The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Donald Trump and the Dark Magic of Violent Political Rhetoric

[fishwax]

Just some thoughts I wanted to work through tonight, as I've been processing the events of the past couple of days; these thoughts are a function of trying to both practice with a lower rhetorical temperature while still maintaining a clear-eyed analysis of the very different roles that the two parties and their various figures have played in escalating that rhetoric over the years ...

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a poem written by Goethe but made more famous through an animated Mickey Mouse sequence from Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, involves an apprentice who summons powerful magic with disastrous results. It’s a function of pride and laziness: though he has not yet mastered the craft of magic, he feels he can charm a broom to complete the difficult work of hauling water by the pail. At first Mickey is happy with his work, because the broom’s labor gives him rest and brings more water than he could ever have hauled on his own. But it also gives him delusions of grandeur. He keeps casting spells, until eventually he and his quarters are overrun with water, while the broom labors on and Mickey is powerless to stop it. I’ve been thinking about the story a lot in the 30+ hours since a twenty-year-old opened fire at a Trump campaign rally. The shooter took the life of one audience member, injured a couple of others, and left the sorcerer’s apprentice bleeding from his ear.

Donald Trump did not invent political violence, nor introduce extreme political rhetoric to the American system. It had been simmering for years before Trump entered as a legitimate player on the national political scene, with his campaign to de-legitimize Barack Obama’s presidency by spreading false information about Obama’s birth certificate. But while he didn’t invent it, he was more willing to use it as a tool than any other candidate before him. It was his willingness to lean into the brewing anger—to encourage it, to invite it into the mainstream, and to legitimize its more radical elements—that set him apart from other republicans. The previous two GOP presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, tried to harness the energy of the tea party while still maintaining control of the party’s platform and direction. Trump’s approach, instead, was to generate as much of that dark energy as possible: by stoking the already-politicized anger on the fringe while politicizing anger anywhere else he could find it. That was the magic spell. That was the shortcut to power, and around the difficult work of mastering any practical political craft. And so Trump offered and/or encouraged one incantation after another: “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” “Make America Great Again.” “Lock her up.” And a whole host of brooms started hauling that water.

And for years, that tide has been rising. As Project 2025 began making waves in the national news, the head of the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, claimed that we were in the midst of a new American revolution that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The GOP candidate for North Carolina governor, who has a long history of attacks on LGBT communities and anti-semitism, declared at a rally (in a church, no less) that “some folks need killing.” Trump used social media to amplify fringe calls for charges of treason against Liz Cheney and the imprisonment of various democratic elected officials. These are just a few examples, and from just the weeks immediately before the assassination attempt. But that water has been rising for years now.

Small wonder, then, that Democratic officials, who have been calling attention to this rising tide for years, were univocal in their condemnation of political violence in the wake of the shooting. Republican officials, too, condemned political violence, but they were not as univocal, and several condemned Joe Biden in the same breath. J.D. Vance, for instance, rumored to be on the shortlist for Trump’s VP spot, said the Biden Campaign’s rhetoric “led directly” to the assassination attempt. (This was, of course, before the shooter was revealed to be a registered republican.) Representative Mike Collins of Georgia tweeted that Biden should be immediately charged with “inciting an assassination.” Online, there were, predictably, folks on both sides of the spectrum who were pulled into conspiracy mongering and harsh rhetoric. But it is a clear and crucial difference that only one party had elected officials who were using this moment in time to amplify that sort of rhetoric. The rising tide that has normalized political rhetoric once seen as fringe and extreme is, for officials such as these, simply the water in which they swim. Trump, for his part, has thus far not framed the incident in these terms. But while the apprentice recovers from his wound and from the shock, the brooms continue in their work, because this sort of magic can never really be controlled.

In Fantasia, as in Goethe’s poem, the humbled apprentice realizes the error of his ways, and the sorcerer returns to save the day. We aren’t likely to see such a tidy resolution for this present darkness. Leaders on both sides of the aisle call on the nation to “lower the temperature” of our political rhetoric, and perhaps Trump will amplify that perspective, but I find little in his history to suggest that Trump will be reflective about the heat that his own rhetoric has propagated. I suppose time will tell. Still, either way, humans, unlike Mickey's broom, have some measure of agency, and so whatever role he played in raising the rhetorical temperature, Trump is not responsible for the actions of the shooter. Further, whatever lessons Trump may or may not draw from this incident, most would agree that, just as Mickey Mouse wouldn't deserve death at the end of Fantasia, Trump didn’t deserve to be shot in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Meanwhile: There is no master sorcerer waiting in the wings with a counter-spell. No single person can sweep in and save us from this. We, as a people, will have to solve this ourselves. I don’t entirely know what that solution looks like, but I am pretty confident in this: if the electorate really cares about lowering the temperature, then we ought not turn around and put the sorcerer's apprentice back in power.

[fishwax]

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