Trump Attack: What Changes Now

Sixty-one years have passed since the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 and there is still debate about what exactly happened, so it is a little early to pronounce on the dynamics and details of the attack on Donald Trump, last night, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. He was wounded by a shot, one of the participants in the rally died.¢The discussion these hours is all about the implications for the electoral campaign, almost regardless of the facts: now that Trump is a victim, is his victory in November almost certain?

Will Americans choose between a Joe Biden whose lucidity and physical stamina even the Democrats question, and a Trump, a convicted criminal but to whom everyone is forced to show empathy and solidarity?

The propensity for violence

American election campaigns have often been marked by violence that has influenced the outcome: Lyndon Johnson might never have become president without the death of John Kennedy in 1963.

Johnson chose not to run again in 1968 and that campaign became the most tragic ever: Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, two months later, on June 6, it was the turn of candidate Robert Kennedy, whose son – a conspiracy theorist anti-vax – is running for president in 2024.

At the end of August of that 1968, the Democratic Party Convention triggers clashes between protesters against the Vietnam War and the police. Also in 2024 the Convention that should confirm Joe Biden as candidate or choose a last-minute alternative will be in Chicago, in a climate that is now increasingly tense.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan, as president, suffered an assassination attempt that brought him a lot of pain and some added popularity.

The attack on Donald Trump comes at a time when Americans say they are more inclined towards political violence. In these hours it is The research of political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago is widely cited: According to the latest findings from June 2024 of its periodic poll, both Biden and Trump supporters say they are ready to use violence to prevent their opponent from gaining or maintaining power.

The striking fact is that Biden supporters, according to Robert Pape’s research, are more ready to use violence to stop Trump than Trump supporters are to prevent Biden’s re-election. 10 percent of anti-Trump supporters are ready to use violence, compared to 6.9 percent of anti-Biden supporters. In absolute values, they are 26 million against 17 million American adults.

It is perhaps small wonder, then, that among those 26 million, one – specifically, 20-year-old Thomas Mathew Crook – took up an AR-15 and fired.

The AR-15 is the rifle that symbolizes the new American violence: after the end of the ban on the sale of assault weapons that lasted ten years, from 1994 to 2004, the AR 15 became the best-selling product, which has supported the retail gun industry for the last twenty years. In the early nineties, the AR-15 they represented 1 percent of the weapons produced in the United States, today we are at 20 percent. There are at least 20 million of them out there. And it is the Republicans who are fighting for as few restrictions as possible on the sale of these semi-automatic rifles, which are used in almost all school shootings.

Even in Europe we are witnessing a return of political violence: there has been The assassination attempt on Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico June 5th, still very unclear in its motivations, and two days later an attack to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. But the United States is another story, both in terms of weapons and context.

The permanent coup d’état

The attack on Donald Trump is not an episode that unfolds in a vacuum, it is not really a watershed moment. It is a point in a long line that goes from 2016 to today and outlines a permanent coup. The names of those responsible and the evidence depend on the side.

Democrats and their supporters denounce an eight-year attempt by Donald Trump to overthrow American democracy. In the 2016 election campaign there were contacts between Trump’s men and Vladimir Putin’s men, there were Russian hackers who stole emails from Hillary Clinton’s committee and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks who relaunched them while Trump harangued the crowds with the slogan «“ock her up”jail Hillary.

In 2020, Trump attempted in every way to overturn the unfavorable outcome of the election, and for this he is on trial. He tried to rig the vote in Georgiaspread lies about sabotaged electronic voting with his acolytes like Tucker Carlson – later fired by Fox for this – incited his supporters to storm the Parliament and approved the incitements to hang Vice President Mike Pence who had recognized Biden’s victory.

Finally, looking ahead to 2024, Trump he obtained a sort of immunity from the Supreme Court judges – the president of the United States is not criminally responsible for what he does while in office – and with a Republican Party now at his command he is trying to restrict voting options in states where the Democrats are ahead and, as he made clear in the televised debate with Biden, he has no intention of committing to recognizing an unfavorable election result in November.

Trump and Trump supporters, however, also denounce a permanent coup d’état: the Qanon fanatics had their ideas about the sects of pedophiles and blood drinkers led by Hillary Clinton.

Others less crazy have denounced the silence of the media and a certain indulgence of the judicial system on the affairs of Hunter Biden, who was paid millions of dollars in fact to promise businessmen in Ukraine but also in China access to his father, when he was vice president.

Then there’s the conspiracy of digital platforms that previously worked against an FBI hostile to Trump. to hide negative news about Biden in 2020 on the campaign trail and then silenced a sitting president after January 6, 2021, when they shut down Trump’s accounts following the storming of the House.

During his term in the White House, Trump convinced himself and his people, with some reason, that he had encountered the hostility of the generals, of the diplomats who did not obey his directives, of the technicians who refused to follow the president’s indications, above all Anthony Fauci, the doctor responsible for health policies during the pandemic.

A democracy in which unelected officials refuse to follow the directions of popularly elected politicians is not a democracy, say Trump and his people.

It is into this eight-year long low-intensity Civil War that the Pennsylvania shot comes.

Who benefits from this?

If this is the climate, the question remains who will benefit from the escalation of violence. At first glance, one would say Donald Trump: politicians and commentators in the Democratic world will feel forced to be more cautious in denouncing the danger that the Republican candidate represents for democracy. One must weigh one’s words if one knows that some fanatic may think of solving the problem with a gun.

While even his supporters doubt Joe Biden’s mental clarity, after his disastrous performance in the first televised confrontation with Trump, empathy and simple institutional courtesy towards the former Republican president could definitively compromise the electoral campaign. If the Democrats cannot criticize Trump too much and cannot hide their doubts about Biden, defeat risks being the only option.

But much will depend on how Trump will handle this situation. After the attack he reacted with the raised fist and the invitation to “fight” (“Fight, fight, fight”). So far, this is a positive image of virile resistance to pain contrasted with Biden’s fragility.

But Trump always risks overdoing it: if he were to call his people to violence, if he were to promise revenge once in the White House against those who ordered the attack (potential vice-president JD Vance has already accused Biden), Trump would end up accentuating the vengeful dimension of his candidacy and frightening the more centrist electorate.

Biden has so far limited himself to very institutional and very presidential comments: together with his vice president, Kamala Harris, he expressed solidarity and clarified that “there is no room for violence in this nation.” Which is a censure of the shooter’s actions, obviously, but also of Trump’s way of doing politics.

The attack is an unexpected opportunity for Biden because it suddenly changes the agenda of the political discussion, which until now has focused on the president’s neurological abilities, his real health conditions, the detailed analysis of his gaffes and his psychophysical condition.

Now, at least for a few days, we will have to discuss Trump, the violence he was the victim of and the violence he inspired and fomented.

It is inevitable that on the Democratic side – once the phase of forced solidarity has passed – someone will start to remember when Trump wanted to shoot Black Lives Matter protestersOf when he joked about the plan of right-wing extremists to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan, or when he made jokes about the guy who took to hammering the husband of Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

Democrats must be careful to calibrate their messages, they cannot say that Trump was asking for it, but they will certainly make it clear that where there is Trump there is chaos and violence. And this can perhaps become the last argument to support the old, slow and peaceful Joe Biden as an alternative.