Trump shooting: what comes next
They say a week is a long time in politics but that’s nothing compared with the fraction of a second it took a would-be assassin’s bullet to travel 164 yards.
The wisdom of the crowd quickly shifted, this weekend, to the view that the failed assassination of former President Donald Trump all but ensures that he will be returned to the White House in November. It’s a persuasive argument… if you ignore that previous saying about “weeks” and “politics”.
Certainly, Trump was lucky to survive and lucky too that the chief Washington photographer for the Associated Press was beneath the stage to photograph the aftermath. Evan Vucci took what isn’t just one of the most compelling pictures of the year but a photograph that immediately claims wall space in the gallery of the most iconic moments of this or any century.
As soon as I saw it, reposted by Tucker Carlson (itself indicative of how iconic it quickly became), I tweeted that it reminded me of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of US troops, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. In the passing days, that resemblance has become even more striking.
In the Trump photo, it’s Trump himself who becomes the flagpole (a thing we already know he enjoys cradling). He’s bloodied but upright, raising his arm in a clenched fist that parallels a nearby structure as secret service agents support him in the lower half of the shot. The agents lean into him, creating a tension that pushes the eye across the photo. In Rosenthal’s picture, the flagpole lags the efforts of the soldiers at its base trying to raise it. Trump’s figure leans the other way, leading the eye to the American flag, not in the process of unfurling like on Iwo Jima, but fully open. In terms of imagery, you couldn’t ask AI to design a picture that conveys so much about resilience, defiance, American freedom but also destiny. Here’s Donald Trump, battle-worn and bleeding for his people, standing above events and leading America towards its destiny.
A November victory, then?
It would be naïve to say it doesn’t look more likely, but we’re also in unprecedented times. Whatever feels defining in the moment is forgotten in a fast-moving news cycle. Did we ever think something could move the Democrat’s Biden dilemma out of the headlines this quickly? Wasn’t Gaza supposed to decide the election? Or Ukraine? Or abortion? We simply cannot anticipate the next “election-defining” headline. Much will still depend on what the Democrats decide to do about a President who is ailing and not up to the rigours of the campaign. If Biden continues and wins the nomination in August, then it’s hard to see where American voters are meant to find the enthusiasm for a second Biden term.
Their one hope remains at the top of the other ticket.
We await to see Donald Trump’s response. Thus far, we’ve heard second-hand reports from inside his camp which have sounded calming, conciliatory, and very unlike Trump. The polished prose of the statements suggests they were not drafted by the former president but by experienced staffers. “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined,” he (or somebody wrote), even getting the capitalisation correct, itself atypical of Trump.
Trump has now travelled to Milwaukee ahead of the Republican convention this week where he is due to accept the party’s nomination on Thursday night. Before then, we still have the matter of the other name on the ticket and it’s unclear how or when Trump will announce his VP choice. As ever, Trump knows how to build drama.
He also knows how to build tensions. If Trump emerges like the Trump we saw in the aftermath of the shooting, then the next few months might well be fraught in America. As he was being hurried off the stage, Trump paused to raise his fist to his crowd and shout “fight, fight!”. At that moment, it felt deeply provocative, and one wonders what was passing through Trump’s mind. Fear, anger, retribution? How has his brush with mortality affected him? Some people might adjust their outlook and, as the cliché goes, start saying good morning to the birds and trees. Others who survive a near-death experience emerge with a sense of indestructibility. Trump already had that, and for good reason. As his legal woes have suggested, he seems immune to the usual forces of politics, law, and economics.
Certainly, the language coming from Trump World has been nothing less than inflammatory. While Democrats were united in condemning the violence, Trump’s proxies have been quick to blame Democrats for a Republican supporter shooting an AR-15 which Republicans have repeatedly refused to ban. We need not rehearse the many examples of Trump and his supporters mocking previous moments of political violence, the jokes they made about the brutal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the celebration of the violence around 6 January, and the number of times that Trump has himself encouraged violence, even offering to pay the legal fees of anybody following his orders.
There is no symmetry around this political violence. As David Frum, the veteran conservative commentator and former speech writer to George W Bush noted: “On July 11, I published an article disliked by strong Biden supporters. That prompted a flurry of emails threatening to cancel subscriptions […] Today I offended Trump supporters – which got me a cascade of fantasies about sending my family to concentration camps.”
There is a problem with violence in American politics and it’s rooted, as it has for the past twenty years, in the rise of the Tea Party movement which has itself morphed into the militant populism of Trumpism. Trump is the latest manifestation of old malignant grudges towards the federal government which became the militia movement in the latter part of the last century.
If Trump escalates the rhetoric, then America will go into November divided on a scale it’s hard to anticipate and the outcome will be even harder to determine. If there were other acts of political violence, such as riots like those at the 1968 968 Democratic National Convention, how would America respond? As much as many people will have sympathy towards Trump, many will see the sad events of last week as the latest example of toxicity in politics that have seen women denied healthcare around pregnancies, legislation blocked that would help reduce the epidemic of gun crime, and a culture in which a man running to become president could suggest putting immigrants into cage fights to win their right to say in the country.
Sympathy for the man does not automatically equate to sympathy for the views of the man. As we’ve seen with polling, the numbers are hardly moving. Some predict that Trump will see a 20-point boost like that which followed Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981. That’s very hard to imagine. Trump’s convictions barely moved the needle, nor did Joe Biden’s dreadful debate performance.
If the election is tight, it’s tight because people are deeply divided around the very issues that manifested themselves in the bitterly tragic events of the weekend.
@DavidWaywell
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