“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence.” President Joe Biden’s reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was more like a desperate prayer than a statement of fact. There is indeed a very large place in America for political violence, a psychological space that has always been there but that now seems more wide open than it has been since the 1960s.
On Saturday night, when Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee, critically injuring two others and lightly wounding his principal target, he was giving expression to a bloodlust that has been implicit in the furious polarisation of American democracy.
Repulsion at this irruption of murderous intent into the presidential election campaign may bring a momentary illusion of unity – anyone who believes in democracy should be genuinely horrified by what Crooks did. But the illusion of bipartisanship will not last long. If it is possible to make American democracy even more tribal this event will achieve that outcome.
For his already fanatical devotees Trump’s fortunate survival will be seen as a miracle – further proof that their leader is not just a politician but a divinely-sanctioned instrument of salvation for America. Instead of having a sobering effect the shooting will up the ante on Trump’s messianic appeal. Since God has spared him those who resist him are not merely political opponents. They are infidels.
And to this raising of the stakes, there will be an equal and opposite reaction. Trump’s survival – and the quasi-religious significance it will have for so many of his supporters – makes him seem an even more implacable agent of destruction. The panic that has already overtaken the Democrats after Biden’s meltdown in the debate with Trump on June 27th will deepen into something like despair.
Trump was already, politically speaking, undead. He ought to have been buried as a political force after the invasion of the Capitol by his supports on January 6th, 2021. But he regenerated himself – to the point where he has been, for months now, the clear favourite to win back the presidency in November.
And now he is undead in a more literal and visceral sense. Americans can now watch, over and over, the videos of his feared death and almost immediate resurrection on Saturday night. Such a drama makes American politics, already seen by so many citizens on both sides of the great divide as a Manichean struggle between darkness and light, even more of a zero sum game.
The idea that this is an existential conflict was already deeply embedded, but on Saturday night the phrase “a matter of life and death” ceased to be metaphorical. The effect on the collective imagination cannot be good.
If things were different, if there was a space for a collective rational reflection, this would be an opportunity for Americans to think about the ways Trump himself has injected violence into their politics: urging his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies, stirring hatred against human “vermin”, giving encouragement to armed neo-Nazi and white supremacist militias.
It might also have been a chance to probe the psychotic nature of America’s gun culture. It might be a time for rueful contemplation of the irony that Trump himself has weaponised that culture for electoral purposes. In May he received the official endorsement of the National Rifle Association and pledged to take up its cause as “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House”. This after a year with 42 mass killings in the US involving the deaths of 217 individuals.
Crooks, the 20 year-old would-be assassin, was wearing a T-shirt advertising a YouTube channel with 11.6 million subscribers called Demolition Ranch. Its offerings include “Which Bullet Goes the Deepest?” ; “I Sawed Off a .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle”; and “I Specifically Built a Van for Drive-By Shootings”.
Trump is undoubtedly the political “best friend” of most of its fans. The AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle with which Crooks shot Trump and the others at the rally used to be banned on the obvious grounds that putting such weapons in the hands of almost anyone who wants them is an invitation to mass killing. But since it came back on the open market in 2004 it has become an icon hailed by the NRA as “America’s rifle”. In 2018, the New York Times wrote that “for those who love the rifle, it is seen as a testament to freedom – a rite of passage shared between parents and children, a token to welcome soldiers home, a tradition shared with friends at the range”.
Were there any possibility for a reasoned response to the assassination attempt it might consider the ways a culture in which possession of a killing machine is a “testament to freedom” is also one where an authoritarian would-be despot like Trump can symbolise freedom for tens of millions of Americans.
But there is no such possibility. That Trump became a victim of the very violence he has done so much to validate will not provoke either him or his fans to think again. It will merely serve to fortify a mindset in which America is already at war with itself.
Hysteria about the approach of civil war has, in recent years, become more and more self-fulfilling. There is an escalating logic of violence: since civil war is coming we need to do it to them before they do it to us. And we need a strongman leader who is not trammelled by the petty constraints of democracy.
Insofar as the attempted assassination deepens this sense of panic, anxiety and impending doom, it is – in a grotesque irony – good for Trump. His message from the start of his political adventure has been one of what he called in his inaugural address of 2017 “this American carnage”. The worse the carnage seems, the more effectively he can present himself as the indispensable saviour who stands between Americans and chaos.