I was walking on West 58th Street just before 10 a.m. Tuesday when cop cars began barreling down the block the wrong way. One came within half an inch of mowing down a guy right next to me.
I shrugged and turned to my friend Dan. “What do you think it is?” I said before proceeding into the new Nordstrom men’s store to look for a suit for my kid’s bat mitzvah. Ten minutes later, I heard CNN had been evacuated. I walked to my office listening to a podcast featuring a conversation with someone who directed many episodes of “Friends.”
Maybe after 9/11 nothing can surprise a New Yorker any longer. Or me. I remember how, along with my colleagues at The Post editorial page, we sat in the weeks after 9/11 as the inbox filled with letters to the editor. No one had time to open them, but three people who touched one envelope were stricken with topical anthrax.
And so it has been ever since in this city. The very real heightened emotions of the year after 9/11, as the air was rank with the smell of burning wire and the sky glowed purple over Ground Zero, could not sustain themselves. That year, that awful, awful year, might have served as an emotional vaccination of a kind.
No one seemed all that surprised or traumatized when two nail bombs went off in Chelsea dumpsters in September 2016, even though 29 people were injured and the story came to a genuinely melodramatic climax with a firefight between the Islamist villain and police in the streets of Linden, NJ.
How long did we dwell on the horror just a year ago when a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” killed eight people with his car on West Street near Chambers?
So I think it might be with this latest terrorist attack on CNN — and, to keep it local, on Robert De Niro’s movie company and the Westchester homes of George Soros and Bill and Hillary Clinton. There’s nothing that I’d remotely call “good news” about this revelation of our damaged civic culture, but thankfully no one was injured.
Since the attack targeted the media in part, the media will maintain its focus on the matter longer than it did even after those eight people were killed on West Street. But the intensity of the present moment will lessen (assuming, in this case, there aren’t many more such devices out there waiting to be found), and we will be talking about something else come next week.
But the pipe bombs will remain a political Rorschach test subject.
Since the targets were Trump critics, was the bomber motivated by Trump’s own incendiary rhetoric against them and the press in general? We will only know the answer to this if the bomber is apprehended, but we all know the theory of Ockham’s razor suggests the simplest answer is likely the right answer.
Which is why, if indeed the bomber was doing this to take revenge against Trump’s enemies, he was doing Trump no favors. For the simple fact of the matter is that the event casts a light not on those critics but on Trump and Trump’s rhetoric itself at exactly the moment when it is least helpful to him politically.
Republicans still hold out some hope that they might not lose control of the House of Representatives on Election Day. The only way that happens is for GOP candidates to do better than polling now suggests they will do in a bunch of suburban districts.
The voters who will decide the fate of Republican candidates and officeholders in those districts are not MAGA-hat people but more conventional Republicans and independents who have expressed discomfort at Trump’s tweeting and general personal comportment.
They have been more positive about the GOP lately because they like the policies, and despised Democrats’ behavior during the Brett Kavanaugh fight. But if we’re going to spend some of the next week talking about Trump’s three-year history of talking approvingly of violence as a form of political expression, that may depress these voters, keep them home and put the House out of reach.
The ball is in Trump’s court here. He can lessen this potential effect by acting soberly. The early signs are that he is torn between wanting to rise to the occasion and fearing that any such restraint will be taken as a show of weakness. It wouldn’t be.
The problem is, if Trump were watching someone else in that position, he’d think the guy was weak. And so he might keep the fire burning rather than doing what he can to put it out.
