You’ve seen the clip. You’ve seen it unfolding in real-time: Donald Trump’s transition from a shocked realisation that he is being shot at, and that something has hit him, to an instinctive understanding of the present moment as a mass media event. It happens almost, but not quite, instantaneously. You hear the distant pop of the bullets, you see the former president’s hand go up to his ear, and then you see him disappear beneath the podium, taken down by a bellowing scrum of Secret Service agents. And then, his face bloodied, he is brought to his feet again by the agents surrounding him, but before they can usher him off the stage, to the safety of the wings, he insists on stopping to raise his fist above his head, and to mouth repeatedly the word “fight”. This is a man who understands, instinctively and intimately, the importance of image, in every sense of that word.
The footage is extraordinary in a number of ways, not least for the queasy historical deja vu it arouses in the viewer, the anxious sense of something terrible being unleashed, something that is both old and completely new. We know this scene. We know its protagonists. We know the American archetype of the “lone gunman” – those triple-named historical nonentities. John Wilkes Booth. Lee Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray. But what’s most extraordinary is the extent to which Trump himself knows the scene, and knows exactly how to play it. And there is no getting around it: he plays it exceptionally well.
In a 1983 essay on America’s history of political assassination, the novelist Don DeLillo refers to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley jnr as a “self-referring event”. Hinckley – who was obsessed with the film Taxi Driver, and wanted to kill the president to impress its young star Jodie Foster – understood his attempt on Reagan’s life as a kind of performance. He was self-consciously enacting the role of the lone gunman, taking possession of the archetype. As mentally ill as he was, he had a strangely sophisticated understanding of his actions. Trump, in his own chillingly sane way, understood the moment he found himself in last weekend as a kind of performance. That, too, was a deeply self-referring event.
Consider the central image that has emerged from this assassination attempt: Evan Vucci’s photo, shot from below, of Trump surrounded by clutching agents. The fist raised against a blue sky, the American flag fluttering behind him, and across his defiant face the thin trickle of fresh blood, as red as the stripes of the flag. To look at this photograph, as someone who anticipates the prospect of a second Trump presidency as a disaster for the world, is to glimpse the darkness and chaos to come, a deepening of the darkness and chaos that already surrounds us. What you are looking at, when you look at this photograph, is an almost overdetermined depiction of heroism, of masculinity in its most politicised form. Mussolini would, quite literally, have killed for such a portrait.
To look at this photograph of Trump is to glimpse the darkness and chaos to come
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It sounds absurd to refer to a photograph taken last weekend as “iconic”, but such is the pace at which the culture now moves, and the viral speed with which images are disseminated and metabolised – memed, shared, analysed – that such a claim has to be taken seriously. Trump himself certainly takes it seriously. In an interview published in the New York Post the day after the attempted assassination, he said this: “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen. They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic photo taken.”
Although it’s not immediately clear what Trump means here – do you really have to die to have an iconic photo taken? – the word “iconic” itself hints at a larger significance. “Icon” is a Greek word, meaning simply “image” or “resemblance”, and its primary sense is a religious one: a devotional image of a figure central to a faith. And when we talk about icons in this sense, we are first and foremost talking about Christ. (Christ: another Greek word, meaning “anointed”.) I don’t mean to suggest here, of course, that Trump is consciously invoking these associations in that particular quote; whatever your personal view of the man, I hope we can agree that it would not be his style to playfully riff on Greek etymology. What I am suggesting is that these associations are already embedded in the words we use, whether we intend them or not: they come, as it were, pre-loaded.
This is a man whom his most fervent supporters already see bathed in a messianic glow. And this is a man, let’s not forget, to whom the conservative-majority US Supreme Court has just pre-emptively ceded the powers of an emperor (or a mafia godfather). In a statement posted on Truth Social, his own social media network, Trump said that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening”. If we want to push the messianic reading even further (and I think we do), the words that followed were “FEAR NOT”. And if this phrase and sentiment sound vaguely familiar, it’s because this, according to the Gospel of Matthew, is what Christ says to his disciples, right after he performs the miracle of walking on water: “be not afraid”. Something miraculous has happened here, we – or they – are to believe. We are in the realm of a kind of profane divinity, cruel and libidinal and irreducibly American.
And there he is, standing at the centre of it, washed in his own blood. Anointed. Trump – who is himself both a creation and a creator of mass media – understands the power of the image. And the image, in keeping with the spirit of Trump’s reign, is an entirely self-referential one. It’s an image, that is, of a powerful man grasping the power of the image. And if its meaning for his supporters is “fear not”, its meaning for everyone else is another: be afraid.