What Stephen Sondheim knew about Donald Trump’s would-be assassin — and the American culture that produced him
Former President Donald Trump, his ear bandaged after it was hit by a bullet during a Saturday assassination attempt, attends the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
By Talya Zax July 16, 2024
What drives someone to try to kill a president?
That’s the question of the moment, as authorities seek to understand what motivated a 20-year-old man’s Saturday assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. It’s also the question behind one of the stranger installments in the American musical theater canon: Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, in which a rogues’ gallery of those who have killed a president — or tried to — sing of the thwarted dreams, unrequited passions and noxious grievances that spurred them toward treason.
Their stories are, in some ways, all alike. The assassins have delusions of grandeur, and their lives have gone upside-down in ways that are easy, if not rational, to blame on the state of the union. “Every now and then the country / Goes a little wrong,” one character sings. “Every now and then a madman’s / Bound to come along.”
We don’t yet know the full story of 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who took aim at Trump at a rally, injuring the former president’s ear and killing one rally attendee. But officials have found no evidence he acted in collaboration with others. That would put him in company with the isolated radicals of Assassins, who are united by the individualist creed that “Everybody’s got the right / To be happy.”
That’s an unusual principle to revisit in this election cycle, which has been more obviously defined by dissatisfaction than any in recent memory. Seen through Sondheim’s lens, whatever Crooks’ motivation may have been, the warning for the country is clear. When people are deprived of the happiness promised by the American dream, they are liable to turn violent in pursuit of it.
There’s always been something garish about the concept of Assassins, which tapped into Sondheim’s passion for stories about extremely American strivers — see Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, Road Show, even his often-forgotten debut outing, Saturday Night — with an outlandish, morbid spin. “Without exactly asking that the audience sympathize with some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, this show insists on reclaiming them as products, however defective, of the same values and traditions as the men they tried to murder,” Frank Rich wrote in his skeptical review of the musical’s 1991 premiere for The New York Times.
But, in poor taste or not, that garishness correctly identified something slimy and skewed about the act of American striving itself. Ours is a country that has always struggled with the idea of reasonable limits: Anything that is big can be bigger; anyone who is rich can be richer; anyone who is working hard can work harder. But exponential growth does not work so well for dreams. When we imagine that we can get whatever we want, we tend to lose our grip on morality.
That’s a lesson as old as theater itself: In the ancient Greek tragedies, the most common heroic flaw was that of hubris, or excessive pride.
It’s also a lesson as old as democracy.
In its original meaning, the word “hubris” referred to an act of violence that aimed to degrade — which, seen from on high, appeared as an act of presumption against the gods, who alone held the right to put mortals in their place. In an incident that helped define hubris as a crime, the wealthy Athenian Meidias assaulted the statesman Demosthenes, who responded in an oration demanding Meidias face legal consequences. He based his claim on the idea that the people, as a group, had the right to be heard when speaking up against the powerful: “The whole people, acting honorably and rightly, evinced such anger, such exasperation, such deep concern at the wrongs which they knew I had suffered, that, in spite of the frantic efforts of the defendant and a few supporters, they were deaf to their arguments, shut their eyes to their wealth and their promises,” he wrote.
To dream too excessively, or feel entitled to too much: That is hubris. To believe one has the right to be violent as one chooses, free of consequence: That is hubris, too.
Democracy is, theoretically, supposed to protect against crimes of hubris; it gives the people the ability to push back on those who presume to more power than they are due. But democracy has also always been, to some degree, performative. Politicians win our votes by acting like the characters we wish to see, preaching the ideals we wish to see realized.
We live, now, in a moment in which the intersection of government and theater is particularly overt, and particularly jarring. Trump, who has shaped American politics around himself for almost a decade, has embraced the role of showman, while building his appeal around the idea that he is simply too great to be subject to the standard consequences — that he should be allowed to “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and still not “lose voters.”
So one of the oldest concepts of both theater and democracy circles back around, in a uniquely American way. Our political life has come to revolve around a man who has made himself the defining figure of our democracy through an ironclad belief in his own entitlement to more than the standard human allotment — of wealth, of power, of adoration, of mercy. Trump is, in some ways, the great American striver. Every time it seems that his drive to acquire more should theoretically bring consequences, he miraculously gets away with it.
Assassins is an uneven show, but Sondheim used it to get to an essential idea: That a culture built around trying to obtain more will always, at some point, turn rotten. In other words, it is about hubris, and the particular ways in which the idea of the American dream has encouraged it — in presidents, and in those who try to kill them. The assassins are gathered by the proprietor of a carnival game; he is a literal showman, selling them on the false promise of the shot of a lifetime. “If you keep your goal in sight / You can climb to any height,” he sings. “Everybody’s got the right / To their dreams.”
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