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Wow. Trump Derangement Syndrome has killed Tenacious D. On stage in Australia yesterday, when asked to make a birthday wish, Kyle said "Don't miss trump next time."
Today, Jack Black cancelled their tour and appears to have killed the band.
I've found the reactions of intense disappointment that Trump wasn't murdered to be really disappointing but unsurprising. My parents (who I was with when it happened and I broke the news to them) immediately expressed disappointment that he was still alive. Watching people post these sentiments publicly online as if they are completely unaware that advocating for the assassination of your political opponents is really bad and completely unacceptable has left me amazed. How can people not realize that it's a bridge too far? They're literally saying that to preserve democracy, they need to assassinate the leading candidate, a level of cognitive dissonance beyond anything I've seen.
That said, I also find the current cancelations hilarious. The very people who are calling Trump "literally hitler" are now pearl clutching that it's not okay to try kill Hitler. The catastrophizing wasn't acceptable before either - maybe this snapped people out of their delusions?
I was surprised by my own reaction, too. I was a lot happier that he survived, and a lot more impressed with his immediate response than I expected to be. Trump grew in my esteem a lot.
Don't get me wrong, the political instability you're pointing at is serious. But it doesn't disgust me nearly as much as the trend I've seen of people trying to posthumously cancel the rally-goer who was killed protecting his family during the shooting. The worst of the left are digging through his internet history laughing it up at right-wing posts he made, trying to make an example out of him the same way they would if he was a random civilian who'd wound up in the news for any other reason. It seems to be a very popular stance to take, in certain corners of Twitter. Microcelebrities are getting in on it. In their social circles, it's gauche to defend him. He was a Trump supporter; of course he deserves to be dragged through the mud online. Hundreds of Tweets saying things to the effect of "obviously he didn't deserve to die, but", perfectly conveying that they're lying their asses off, are quite glad that he's dead, and think it's a good start.
They have made it crystal clear that their ire is not constrained to Trump. It regularly spills over to his base, Republicans in general, and even people that just are just not faithfully aligned with Blue Tribe values.
It is astounding reading and watching people act like this is some hot topic of the week that will blow over in a month. Maybe? What I don't see enough chatter about is how Trump voters received a loud and clear message that their deaths and misfortune (not just Trump's!) will be minimized at best and actively celebrated at worst (see also Babbit). As if it matters one bit to me if Crooks was a registered Republican when I subsequently saw how sizable chunks of the Left reacted to it.
This memory will not be going away any time soon.
I'll second this with roystgnr's caveat about it being a lot worse where people like Comperatore are victims, and also point to people who've made similar arguments in other contexts. FCFromSSC has pointed to the celebrations around the murder of Aaron Danielson (and conspiracy theories about the police shooting of his killer), but there were also significant efforts to explain how Lee Keltner or Jessica Doty-Whitaker 'deserved' it, and state prosecutors gleeful that their campaign lead to Jake Gardner's suicide.
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