Many in higher education didn’t waste time jumping on Saturday’s attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania.
Perhaps most noteworthy is the University of Southern California’s Shaun Harper, who ended up having his article deleted by Forbes after he hypothesized that Trump’s “surviving gunfire” could result in appealing to black voters.
Harper, who in 2022 claimed that if the January 6 “insurrectionists” had been primarily black they’d have been “massacred,” wrote that Trump conceivably might say “And the Blacks, they love me because they know the terrifying sound of gunshots.” He added “Hopefully he doesn’t. But it isn’t at all unthinkable.”
The USC Race and Equity Center executive director also theorized Trump “could claim” that raising his fist shortly after being nicked by the would-be assassin’s bullet was an “homage” to the raised black-gloved fists of track stars Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games.
The University of British Columbia’s Karen Pinder, whose faculty page notes she “is dedicated to excellence in education in the UBC M.D. undergraduate program,” tweeted shortly after the shooting “Damn, so close. Too bad” (pictured).
In response to a commenter saying she “reeeeally wished the [shooter] had better aim,” Pinder replied “What a glorious day this could have been.”
Pinder’s X account has since been made inactive.
The University of Massachusetts at Lowell’s Arie Perliger wrote in The Conversation that the Trump shooting “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.”
MORE: Professors bemoan Donald Trump’s announcement of his presidential run
Perliger, a “principal investigator” for a just-under $1 million Department of Justice-funded project on mis/disinformation, went on to decry the “increasing [political] polarization” in the United States since 2008″ … and specifically cited the Tea Party movement.
The University of Guelph’s Shoshanah Jacobs, in response to Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre’s tweet expressing relief that Trump’s suspected shooter had been shot dead by the Secret Service, wrote “We’re executing suspects now?”
When it was pointed out the suspect was killed because he was still an active threat, Jacobs replied “Do we have to be happy?”
American University’s Allan Lichtman worried in the Los Angeles Times that “Republicans would use the [Trump] attack to assail Democrats, running the ‘danger of whipping up more political violence.’”
Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox, who “presides” over a university and Associated Press/USA Today “mass killings” database, said the attempted assassination should bring gun control to the fore as a campaign issue.
“The Republican party has been rather reluctant to back sensible gun control measures,” Fox told Northeastern Global News. “Their party leader has been shot. Fortunately, he didn’t get mortally wounded, but it certainly should help them reconsider some of their stances on sensible gun safety measures.”
Fox’s Northeastern colleague Costas Panagopoulos, while conceding the shooting could lead to more sympathy for the 45th president, said it also “could potentially be damaging” for him — because “many believe he has stoked the fires of political violence and division for political advantage.”
UCLA School of Law professor Peter Arenella worried on X that U.S. democracy “was already hanging by a thread” before the Trump assassination attempt, and now the “iconic picture of Trump raising his fist in defiance with our flag waving behind him will lead to his election and the loss of our democracy.”
Arenella also noted his first instinct (“without any factual basis,” he admitted) upon hearing news of the shooting was that Trump had staged it as the former president has made him “so cynical of everything he does.”
The “only silver lining” of the shooting, Arenella added, was that the media might cease “obsessing” over President Biden’s verbal gaffes.
MORE: Harvard prof: Rise of Donald Trump similar to Jim Crow, KKK era
IMAGES: George, Libs of TikTok/X
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