The Infernal Triangle: The Sound of One MAGA Attacking

In 2016, a Twitter account called “FutureRickPerlstein” appeared, then suddenly went inactive. It documented convergences that spoke to the surreal nature of the new political era that was aborning with the political emergence of Donald J. Trump; the kind of things the titular Perlstein might feature in a book on the history of the 2016 election written 50 years from now in the style of his (OK, my) books like Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland. Like, you know, the time Donald Trump said the reason Mitt Romney lost was that he didn’t run a video of Donald Trump saying, “Barack Hussein Obama, you’re fired!” at the 2012 Republican National Convention. “They thought it was too controversial. Stupid people. The cinematographer said it was one of the best things he ever did.”

I was flattered by how well this mysterious tweeter captured what I try to accomplish: to convey the thump and thrum of history, how it feels to people living through it. I stress that political change is never only about political change; it is also driven by—and simultaneously drives—changes in popular culture, religion, economics, and many other “nonpolitical” variables.

Change is often best discerned in unlikely synchronicities. Like when two very different groups of Americans—Irish working-class Catholics in Boston and hillbilly fundamentalists in West Virginia—simultaneously lashed out violently in the fall of 1974 to purify their children’s public schools from the pollution of liberals. Or how an offhand joke on a TV sitcom, better than any “scientific” poll, sent up a flare that foretold not just who would next occupy the White House, but the unexpected new voting bloc that sent him there. (“Archie Bunker, a Democrat, is one of us!” a delighted New Right activist proclaimed the night after a December 1976 episode of All in the Family in which the blue-collar tribune informed his shocked hippie son-in-law that Reagan would be elected in 1980.)

Well, if FutureRickPerlstein were pressed back into service to tweet about 2024, PresentRickPerlstein suggests he or she might start with a remarkable convergence that took place last week in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, A DERANGED MAN rushed the press pen at a Trump rally in Johnstown, a depressed old steel town about an hour from Pittsburgh, and one of the onetime “sundown towns” where Trump has been dog-whistling his way across America of late. These details are necessary, but not quite sufficient, aspects of what made it exemplary of our twisted times. The other part wasn’t the tree that fell in the forest; deranged, violent men, after all, are a dime a dozen these days. It’s how little sound it made. That’s what FutureRickPerlstein might pay attention to most.

The assault wasn’t mentioned at all in the biggest newspaper in the election’s most important swing state, The Philadelphia Inquirer. The story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the paper of record in the western part of the state, did reference the press riser scuffle—in the 20th paragraph, and then for three sentences.

What was not in the Associated Press’s dutiful dispatch, by contrast, tells us more than what was; and the number of places where that dispatch did not appear tells us more than anything.

AP items are useful tools for historians: With a database like Newspapers.com, you can gin up a rough estimate of how deeply a story penetrated into the media consciousness by counting how many newspapers ran it, at what length, and on what page. When it comes to the present, you can do the same thing with LexisNexis. This is how I learned that the AP story appeared in precisely one American newspaper, the Chicago Daily Herald (I live in Chicago and I don’t recall ever hearing of it; it covers the northwestern suburbs), and also only one in Canada (in Red Deer, Alberta—population 100,844—home of the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame and Museum).

It did for some reason appear in lots of outlets in India and Africa. Perhaps readers there find comfort in confirming that the “Third World” ain’t the only place local authoritarians assault the free press, and editors are just giving their readers what they want. Giving readers what they want is also what editors do all too often here, unfortunately. Think of all those editorials responding to the kind of vicious savagery the rest of us know is routine in American life by doggedly insisting that “this is not us.”

Or the way they don’t report much on America’s metastasizing slow civil war at all.

The missing Johnstown story is a nice illustration of the argument I’ve been making often these days about how systematically American political journalism represses the story of right-wing political violence. And combined with that, how rarely the media adequately analyzes what might come next.

Think about it. As the AP reports, the fellow was immediately subdued by authorities armed with tasers. In an update, they added how “the man was arrested, released and will be formally charged next week,” to “face misdemeanors in municipal court for alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disrupting a public assembly.”

Not so burdensome, right? Easy to imagine him building a minor MAGA career from his heroics. Easy, also, to imagine the next guy trying the same thing with five, ten, or fifty buddies at his back. Maybe, then, the story deserves representation on a few American front pages here and there?

THE AP DISPATCH INCLUDED ONE OF THOSE absurdly rigid genre conventions of American political journalism, the one where the mere fact of puddles on the ground in the morning cannot be taken for evidence it had rained during the night:

“It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic.”

Came next another rigid genre convention, the one that requires reporters to run a verbatim response from the Trump campaign, thus turning their notion of “objectivity” into a conveyor belt for disinformation: “‘Witnesses, including some in the press corps, described a crazed individual shouting expletives at President Trump,’ said campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez. ‘His aggression was focused on the president and towards the stage as he entered the press area.’”

Well, who are you going to believe, Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez or Donald Trump?

Scroll down for the video as it appears on the website of thugocrat Pamela Geller. Note a textbook fascist technique: blithely insisting that two plus two equals five, should the demands of propaganda require it. The headline is “Deranged Democrat Tries to Charge at Trump During Pennsylvania Rally.” The video shows Trump plainly saying, “That’s beautiful,” as police violently subdue an agent of disorder, then correcting himself when he realizes that the man is attacking the press. Trump then, correctly, said, “No, no, he’s on our side.”

IN FAIRNESS, THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE did bother to mention Trump’s words; the AP, no dice. Since the AP only rates the story as worth less than 300 words, that level of detail is not possible. That means what just happened—Trump identifying with an attempted assault on journalists—had been rendered invisible to readers who think they have received the full story.

Even more crucially, if a bit more subtly, the AP makes it impossible to grasp the story’s broader context: the main reason, really, stuff like this ought to be on all the front pages.

Second paragraph: “The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and had dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.”

Readers like responsible journalism, right? But a much bigger tree also crashed in that forest. In every last media account I tracked down, including this one, it didn’t even register a whisper.

Return to that video (this time at a friendlier link). Trump is in the middle of one of his favorite stories. He was talking about the assassination attempt on his life in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania, just a month earlier, and the pattern visible in the sky that day: “… two American flags, very far apart, held up by different frames, they were very big flags, beautiful flags, they were waving … the wind blew the flags together, and they formed a perfect angel … a perfect angel was formed!”

Google it: “Trump,” “shooting,” “angel,” “flags”—and don’t forget to put in “God.” The story of the flags God braided into angels at the exact moment he laid hands on Donald J. Trump offers proof to the skeptical that Trump’s survival revealed him as the instrument of His will. It’s manifestly possible that what most motivated the attacker was this notion that those getting in Donald Trump’s way are not merely enemies of the people, but enemies of God. That millions of people now think this way is something future historians will surely latch onto in trying to make sense of whatever comes next.

When elite agenda-setting political journalists start wrapping their minds around that reality is the precise moment they will start actually doing their jobs.

It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.