You see, if people are led to believe it is tied, then it must also be true that half of America thinks it’s somehow okay to pick Trump, despite everything we know about him. It normalizes him. It tells us all that these horrific things don’t matter, and we begin to believe that because the polls are telling us so.

How sad it must be believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty. Especially when he’s the one you should fear the most. The one who will hurt you the fastest.

Note that the second would-be assassin is, like the first, also a white male. He is not an immigrant, a Haitian or a drag queen. He’s a gun enthusiast who voted for Trump in 2016 but soured on him by 2020, and whose social media indicates he is a vaccine conspiracy theorist while supporting a Haley/Ramaswamy GOP ticket. Not exactly a stable individual. The first time Trump was shot at, there was a collective gasp from the public and an outpouring of condemnation of political violence. This time feels different. Once again, the perpetrator, however unstable is a statistically predictable outgrowth of the very toxic political environment that Trump himself created. Like his second indictment, this second attempt feels like more of the same, with Trump himself to blame for much of it.