Chuck Todd: What if we can't unite?

There’s been an odd numbness in the political ecosystem regarding the apparent second attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump.

There’s been an odd numbness in the political ecosystem regarding the apparent second attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump. We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.

Yet I fear some of the underreaction has to do with the fact that we are now so close to Election Day that some people are calibrating their responses through the prism of whether what they say will help or hurt their partisan causes, rather than stepping back and asking themselves critically how we got here.

And unfortunately, I think, the broader electorate and the media are more concerned about that larger question than any of the elected leaders we have collectively put in charge of our democracy. It's frustrating watching the effort to exploit this episode for political gain, which is only feeding the divide, not healing it.

Just look at Trump's initial response to the apprehension of a man armed with a rifle who was spotted on the perimeter of his golf course. Unlike after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, when he and his team embraced the approach of “let’s have cooler heads prevail” and left some of the more heated rhetoric to other Republicans, there has been none of that this time.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect. That initial attempt to overtly politicize the situation has most likely accelerated the collective numbness to the event itself. Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to. It is simply feeding an audience what it thinks it wants, rather than deciding whether it should be responsible and provide nuance and context. It is hardly alone.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303

---