Scrambled and Messed up – Trump assassination attempt upends entire 2024 election dynamic

At Saturday afternoon’s rally for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Butler, Pennsylvania, about 50km from Pittsburgh, a young man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, attempted to assassinate the former president. Perched on the roof of a nearby building, he fired several shots at those on the raised platform and one bullet delivered a glancing blow to Donald Trump’s ear. A few millimetres in a different direction, though, and the outcome would have been a very different, more tragic one.

The US is not new to such tragedies. Four presidents (Abraham Lincoln, James A Garfield, William McKinley and John F Kennedy) have been assassinated; one, Ronald Reagan, nearly was. Robert F Kennedy was assassinated just after winning the California primary in 1968, in the same year the Rev Martin Luther King Jr was killed. And back in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot, but not killed, when he was running to replace his chosen successor as president, although he came in second.

At his rally on Saturday, with blood flowing down the side of his head, Trump was quickly hustled from the podium and sped on to urgent medical assistance, but not before an iconic image was captured by a photographer. In that photograph, there is Donald Trump with a US flag (upside-down, a common distress symbol) behind him, his fist raised, as he shouts to the crowd, “Fight, fight, fight!” 

In less than a day, this photograph has become a standard element of social media and soon enough, no doubt, we shall see it emblazoned on T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, computer screensavers, coffee mugs and probably even rifle-carrying cases. (Yes, there is a contradiction between Republican support for untrammelled gun ownership rights and the fact their standard-bearer was nearly felled by a rifle shot from a young man, a registered Republican.) With that, the entire dynamic of the 2024 US presidential campaign has been upended. 

The attempted assassination took place in the weekend just before the Republican National Convention, starting on 15 July in Milwaukee. There, Trump is guaranteed to be nominated but he will also use this opportunity to gain maximum public impact for the big reveal of his choice for his vice-presidential running mate. 

This image of a defiant Trump will inevitably be a major element of the iconography of this convention. Trump, of course, is a man who excels at portraying himself as both martyr and victim — certainly, he was a victim of that shooting but, in the process, he has simultaneously become a near-murdered martyr to his flock. In a sense, Trump must be the luckiest, unlucky man on the planet.

This is now a story that will roll on, unabated, well into the future. There is the upcoming convention, yes, but there will be the subsequent campaign as well. There will also be a continuing, parallel element to the coverage as investigations continue into how this was allowed to happen and the motivations of the shooter become clearer.

Biden’s tribulations

Beyond the overwhelming momentum of this story, it is a saga that will transcend any single news cycle. At least for the present, it has driven from the media radar the tribulations of the incumbent president, Joe Biden. This includes an ongoing panic about whether he is cogent enough to be reelected and whether the Democratic Party must select a suitable alternative candidate, such as one of the party’s younger, more energetic, attractive, less-prone-to-gaffes governors or his incumbent vice-president.

Nearly 100 years ago, “cowboy comic” Will Rogers was the man who almost singlehandedly kept Americans laughing, despite the desperation and despair in the Great Depression. One of his best, enduring lines came during an interview in which he was asked whether he belonged to an organised political party. He responded that he did not belong to an organised party — he was a Democrat.

Then, the Democratic Party was an uneasy coalition of divergent voices. Its supporters ranged from the arch-segregationists of the Deep South to the near-socialists in big cities of the Northeast and Midwest. There were African Americans, wherever they had the right to vote, along with new citizens from among the millions of immigrants who had come to the country from southern and eastern Europe during the 19th century and on through to 1920. The party included those who could barely write their names to famous academics, some of the country’s ultra-rich and most penurious.

One thing they had in common was their willingness, even enthusiasm, to duke it out in the conventions and in the legendary smoke-filled rooms over who would be their party’s candidates for political office. Then, as now, Rogers was right about the ferocity of the battles and how its presidential nominations could represent an uneasy compromise among the various wings of and interest groups in the party.

Republicans historically had a more unified sensibility and would usually fall in line behind the politician who “deserved” the nomination or whose “turn” it had become. Now, in the Maga world, the old Republican conservative business elite has been largely expunged even though the party’s ethos does not comport easily with public squabbles over nominations.

This year, in particular, the renomination of Biden has become an increasingly bizarre iteration of Rogers’ vision. This is extraordinary given that an incumbent president’s renomination is almost a certainty. In the twentieth century, the rule of thumb has been that opposition to a sitting president — even as the challenger does not succeed — has meant doom for that president in the general election. This was the case with George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter, and thus with consequent losses for that party down-ballot as well. 

Campaign’s defining metaphor

Beyond the overturned dynamic caused by the attempted assassination of  Trump on Saturday afternoon, where are we now with Biden’s chances? The earlier nervousness on the parts of many people about Biden’s age and capabilities — and especially how his competence would play out two or three years in the future — have come together into an increasingly ugly mess due to Biden’s dreadful performance two weeks ago in the first of two planned debates between the two candidates. 

Since then, a focus on Biden’s verbal fumbles or worse has become the defining metaphor of his campaign. The media is now on the alert for every new Biden verbal miscue as further proof of his declining capabilities. Major columnists like Thomas Friedman in The New York Times and mega-fundraisers like actor George Clooney have taken a stand that Biden must step aside for the next generation, lest Republicans overwhelm Biden and the rest of the Democrats, come November. 

While a number — still fewer than two dozen — of Democratic members of Congress have signalled their hope for just such an outcome, the left wing of the party in Congress, in the person of Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has risen to defend and embrace Biden, despite sharp disagreements over policies. 

As Sanders wrote the other day in The New York Times, “I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected. Why? Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump — a demagogue and pathological liar. It’s time to learn a lesson from the progressive and centrist forces in France who, despite profound political differences, came together this week to soundly defeat right-wing extremism.”

Meanwhile, the Biden team has gingerly tried to reconfigure his public presence, once the baleful impact of the CNN debate debacle sank in. He has done an extended one-on-one interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and has another one set with Lester Holt of NBC on Monday night. In between, Biden did 59 minutes of free-form questioning following the Nato summit in Washington, in which he wanted to focus on the alliance’s challenges, plans and strategic vision vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine, and Chinese support for Russia. 

In truth, though, it was also a test for Biden to show his chops in the real job of being a president — thus providing a real, substantive contrast to the bizarre pronouncements of his opponent. Aside from a few, inevitable fumbles such as calling the president of Ukraine “Vladimir Putin” and his own vice-president “Donald Trump”, the consensus judgement was that Biden passed the test to prove his competence.

That now seems to have been washed away in the wake of the would-be assassination of Donald Trump. Inevitably, commentators are focusing on threats of domestic terrorism and the increasingly crude, rude, coarse, violent rhetoric on the part of so many politicians.

So far, there has been virtually no comment on the obvious fact that one of the reasons things like the Saturday shooting happen is because sadly unsuitable people have easy access to guns for killing people (especially semi-automatic rifles for use at long range). That feature of US life is married to the increasingly violent tenor of the country’s political language and how so many people increasingly see violence as an inevitable element of the country’s political contests. 

But realists need to confess there is little likelihood that limitations on the access to weapons will be imposed. Equally unlikely is the chance the apocalyptic rhetoric in so much of the US political language will suddenly elide into a chorus of “Kumbaya”. Moreover, even a heartfelt endorsement of Biden’s candidacy by singer Taylor Swift may not be enough to help salvage his chances. DM