Raising his fist in the air and with his face covered in blood. The image of Donald Trump getting up after suffering an assassination attempt during the rally held this Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, marks a turning point in a completely polarized electoral campaign. What was supposed to be just another campaign event on the former president’s agenda has become a decisive boost for his candidacy. Gone is the convicted Trump leaving the New York courts after being found guilty in the Stormy Daniels trial at the end of May.
The shooting occurred just four months before the election and at a time in the campaign when Trump leads the polls by a wide margin, while the Democratic Party is lost in internal struggles over the viability of Joe Biden as a candidate. Since the CNN debate, the Republican leader had adopted a low profile and had let the press and Biden’s critics devote themselves to carefully scrutinizing every gesture of the Democrat, looking for traces of the hesitations and confusions experienced just two weeks ago. The televised duel has already led the campaign towards a fight of symbols and images, to the detriment of speeches and electoral proposals. Now, the photograph of Trump in Butler reinforces this scenario.
The key to these elections remains in the independent voters, who are already referred to as the “double haters” (double detractors) because they find themselves in the dilemma of having to choose between two candidates who do not quite convince them. While the Trumpist bases cling more to their leader, it remains to be seen how this group of the population that will be decisive in November will react.
Assassination attempts on presidents and former presidents, as well as assassinations, are not foreign to American society. In its 250-year history, the United States has already seen four presidents killed at gunpoint: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901) and John F. Kennedy (1968). The last attempt on a president that the country remembers was the one that took place in March 1981 against Ronald Reagan just 70 days after he assumed the presidency of the country. Reagan managed to survive thanks to the quick intervention of the American Secret Service agents. The incident increased his popularity and secured him a second term in office.
When Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980, he won 44 states and 50.7% of the vote to the Democrat’s 47%. The year he took office, Gallup polls showed that society was divided over his figure, with broad support among Republicans but less among independents and Democrats. A survey of 505 people by the Gallup poll found that Carter had a strong support among Republicans, but less support among independents and Democrats. Washington Post and ABC News just after the shooting showed that 73% of respondents supported Reagan as president and only 16% were against. Reagan had increased 11 percentage points compared to a poll conducted the previous week, also by the ABC News. Post and ABC, which showed that 62% of respondents approved of his presidency and 23% were against it.
A political “martyr”
More than 40 years after the attack, Trump’s shooting has further boosted the Republican’s candidacy and consolidated his image as a political “martyr” among his supporters. In the four criminal cases against him, the former president had already shown his television Midas skills in turning situations that would have sunk any other candidate into political successes. Trump turned the dock into a lectern from which to campaign and present himself as a political “victim” of a “witch hunt” orchestrated by Biden. After being convicted in the Stormy case, despite it being a hard blow to his image, he boasted that he had managed to raise $35 million in the hours after the sentencing.
Trump made a second public statement on Sunday on his social network Truth Social, calling for unity in the country and asking Americans to show the “character” and “resilience” that characterizes them: “We will not be afraid, but we will remain resilient in our faith and defiant in the face of it.” “At this time it is more important than ever that we stand together and show our true character as Americans, staying strong and determined, not allowing evil to win. I truly love our country and I love you all, and I look forward to speaking to our great nation this week from Wisconsin,” in reference to the Republican convention that starts this Monday, the tycoon wrote.
Meanwhile, the president’s most ardent supporters have already taken it upon themselves to fuel the idea of ”political persecution” of their candidate. Ohio Senator James David Vance, one of the names that has been mentioned these days as a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate, assured on social network X that what happened this Saturday “is not an isolated case.” He also pointed to Biden: “The central premise of Biden’s campaign is that former President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric has led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump.”
Along the same lines, Congresswoman Marjorie Tylor Greene, known for being part of the most pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party and for starring in videos full of violence against political rivals, has stated in a tweet that Democrats “want President Trump and his supporters dead.”
Biden has repeatedly condemned the events and on Sunday announced an independent investigation to clarify the failure of the security protocol that allowed the shooter to carry out his plans. Despite this, not only is incendiary rhetoric expected to increase among certain groups, but conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media will also grow. It is worth remembering that a good part of Trump’s supporters continue to believe that the 2020 elections were “stolen” and that the real winner was the former president.
The rise of political violence
A term that has been heard a lot in recent hours is “political violence”. Various personalities, such as the case of speaker House Rep. Mike Johnson was already talking about this when they condemned the shooting shortly after it happened.
In August last year, Reuters reported a total of 213 cases of political violence since January 6, 2021. Two-thirds of these cases were physical confrontations and assaults, and the other third were attacks on private property. It also noted that of the 14 lethal political attacks that have occurred in the country since the January 6 riots, in which the perpetrator or suspect had a clear partisan leaning, 13 were right-wing attackers.
One of the most serious, though non-lethal, incidents in 2022 involved the husband of the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who was assaulted and beaten with a hammer in his home by a man who intended to kidnap his wife. In October 2020, authorities thwarted a plot by radicals to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, over the measures she had put in place to deal with the pandemic.
Source: www.eldiario.es
