If you’re like me — if you’re like nearly every American last night — you reacted to the attempted assassination of President Donald J. Trump with shock. I’ve been fielding a million questions from my twelve-year old since we got the news, and my answers to her are tinged with the reflexive disbelief that this could happen. After all, this is America.
There is another emotion after shock, though, born of it but more enduring and more powerful: resolve.
That resolve is deeply consequential, and we must remember why we have it and what it is for. That means remembering the thing that precedes all else: who we are. There is a pretty simple answer to that one.
We are Americans. We are Texans. The second is just the perfection of the first.
Our forefathers fought for America, and then for Texas, for one thing above all else: to live in liberty. Liberty means several things, but one of the things it means is living in law. We are here, in our republic, because we are not, and do not wish to be, the sort of nation that is ruled by the arbitrariness of aristocracies or the violent. We do not adjudicate our politics through the gun. We don’t. What we saw in Pennsylvania today is the sad truth that there are some men out there who will — and do.
In my leadership of the Foundation, I get to spend some time in Mexico. Our work isn’t in the nice parts of Mexico that the tourists see. We work with men and women who know firsthand what a society of lawlessness looks like — and have paid the price. Our stricken neighbor to the south convulses in blood and agony because its elites are alternately corrupt, criminal, or uncaring about their own nation: qualities amplified by the cartel pesos that go their way. America is nothing like that now, but we can discern a comparable future in the nature of our regime elites now — who will do nothing to stop the erosion of their own power and privileges. If that means ending a society of law and justice, then their answer is: so be it.
Right now they’ve convinced themselves that the reelection of President Donald J. Trump is an existential threat to themselves. They’re probably right about that. As I write this, we still don’t know much about the would-be assassin in Pennsylvania. We do, however, know that the rhetoric and the panic on the far left would lead, logically and ineluctably, precisely to this kind of act. That is who they are, and we must understand.
Who we are is entirely different. Because we are Americans and Texans, because we live in law and liberty, we know what our resolve is for. Once the shock evaporates, we resolve to keep fighting, to keep working, to keep laboring, to keep praying — all the things a free people do — as the only proper responses to the recourse to violence. It isn’t just because we’ve seen what happens to a nation when violence becomes the norm, although we have. It isn’t because there isn’t a field of battle out there, because there is.
That field of battle, though, is moral. The man with the gun trying to kill a President is doing it because he already lost the argument. We are the winners. And we’re going to keep winning — and keep the America, and the Texas, that we love.