Assassins believe that they can change the course of history. And although the U.S. presidential election is less than four months away, it is safe to say that Saturday’s attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump’s life will likely impact its outcome. The United States is both already too politically polarized and too imbued with violence for it to be otherwise.
Assassins believe that they can change the course of history. And although the U.S. presidential election is less than four months away, it is safe to say that Saturday’s attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump’s life will likely impact its outcome. The United States is both already too politically polarized and too imbued with violence for it to be otherwise.
This is but the latest violent incident targeting an elected official or candidate in the United States in recent years. In 2017, a self-professed supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders attempted to murder Republican members of Congress at an early morning baseball practice and managed to wound six people, including then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. In 2022, a far-right Canadian conspiracy theorist broke into Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s home and seriously injured her husband. Supreme Court justices are not immune from such threats, as displayed in 2022, when a California man angered by the court’s expected decision to overturn legalized abortion stalked Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to his home. And the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course, also involved a prominent assassination threat, with the crowd baying to “Hang Mike Pence.”
Moreover, the idea that we have entered a global era where political assassins are again in fashion has been clearly supported by the recent attacks on the lives of elected officials literally around the world—in Argentina, Britain, Haiti, Japan, and Slovakia, among other places. Indeed, the attack on Trump occurred during an election cycle that, we have long argued, was always highly likely to be accompanied by violence.
To find a similarly unsettled time in the U.S. polity, one would have to go back to the 1960s, when separate assassinations murdered President John F. Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (respectively the uncle and father to the lesser-known third candidate in this election, Robert Kennedy Jr.), and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. An attempt on third-party presidential candidate George Wallace left him in a wheelchair for life.
Similar violence also accompanied the recovery from the Great Depression—when an assassination attempt again may otherwise have changed the course of history. On Feb. 15, 1933, a disgruntled naturalized Italian immigrant wildly opened fire on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 17 days before his inauguration, as he delivered a speech in Miami. The similarities between would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara then and 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks (whom the FBI has identified as Trump’s shooter) today are unsettling. Both were evidently disgruntled by the political process. Both failed to kill their primary target but took the lives of bystanders. Both paid for their crime with their own lives.
This latest assassination attempt, 91 years after Roosevelt’s survival and 43 years since President Ronald Reagan survived a shooting in Washington, D.C., comes at a moment when an already polarized nation faces an escalating spiral of political violence. Right now, factions of the United States’ militant left are gearing up for mass protests at the Democratic National Convention while the movement continues to ratchet up protests over the Israel-Hamas war and Israel’s existence more broadly.
The far right is already eyeing these developments with ever more effusive concern over social media. The movement will almost certainly be provoked by the attempt into actively assuming the mantle of the Republican candidate’s ultimate guardians; they will likely try to take his safety in their own hands, given the blatant failure of the authorities to do so. Violence in this context could be either preemptive or vengeful, perhaps similar to the brutality embodied by acquitted vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse, who in August 2020 shot three people (two fatally) protesting police brutality. Unlike the recent spate of politically motivated mass shootings in the United States that have been linked to white supremacists, this targeting of specific individuals heralds yet another dimension of what has become a uniquely American form of violence, as gunmen wield semiautomatic assault rifles with high-velocity and high capacity magazines.
The problem at this perilous moment is that both violent extremes see an advantage in setting the United States ablaze. Beyond just dissatisfaction with both presidential candidates, there is also a prevalent sense on both extremes that the political system is sclerotic, corrupt, and ineffective, thus leading to the conviction that violence is needed to pull the system down. Adherents of this so-called “accelerationist” strategy insist that even small acts of violence can spark a broader conflagration, greatly increasing the risk of follow-on attacks. That both the far-left and the far-right share this belief is as unprecedented as it is unimaginable in the country that the world looks up as a citadel of democracy. At a time when a recent NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll found that 1 in 5 people surveyed agreed with the statement, “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track,” it is too soon to tell whether both Trump and Biden’s respective calls for national unity can supersede this dangerous trend affecting both sides of the country’s political spectrum.
Trump will almost certainly harness his fist-pumping defiance of an assassin’s bullet as evidence of his strength and vitality compared with Biden’s enfeeblement and inertia. The narrative he has constructed of himself as a victim of political persecution and vituperation will now be buoyed by the irrefutable argument of near-lethal targeting.
Even though we still do not know Crooks’ motive, Trump supporters will nevertheless see the attempt on the former president’s life as the latest effort to knock the most popular candidate out of the race—with litigation having failed or had no political impact, despite the 34 felony convictions against him—they’ll surely insist that Trump’s enemies are turning to actual violence.
The biggest question is whether this is, in fact, the beginning of what could be the most violent presidential race in the history of the country. Never before has the electorate been presented with two such singularly unpopular choices, which only creates an environment where frustration, perhaps coupled with mental instability, might bring to the surface individuals emboldened to take matters into their own hands. Extremists in the United States might see the failed assassination as a green light to “neutralize”—in the Secret Service’s parlance describing their handling of the shooting—what they will now see as serial threats to the leading candidate and former president.
The post A Uniquely Perilous Moment in U.S. Politics appeared first on Foreign Policy.
