The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, stunned America and the world.
On July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old male from nearby Bethel Park, fired eight rounds with what authorities described as an “AR-style rifle.” He wounded President Trump, killed one man, and wounded two others.
The assassination attempt failed, but Donald Trump wasn’t the only one who dodged a bullet on that late afternoon in July. In a culture where political hostilities are already white hot, had Trump been killed, America might have torn itself apart.
Wounded and dying
As most of us are aware, the past 60 years in America have seen a handful of attempted assassinations of high-profile politicians. We know that some were successful, resulting in the murders of President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. We also know that some attempts were not: Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan both survived, although the latter was hit by gunfire, and, for a while, his survival was not certain.
However, it is stunning to realize that, following the assassination of President Kennedy, there have been plots against every president since. That list includes Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton (and wife Hillary), George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Every single one.
Does that say something about only the individuals involved in the assassination plots, our culture, or both?
Answering that question is not easy. After all, human beings are incredibly complex – psychologically and spiritually. Toss hundreds of millions of them together into the same country, and the complexity of our culture increases exponentially. Understanding the causation behind any particular social pathology becomes extremely difficult; assigning blame for a single act – like aiming an AR-15 at a presidential candidate – becomes even more so.
As evidenced by the human body, of course, complexity is not necessarily a bad thing, if individual parts are operating in harmony. However, should a traumatic injury occur, if cells break down due to sickness, or if a poison or venom enters the bloodstream, then complexity turns into chaos; corruption and even death can be the result.
Isaiah 1:5-6 compares the nation of Israel to a body that’s so sick there is nothing healthy in it:
“Where will you be stricken again, as you continue in your rebellion? The entire head is sick and the entire heart is faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head there is nothing healthy in it, only bruises, welts, and raw wounds; not pressed out nor bandaged, nor softened with oil.”
That sounds like America in 2024. The ills afflicting our nation are legion and lethal: surging violence, crime, and chaos in the nation’s biggest cities; homeless encampments that look like a post-apocalyptic disaster; addictions to strange new drugs that turn victims into twitching zombies – or corpses; collapsing public educational systems that not only fail to teach children basic skills, but instead infect them with a deep hatred for their own country; stunning levels of sexual perversion and gender confusion that are tormenting our children; economic struggles that are crushing families under immense stress; and a soaring national debt that may be reaching catastrophic levels.
Divided and warring
Perhaps most discouraging of all is that America is so bitterly divided that it is devouring itself and splitting apart at the seams. Many people believe the depth of hatred between warring political and cultural camps is deeper than ever. For example, an April 2024 Ipsos poll found that 78% of Americans said they believed our country is more divided than it was just a decade ago.
With his brash-and-brawling New York City style, Trump is certainly responsible for some of that division. While the cultural fractures were already present before his first campaign even began, his insults, combativeness, and social media trolling undoubtedly exacerbated the problem.
However, since the moment he announced he was running for president on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump has been the target of the most virulent, widespread, and incessant campaign of verbal violence in our lifetime.
For example, comedian George Lopez posted a cartoon of Trump’s severed head on social media; actress Rosie O’Donnell wanted to push him off a cliff; and singer Madonna said she wanted to blow up the White House after Trump was in office.
Actor Robert De Niro was far milder in his hostility; he merely wanted to punch Trump in the face.
In the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) noted in a social media post on X: “Democrats and liberals in the media have called Trump a fascist. They’ve compared him to Hitler. They’ve tried to lock him up. They tried to remove his Secret Service protection. Just this week, [President Joe Biden] said he wanted to put Trump in the crosshairs.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who serves as House majority leader, also noted that Democrats were “fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning reelection would be the end of democracy in America.”
Biting and devouring
This depth of division in a society is deadly, because the anger and bitterness that separate individuals can lead to the demise of all those engaged in the conflict.
In Isaiah 9:18-21, Israel faced the same dire situation as we do. The prophet said, “No man spares his brother. … Manasseh devours Ephraim, and Ephraim Manasseh, and together they are against Judah.”
This passage – and indeed the entire chapter – is a perfect illustration of the complexity of national disintegration. At first it appears that the horrors are solely caused by human evil: “For wickedness burns like a fire; it consumes briars and thorns; it even sets the thickets of the forest aflame and they roll upward in a column of smoke” (v. 18).
However, the very next verse seems to indicate that the conflagration is due to the power of divine judgment: “By the fury of the Lord of hosts the land is burned up, and the people are like fuel for the fire” (v. 19).
So, which is it? Is our desperate state the result of our own iniquities, or has heaven unleashed the power of holy retribution? The answer is yes. The two are inexorably intertwined. It is useless to try to unravel and identify the strands, because it cannot be done. They form a circle where cause and effect reinforce each other in a loop that spirals downward to its fateful end. The laws created by God to govern the moral universe apply just as inexorably to America as they did to Israel.
Moreover, the cure for the illness is the same either way: national repentance and a return to God. Yet, like Israel in Isaiah’s day, so few Americans seem to care that we are careening toward devastation. Or if they do care, they appear unwilling to imagine that the God of heaven is calling us to a spiritual restoration. How can we bandage our wounds if we refuse to admit we are dying?
If the need for another great awakening was the only issue, that would be daunting enough. It would require Christian repentance, prayer, and holiness on the level of the famous passage in 2 Chronicles 7:14; it would necessitate the dedicated preaching of the gospel by every believer in America in ways few of us have contemplated.
Hating and rebelling
Yet, as important as all that is, what if there is something else afoot in our country? Yes, America is drowning in spiritual darkness; yes, we are at each other’s throats; yes, the hand of divine judgment is upon our land. But is there another ingredient that has been thrown into the pot – something that most Christians have not recognized?
Again, the answer is yes. While many of our problems are the result of typical human persistence in idolatry and indifference to the things of God, there are also people in outright rebellion against the Almighty. The nation is being manipulated by forces intent on our destruction, and these God-haters are fully resolved to reconstruct on the ruins something entirely different from that mapped out by our Founding Fathers.
This was clear, for example, in the aftermath of the violent and destructive protests during the summer of 2020. In terms of dollars alone, the protesting, rioting, looting, and burning that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis were the most destructive in history, according to a review by Axios. Across 140 cities in 20 U.S. states, the damage cost the insurance industry between $1 billion and $2 billion, shattering the previous record of $775 million in riot damage in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict.
Equally disturbing, however, were some subsequent statements in the aftermath of the 2020 riots, as several high-profile Democrats called for protests to continue – especially against Trump and his policies. It was almost as if they wanted the destruction to continue too.
For example, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said about the protests, “They’re not gonna stop … and they should not.”
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wondered aloud at a press conference, “I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country.”
Remember, at the time of these statements, the nation had witnessed the meltdown of entire cities; family businesses had been firebombed and stores looted. The streets were filled with a chaotic rage.
It should have been a time to calm the nation, not aggravate and incite further hostilities, but that was not the route taken by leftists.
Praying and voting
If America is unraveling, it is fair to lay much of the blame at the feet of the increasingly radical political Left. It is the cause of much of the strain on our nation as it pulls apart.
Journalist Kevin Drum, who currently runs his blog, Jabberwocking, published a famous article in 2021 titled “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals.”
Drum is a liberal who says he is mostly happy with how far left the liberals have pushed things, but his honest take was refreshing. “Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot-button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.
“The truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary,” Drum said.
He is right. It’s hard to believe that the Democratic Party is in favor of allowing children to learn about anal sex in school and get an abortion without parental notification; in Democrat-run California, a new law allows public school teachers to withhold from parents the gender transitioning of their own children.
There is venom running through the veins of the American body just as surely as welts covered Israel in the biblical figure – and the venom was injected by the bite of a serpent bent on revolution.
Make no mistake – a revolution is underway. The radical Left reviles the restrictions on unlimited power placed in its way by the Constitution; it detests the moral strictures of the Christian faith; it abhors the patriotic fervor of conservatives; and it loathes the nationalistic – and simultaneously anti-globalist – leanings of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
In the minds of many on the secular Left, burning down the American experiment is the only way to clear out the rubbish to make way for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
In addition to preaching the gospel to our neighbors, while also attending critically important prayer meetings for our nation, Christians need to understand the “just plain scary” ideas of those who are working toward that revolution.
Then, followers of Christ need to get involved politically – especially by voting – before America becomes completely unrecognizable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson famously penned the words, “the shot heard round the world,” referring to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord, which initiated the American Revolutionary War. That was a revolution that changed the world for the better.
The rounds fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks at former President Donald Trump might have missed their intended target, but our nation had better not miss the dangers that those shots portend.
(Digital Editor's Note: This article was published first in the October 2024 print edition of The Stand. Click HERE for a free six-month subscription.)
