I was not especially appalled—not at first, anyway—when I heard, on the evening of July 13, 2024, that Donald Trump had been shot at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. We’ve been stuck in the current moment like a stylus on a scratched record; perhaps this evil act would finally get us back in the groove. But the more I learned about the shooting and the would-be assassin, the more I knew that the shots fired in Butler would only stick us more deeply in the moment.
The 180-page F.B.I report released in December by the Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump filled in the details but told us little more than we already knew: the Secret Service screwed up that day, as did the local cops; the particle slipped through the mesh; the would-be killer was killed; having been killed, investigated, and searched, he turned out, from all indications, to have been acting in the classic American manner—alone.
