Progressive academics had mixed reactions to the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally. There were those who welcomed it, while others viewed it as a false-flag operation staged by the Trump campaign itself.
University of British Columbia Professor Karen Pinder tweeted shortly after the shooting “Damn, so close. Too bad.” In response to a commenter saying she “reeeeally wished the [shooter] had better aim,” Pinder replied “What a glorious day this could have been.”
Bellarmine University instructor John James posted on Instagram: “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss,” and included a screenshot of an article on the assassination attempt. James teaches English classes.
Other professors argued that the attempted assassination was staged by Trump to improve his chances of winning the election. University of Virginia Assistant Professor Sethunya Mokoko claimed on X that the incident was “theatrics” and an attempt to gain voters’ sympathy. Mokoko wrote that “trump & secrete [sic] service staged theatrics to win idiots’ vote.”
UCLA School of Law professor Peter Arenella worried on X that the “iconic picture of Trump raising his fist in defiance with our flag waving behind him will lead to his election.” Arenella also said his first instinct upon hearing of the shooting was that Trump had staged it as the former president has made him “so cynical of everything he does.”
University of Massachusetts at Lowell Professor Arie Perliger wrote that the Trump shooting would feed conservative narratives of victimization “for many of the people on the far right, fits very well into a narrative that they’ve already been constructing and disseminating for the last few months.” Perliger, a “principal investigator” for a $1 million Justice Department-funded project on misinformation, went on to decry the “increasing polarization” in the United States since 2008,” criticizing the Tea Party movement.
Progressive academics have long hated the Tea Party movement, which called for curbs on government spending. An article in the taxpayer-funded National Library of Medicine claims that Tea Party activists took the political positions they did because they were stuck in the anal stage of development. It adds, “Extreme resistance to governmental taxation and authority is derived, according to Freud’s theory of anal characterology, from premature and harshly coercive toilet training, in which a child is forced unfairly and against its will to surrender the products of his eliminations (which represent money, among other things, in the unconscious) to parental authority. Among these individuals anal eroticism plays a significant role in the psychogenesis of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, which may represent a defense mechanism erected against repressed fears of passive submission.”
University of Southern California professor Shaun Harper contended that Trump’s “surviving gunfire” might help him with black voters.
American University’s Allan Lichtman contended in the Los Angeles Times that “Republicans would use the [Trump] attack to assail Democrats, running the ‘danger of whipping up more political violence.’”
