

in the wake of it, just completely resuscitated his presidency. And, you know, I mean, he had a pretty rough go of it. You know, but, but, but, but it probably would have had a much rougher go of it. Had not he kind of established himself in the minds of the public as this,

resilient guy. He didn't quite raise his fist and say, fight, you know. And yeah, I mean, this guy, John Connolly, you know, I mean, the guy who survived the Kennedy assassination, I don't know if I've said this. I've been saying it all the time. I don't know if we were off the air on there, but he, he would keep his arm in a sling for years. And that was kind of like a standing joke that he'll have this arm in the sling forever to show what a, you know, tough, resilient guy he is. And he was incredibly ambitious and was always talked about both as a Democrat and then as a Republican as like a presidential possibility of presidential popular possibility until he finally did run for president in 1979 and tanked for reasons you can read about it in Reaganland. But I mean,

that was absolutely essential to his politics, was, you know, surviving this is as a assassination, kind of put him on the map nationally, as it were. Yeah, I'll just kind of stop. Reagan was obsessed with his own assassination. Yeah, so we were talking about this. I kind of, yes, I have a, I have, I have the, I have to write this piece, and I don't know if I'll write it now. Maybe I should let a decent interval pass.

I don't know. But Reagan had this, and here I am kind of putting it out of the ether. and, you know, maybe someone will steal it, but that's okay. He, we all know he was this kind of athlete the imagination, right? And this self-metologizer, you know, it was always kind of not just crafting kind of these melodramatic tales of good versus evil, but kind of figuring out ways to place himself at the center of them. And there's this pattern in his life, and it literally goes back to the 1940s, in which he kind of imagined his, own vulnerability to assassination and kind of rehearsed it in his own mind, I would argue.

You know, people know about Reagan know that he was the head of the screen actors guild during this, you know, big jurid's Dictional Strike in Hollywood that was, you know, quite violent. And he was basically supporting the kind of mobbed up company union against this up upstart militant left wing union that he that that you know basically the the the satchems of Hollywood decided was a communist front and Reagan completely picked up on this idea and one of the things that's I'm so I'm reading like Max Boots Reagan biography and it's really kind of quite unsparing and one of the things I'm so you know kind of gratified to see is that he just is like this was nonsense there was like there was no common

in this union. You know, they were going on strike during the war, which was, you know, way against communist policy. The guy on the other side of the strike said there were no communists in that union. You know, this one labor priest who investigated it, you know, very carefully said this is nonsense. There was no communist in this union. Reagan literally said that that was a conspiracy from the Vatican to kind of hide their communism. But he just decided that this was a communist attempt to take over Hollywood. In fact, one of the things I found in his papers was a contract to write a book about this. I think that what probably happened was it just, you know, they realized that this was nuts.

And I think it was the same contract that actually became his memoir. Like he kind of picked, you know, like he kind of made a deal. But during that violence, he writes in his first memoir, which came out in 1965, about how the police gave a gun to use because they said they were going to come after him. And, you know, it's quite possible that, you know, his life was in danger. that was the kind of situation it was, but he decided that this was his own kind of heroic stand against the communist conspiracy.

A guy who never fought in World War II, but kind of imagined himself as, you know, fighting the Cold War and it said. And, you know, kind of fast forwarding, there's this astonishing moment in the memoir of Jack Germand, fat man in the middle seat.

Are you guys old enough to remember Jack Germant? I am not. It was kind of a full, journalist who was on like one of those Sunday shows every week. So he's fat man in the middle seat and he's a centrist. But he wrote about how he was at dinner with Ronald Reagan in like 1975 and with John Sears. And they were kind of selling Reagan as, you know, a presidential candidate. And Reagan was going on and on about how all these assassination attempts that kept happening against Ford were obvious setups by Ford, you know, to kind of increase his political portions.

And, you know, Germant said, we knew this guy was, you know, loopy, even. then, you know, of course, he didn't necessarily say that when he was covering him. But, you know, after, after they're safely gone, they can kind of tell the truth, I guess. And then, you know, another situation was, you know, during that 76 campaign, someone was arrested for kind of threatening him with a fake gun, you know, at an event, which seems like a really stupid thing to do. But, you know, he kind of behaved in a very kind of, you know, apparently valorous way, you know, kind of the way we think about Trump today. And then, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, you know, the way he just behaved after his assassination and kind of knew how important it was to kind of make, strike this pose of vigor. And of course, he, he had these quips like at the ready, right? One of the things, what do you remember the famous quip he said to his wife that, of course, became public? He said, honey, I forgot the duck, right? So it's a little different from, you know, putting up your fist, but it was the genial Reagan version of that. And, you know, I discovered that Tony, I forgot to duck was what Jack Dempsey had said to his wife or to the press or whatever

after he got knocked out at Yankee Stadium against, you know, Jack Tony or something like that. So, I mean, it's just kind of this, this, and you know, in Reagan's, you know, mind and kind of the mythology of these superheroes of sports were kind of how he kind of, a lot of the ways he kind of structured this kind of thinking. And then, you know, just kind of going back to work and making sure that people saw him, you know, walking and that sort of thing. And then the final part of this, you know, kind of little riff I've kind of been thrown together over years is

he, and I did write about this, he asked and persuaded the Secret Service to let him carry a handgun in the briefcase he carried everywhere as president

because he wanted to be able to, if there was an assassination attempt, he wanted to be able to help them. you know, if you know how, you know, presidential secret service, presidential details work. I mean, it's just the craziest thing ever. And the guy that the idea that like the president of the United States was like carrying a gun everywhere, he went. They were kind of like humoring this old man who had these kind of hero fantasies, you know.

And, you know, you realize it kind of at this level of the game, a Donald Trump and, you know, probably from what we know about his ego, certainly Joe Biden. you know, they have these scenarios in their head. And if you watch this absolutely so much fascinating visual evidence and photographic footage, you know, the picture of the bullet, you know, about to whizz by his ear, you know, which is pretty handy and kind of shutting down some of the conspiracy theories, right? The fact that you watch this, this like, you know, one-minute video, what happened immediately afterwards, he's ducking behind the podium. He's kind of babbling.

He kind of's like, what about my shoes? Find my shoes. Find my shoes. And he kind of sounds pathetic. He kind of sounds like he just how he doesn't want to sound in public. And finally, we're like,

oh, the shooter's down. And we should maybe talk about the fact that the idea that you would assassinate an assassin as a security measure is very much of our era. It's very much of the post-9-11. Everything is terrifying. Everything's a threat, warrior cap mentality. And not the kind of mid-century, we are a nation of laws, not men. We got to bring the malefactor to justice.

So, you know, that's actually part of the melodrama, all this stuff, too. The famous scene where Rosie Greer, you know, basically subdued the assassin, I think, and someone says, we don't want another Oswald. You know, we need this guy alive. You know, we need to, we're Americans, right? We don't, we don't solve our problems with violence, right? which is how they do it now. So, you know, they literally blow the head off.

The Secret Service, well, they're not good enough to, like, you know, keep the guy off the roof, but they're good enough to blow his head off after, you know, after the damage is done. And that's when the Secret Service say, okay, we're clear. Shoot her down. So they clearly that was part of an operation. That was a plan. And then Donald Trump says, wait, wait, wait, wait.

As I'm about to move him off the stage. And he paused for a second, kind of composed himself. And that's when he puts his fist up and poses for the picture, basically. you know, this is, he had the presence of mine to kind of enact the script that was in his head, which is kind of what I feel like Reagan did. It's funny. I hadn't considered the fact that we, that his head was blown off immediately, but like I'm looking at the list right now. Like, Guto, captured trial hang, Cholgosh, captured trial. Yeah, there's a whole, you know, half the museum of the Martin Luther King Museum in Memphis is. how they found, you know, they found the assassin.

You know, that was really important. I mean, obviously finding criminals is important. But just the idea that we're never more American than when we, yeah, we find these people and bring them to justice. And now we've got this, this guy is dead and doesn't seem to have left much of a digital footprint. Obviously, people are pouring through his past, finding every single scrap of anything that we can. him. Yeah, you know, you know how we know he's Antisca, Matt. How?

The $15 donation he made when he was a 17. And also the fact that he's, you know, the fact that he's registered as a Republican, well, that's what those people do. Just to throw you off the set, right? False flag. No, no, no, so they can vote in the, so they can screw up the Republican people. Nice. I mean, clearly a very sophisticated operator.

Of course, yes. I mean, why else would he have appeared in a Black Rock advertisement, right? Oh, you haven't heard. You haven't heard about this? He was in, apparently Black. I mean, I'm busy. Black Rock visited his school and gave a lecture and he,

yeah, he was in the background of a couple of the shots. Black Rock has pulled the ad. It is real. It is him. Well, if only he had, you know, like, realize that, you know, he had a bright career ahead of him in high finance, he could have become advanced, you know. But, yeah, and that's another thing.

I mean, we'll talk about him, right? But yes, we'll talk about the figure of the, you know, alienated loan asses. I mean, that's the transition to talk about the figure of the alienated loan assassins. No, no, no. I mean, that's, I think that that's what's next. And I'm also struck by this through line of art affecting real life, affecting art, affecting real life, which also comes back into, into Reagan, right, with taxi driver and... So do we know

do we have a scenario in which the sky was affected by art? I mean, besides the kind of the art, such as it was at whatever, blowing shit up ranch... Demolition Ranch. At demolition ranch, which is a kind of art, right?

I mean, I would think, I would argue that people that age have absorbed far more YouTube-style content that they have like traditional visual media that like we would think of like television

and movies that that is to him like his media environment. Again, having not looked at his plate, like only going by the t-shirt that he was wearing and having not lit... Yeah, not to speculate, but that that sounds fair enough. Yeah, I mean, so what you're referring to with the Reagan assassination is absolutely

fascinating and really just kind of like such a perfect emblem of the kind of dark gothic side of the American story, you know, the kind of underside of the American dream. So here I am in Milwaukee, right? And that's my hometown. And a name that kind of, you know, I was just thinking about this, you know, how like when you were a kid, there would always be these kind of names you'd hear on the news. And they would never explain who they were. And parents, people kind of knew because there were these old stories, right? One of the things I learned was that Arthur Bremer was the guy who shot George Wallace in 1972 in Laurel, Massachusetts, right by the NSA, by the way.

It's right down the street from them. One time I went to like, for Nixon land, I was researching and I decided to go to the mall where he was shot, which was still there. And I literally took a long, wrong turn and ended up at the security gate at Fort Meade. And I was like, hey, guys, I'm going to see where George Wallace was shot. Oh, you mean Maryland? Sorry. You said, sorry, you said, Massachusetts. Oh, Laurel, Maryland. Yeah, it was right. It was like an out of between Washington

and Baltimore. So anyway, so he shot George Wallace in the shopping mall classic, you know, assassination scenario. And it turns out that this guy wrote a diary. He was from Milwaukee.

And the diary was actually found maybe like two miles from where I am now in the Bayview neighborhood of Milwaukee. Right underneath, they have these viaducts in Milwaukee, these kind of long bridges that go over this industrial valley, which separates the north and the south side. So somehow this was kind of buried. He buried his diary under this bridge. And it was found literally like across the street from my parents' office.

And this diary was published, not too many, like next year. I think it was published in 1973. I think like maybe Norman Mailer did an introduction or something like that. And it is like, it's perfect. It comes straight out of a 70s conspiracy movie. It's this weird, insane stream of consciousness document. You know, it's like the Sir Hans, Sir Hand text, which is that like, kill Robert Kennedy, kill Robert Kennedy,

kill Robert Kennedy, kill Robert Kennedy. He talks about, I mean, just this sad, lonely man working in a chocolate factory. And he talks about, you know, going to a massage parlor and trying to persuade the masseuse, the young woman to, you know, basically go all the way and, you know, talks about how maybe he can kill Nixon and how he's following Richard Nixon. And, you know, and, you know, this was a very familiar type to people who would have, you know, been around then from the kind of the Oswald scenario, just this lonely, sad, pathetic guy seeking meaning in his life. and we don't even need to go into the, you know, conspiracy part of it, which is a whole different world, you know, different kind of

part of this story. And yeah, so he ends up basically saying, oh, I'll shoot this guy. And very, very, very, very much is the direct inspiration for the script for taxi driver, which is, you know, basically

about a guy who assassinates a political candidate to impress a woman who has these fantasies of heroic rescue, you know, when it comes to, you know, the young prostitute played by Joey Foster. And it is in this movie, by watching this movie, that this guy who clearly identifies with the hero,

which is freaky enough, named John Hinkley, falls in love with Jody Foster. and decides that he's not going to do it to impress Candace Bergen, Bergman, but who played the girlfriend, but he is going to do this to impress Jody Foster. And this weird kind of psychosexual jumble in which, you know, he takes his girlfriend to a porn movie and doesn't understand why she's, you know, it's straight out of the kind of the weird dark imagination

that's got Arthur Bremmer. And there's there's a rumor that he was, you know, at the Oscar. ceremony, you know, when, when taxi driver didn't, or won the Oscar or something like that, or maybe, I don't remember what, what the rumor was, something to do with that. But so, you know, there's this weird kind of dark thread that kind of goes through all these things. But the figure of, you know, this kind of alienated loner, right, and everyone's trying to find profound meeting, right?

Oswald must be part of a CIA, LBJ, mafia conspiracy. It can't just be this, you know, it's too unbearable to think. that the world can stop turning on its axis because one guy taking a lucky shot, right? Which, you know, pretty much it always is. People who want attention. You know, one of the great essays, I think that kind of gets at this mentality is a piece by Tom Woof in one of his collections in which he says hijacking is the ultimate crime of the 1970s because it's always kind of lonely people who want attention and want to be on camera. You know, look at me, look at me, the me decade. And if you look at this guy, you know, you got the same classic profile, this kind of nerdy guy, kind of like has this sort of slightly creepy vibe.

Maybe he was bullied. Maybe he was not smart. And the thing that really sticks out with me is actually the job he had. And he's, you know, he also has this kind of like a Gen Z angle to it. He's 20 years old, but he lives with his parents, right? which is kind of what Charlie Kirk talked about in his speech last night. You know, that's what they want for you. But we have a better, you know, better dream for you.

It was very Reaganite. But this guy works at a nursing home. And he, you know, basically six feeding tubes into people and, you know, make sure the mush gets into these poor sad people's bloodstreams that, you know, kind of often don't have people visiting them. You know, the people who do this kind of work are, you know, underpaid, have no respect. those of us who had, you know, elderly parents-in-laws have kind of seen this. And you can just imagine this guy just kind of wallowing in enemy misery and saying, well, now I'm going to get people to pay attention to me. I'm going to be, everyone's going to know my name, which is this weird kind of obverse of, you know,

why people become Joe Biden or, or, you know, Barack Obama. You know, I'm going to make my mark on history. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, if you watch the documentary of, pumping iron on him, you know, in this mid-70s documentary, he says, you know, one of the guys says, oh, he's the kind of guy who wants to, he wants people to know his name hundreds of years from now. It's just like this panoply of like modern alienation, you know? And it's not a story really know as well now because I feel like the weird thing is like kind these kind of resentful alienated people kind of, I don't want to, you know, kind of make this too direct.

But that that structure of thought, that kind of psychological outlook, you know, does have its political expression in the MAGA movement, you know, I'm your vengeance, you know. That's interesting. But are these the same people who, like at Newtown and the, other kinds of shootings. School shooter types. I mean, or, yeah, it sounds like from what you said,

it sounds like, if, if this guy was, you know, four years older, and he would have been a school shooter. And I mean, certainly fits,

right? Yeah. I've heard an argument before that, um, there used to be more celebrity and political assassinations because security was laxer. And that, that,

that kind of alienated, young man angry at the world, that energy has moved to the place that's least defended, which is schools. The same kind of impulse just directed at the... Yeah, well, and lo and behold, it turns out the Secret Service is so crappy, you know. Maybe he's reading those articles, you know.

I mean, we don't know what this guy knows and doesn't know, but maybe he was reading those articles about, you know, the Secret Service guys, you know, getting drunk in South America, you know, between presidential events. You know, I mean, it's certainly been in the media. You know, everyone knows the Secret Service sucks, you know. They're just, you know, one more group of douchebags with a different badge, you know, who just kind of don't seem to know what they're doing.

Another set of institutional failures, this kind of once proud service that, you know, I mean, they were Superman, right? They were the guys who, you know, would jump on a body, you know, jump on a, jump on the president, take a bullet for him, right? you know, where's John Lewis, right? I mean, where are the people who are, you know, putting their bodies on the line, sacrificing for the greater good, right? And, you know, it's kind of interesting.

We do kind of have this guy, this fireman who died, who's also kind of being raised up as a martyr and a hero. And, you know, I mean, it seems like just bad luck, right? He's got in the line of fire and, you know, God bless him and, you know, think about his family. But I, you know, you guys know I'm obsessed with nine line coffee, you know, know, and the kind of, you know, like, I don't think you guys, so I wrote a column about the, the phenomenon of, um, kind of ethical culture chic in consumer products. And nine line, you know, so I follow, I got a

Google alert for them, and nine line coffee just put out a t-shirt with the firefighter who died. And, you know, people are desperate for heroes, right? I mean, this guy is, you know, whatever else he is, he's probably a hero as a firefighter, but he wasn't a hero that day. He was just a guy who happened to be a firefighter and happen to die. Am I wrong? No. No, you're not wrong. But that is one thing that kind of shocked me,

I guess I shouldn't have shocked me. The merchification of the moment in the immediate aftermath. Right. Right. And I'd see any of that. Well, I told you I saw the guy with the T-shirt that said, Hey, Joe, it was an assassination attempt.

Oh, yeah. People have. Well, you can already picture what some of the other merch is going to be. I mean, there's going to be a special kind of sneaker that Trump will sell ear bandages, you know, with a signed by the president. I can't, I don't think I can like bear kind of going inside of the halt and I can give myself a night off and just kind of walk around the perimeter where all the swag is. So I'll let you know what I say. I mean, look, I mean, I, you know, I mean, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, um, Republicans are really good at this. I remember in, you know, 2012 or which one was it?

I've been to, you know, they all run together. The one where they, the audience seemed to spontaneously break into a chant. Well, it must have been Sarah Palin, you know, since we're going to have, you know, all the above energy policy. And then people seem to spawning as they start chanting drill, baby drill, drill, drill, baby drill. And then you walk out of the hall and there were drill baby drill t-shirts. You didn't read about that in New York Times probably.

They treat it like it's real. So. I love that note of anguish and you've always called that. Well, it's just, I will say, I guess I'll put it this way, that I've been pretty sanguine about things and fairly hopeful for America in general. And then, but the last couple weeks have not been great. And Wednesday night, I happened to win, or Saturday night, when this. when this assassination attempt happened. I happen to have a personal friend over who was a war correspondent,

a retired war correspondent, say, and has spent time in a lot of war zones, has been in Somalia and everywhere, essentially. And he was very frightened and very frightening that evening as we were kind of watching the aftermath of, because we were set to eat. at seven and like it happened at like 645 so you know we've got the news on and we're watching as he walks in the door and he's like what happened and he's watching this and I'm and a a guy whose job

it is to be in a place where civil war is happening and document it and kind of understand the reasons why they occur is giving me unpleasant indications that he is worried about the future Right. And then Monday comes, like the weekend passes Monday comes, newsrooms are all hopping around this thing. It is the story of the moment.

And then J.D. Vance gets picked as the vice presidential nominee. And there's something about that pick specifically. Yeah. The guy who has a book called Unhuman about the left. I'm sorry. What? You know the guy Jack Prozze Wax? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

whatever called unhuman. You know, he's a Pizza Gate guy, right? He's a... Yeah, he can't serve his book Unhuman. Good. That's great to know. No, it's just more of, more of that kind of thing where... Everything, everything, what is that movie? Everything always all at once.

Yeah. All at once. In this, J.D. Vance, this guy that's my age, who is a poster, who seems to have sold out his own family, who is obsequious, servile. Doesn't seem to believe in anything except personal power. And this is maybe more overtly political than we've ever gotten on this show before. But the bad pick, a bad pick and a frightening pick, I think. And so it just, like, for some reason, the assassination attempt in the picking of J.D.

Vance back to back. Right. Well, let's all, you know, so you know my, my paradigm for explaining the world these days is the infernal triangle. That's the book I'm working on, it's name of my column. And the infernal triangle is, you know, the authoritarian right, the factless Democratic Party. But it's also the bridge between all this, which is, you know, the incompetence media. And, you know, which really does seem to be biting on the narrative that Trump intends to, you know, tone down his rhetoric and do it. Why can't we? I'll get along, shtick, which is, you know, really, what kind of, what kind of, what kind of carnival barker fleece rude do you have to be to, you know, buy that? And, and the Republican Party immediately, you know, figured out that all they need to do to work the refs with this is say, well, yeah, we all have to tone down the rhetoric, starting with the Democrats, stopping complaining about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy. And the media seems to be buying that, too. So they deserve you know, they deserve, you know, a cauldron of boiling oil, you know,

rhetorically speaking too. Yeah, I've always wondered, like, speaking as a person who spent the majority of their life in these newsrooms. Yeah. Like, you know, like AP and New York Times and all that. It's never the reporters and the stringers and the correspondents. It's always the guys with names like Washington Correspondents. or, you know, White House reporter or, you know, national...

The people are supposed to tell you what something means, not just what happened. Yeah, the people who's jabbitist to explain to other journalists what they're supposed to... What story they're supposed to be telling about the world, agenda setters. Right. Well, I mean, there's also just this whole thing where people are so afraid in these news meetings to say the wrong thing. And, like, you know, you go to the big boy table. Yeah. And, you know, being polite and decorous differential. It's Ivy League.

It is. It's Ivy League, you know, kind of, you know, eating club, you know. Yeah, and it's the opposite of what newsrooms used to be. Right. I mean, you know, like poker and, you know, hard drinking. Well, I mean, you know, I'm 53, but I actually got a chance to see some of that shit for myself because my mom worked at the New York Daily News. Oh, wow. And it was filled with a car.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, so, I mean, you know, they really did have everything was filled with smoke. Everybody did drink. I mean, you know, all this stuff. They didn't go to college. They didn't go to college. And they certainly didn't get master's degrees.

I mean, give me a fucking break with the master's degree. You're going to spend $100,000 to earn $35,000? This feels dangerously close to idealizing a prelapsarian past. Yeah, well, that's a part. Yeah. We need more lapses. No, I mean, I don't have, I mean, I, you know, we could talk for three hours about our theories about why, you know, kind of elite journalism is the way it is, but it ain't right. It's part of the problem.

And I think, you know, I mean, one of the, one of the rhetorical advantages I have as a historian is I always say, 50 years from now, people will look at this and say this. And I think people 50 years ago will look back in their cell, they'll say, wait a sec, this happened. but this is how it was explained, you know? You know, it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So some judge who was like, whatever, 40 years old, who has like no qualifications just, like, affected her own constitutional coup and got to decide that, you know, the former president gets to keep his own nuclear documents

because someone didn't dot the right eye and cross the right T. Well, could we mention that she was appointed by him? Pointed by him. I mean, yes, in any other context, that would be called a constitutional. coup, you know. Yeah. Well, I mean, when George W. Bush was given the election by people he and his father had appointed. Right.

You know, he, I'm sorry, his father had appointed. Emilyto later said that the, that Bush, the argument that he, that they, that Bush v. Gore turned on was shit. Can I let me. All right. Thanks very much. Let me ask this is a, sorry, a medic question to see us out. What is the role of the historian in a moment like this?

Oh, man, to, you know, find the kindness buddy he can find. And, you know, no, just kidding. You don't have to cut that. That's okay. It's legal where I live. I mean, so this is interesting. When you, Matt, when you reached out to do this podcast, I, you know, waited 24 hours, which is not usual. You know, I'm like, you know, one of those assassinations are presidential candidates.

I need people thinking about my name, you know, getting. that out there. But I did kind of realize that like I'm so kind of overwhelmed that my pores are so open to all this stuff after all these years. And my instinct is just to like immediately start kind of whack-a-moling the bullshit. And there's just way too much and that I just needed to like, I couldn't possibly, you know. So what I just kind of decided to do as I went on Twitter and I said, hey, I'm not going to say anything for a while. I'm just going to think and absorb. And hopefully, hopefully I can model some kind of, you know, sagacious kind of patience and big picture thinking that isn't glib, that isn't cynical, that isn't tendentious.

I think that's something, something I might honor in the breach sometimes. And, you know, I resist the temptation of authority. I think that, you know, nobody knows anything. I constantly am telling reporters, don't call historians, ask the people who are involved in these events, right? There's no, we don't have some skeleton key. This is not 1968. This is not 1972. This is 2024.

And just kind of counsel as much as humanly possible, some kind of kind of, kind of. of calm absorption of what is happening without sentiment, without fear, without favor. I'm not going to say without bias because I think, you know, my bias is towards, you know, preserving democracy and fighting fascism, you know. Just maybe a little bit of calm. Maybe a little bit calm, which, you know, I don't know, I'm pretty, pretty histrionic when it comes to this stuff. So maybe, but I think that hopefully I'm appropriate to the movement and not, you know, I've certainly been accused of disaster porn. But I mean, what can I tell you? You know,

I mean, when you have war correspondence coming back from Mogadishu and saying, oh, this reminds me of that, you know, something, something's happening here and what it is ain't exactly clear. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gold, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. I was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, please go to Angry PlanetPod.com, kick us $9 a month. You get early commercial free access to all of the episodes, and you get bonus episodes, another one, cooking soon. This one got released mainline and commercial free at the same time because we recorded it on the Tuesday after the Saturday. I edited it on a Wednesday.

I'm releasing it Thursday morning. God knows the news is moving. moving so fast right now, but I have no idea what things are going to be like on Friday. So I just figured it was best to just get this out the door. I'm hoping everyone understands. We will be back soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.