Is Anything Different Now?
An assassination attempt should mean something. What if it doesn’t change anything at all?
The dust of Saturday’s assassination attempt of Donald Trump has mostly settled, but there’s still one online response to it that’s rattling around in my brain. Attached to the now iconic photo of Trump pumping his fist with blood smeared on his cheek, journalist Olivia Messer wrote, “this is one of those horrifyingly clear moments in history when you immediately know everything has changed but you can’t see how yet.” No better way to crystalize how fast things can change on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Once, we lived in the before, and now we are in the after.
Messer is right—the assassination attempt has turned Trump into a martyr without him actually having to have been martyred. Trump himself agrees, and with the election just a few months away, it’s very likely that he’ll experience a bit of a bump in the polls as a result of the action, and that unforgettable photo. But among Democrats and leftists, there has been a kind of despairing resignation around what might happen on Election Day now. “He’s going to win” was an immediate reaction online and offline, as if only through an attempted murder could a politician like Trump become popular enough to win a second term after being convicted of a felony.
Don’t worry, the reality is actually a little darker than that, and a little less responsive to what happened last weekend. While his stock price has surged since the assassination attempt, and he continues to edge out President Joe Biden in the polls, most of our current political reality is the exact same. Martyred or not, this is just what Trump does. Despite the way half of the country laughs at him, or derides him, or campaigns against him, Trump gets one thing right: He’s a winner, and he knows it. That’s why he thrust his fist into the air, apparently on now-genius instinct.
Everything feels different, but really, nothing is. We’re still in the same place we were last week, even while it feels like our world has been irrevocably upended. Biden remains woefully unequipped to handle this campaign, this news cycle, and perhaps even a second term—he continues to poll behind his vice president, Kamala Harris, and it’s increasingly predicted that only an October Surprise could swing the election in his favor. (On Saturday evening he announced he had halted campaigning—as if it would make any impact at all!) The Democratic Party, meanwhile, continues to buckle from deep fissures among its members. Socialist darlings like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have continued to back Biden even as he’s continued to operate as a centrist, leaving leftists forgotten in this election. The Democrats continue to suffer because they fail to speak to their own voters; Biden, and many other establishment Democrats, continue to be uninspiring choices for left-of-center voters.
Republicans, meanwhile, are happy to use the assassination attempt to further sow division; Trump acolyte (and vice presidential pick) J.D. Vance suggested Biden’s campaign rhetoric was responsible for the attempt before any actual information became available. There are plenty of conspiracy theories floating around online too, from liberal ones (that the shooting was staged, an inside job to boost Trump’s chances in November) to conservative ones (that the Democratic institution couldn’t beat him in November, and so they had to kill him instead). Occam’s razor likely wins out here: It was not a conspiracy, it was just an act of violence—a school shooting at a Trump rally.
But that act doesn’t change things as much as we think it does. In modern North American parlance, assassination attempts are indeed rare; the last one the public saw was in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan was shot while leaving a hotel in Washington. No wonder we’re trying to ascribe value to a valueless act. Some online response has been in relation to how handily Reagan won his second term after getting shot, as if an assassination attempt was the only way he garnered support. Indeed, the attempt on Reagan’s life did have a unifying effect on the country, and there are a few similarities between his case and Trump’s—both were shot by lone gunmen, both were able to avoid real injury. Both also used the slogan “Make America great again,” but our political landscape isn’t what it used to be. Reagan wasn’t the same kind of Republican candidate Trump is. In fact, the entire Republican Party is unrecognizable to the one it was 40 years ago.
Besides, Trump didn’t need an assassination attempt–related boost in the polls anyway. He didn’t need anything at all, really. He could have sat back and let Biden continue to get flustered in press conferences, accidentally calling his opponent his VP. No doubt Biden will also continue to alienate his base with centrist politics and his refusal to take his age and lousy debate performance seriously. But politically, in terms of how it benefits Trump and his party, the assassination attempt itself changes very little. The Democrats continue to flounder, the Republicans continue to weaponize their own harmful rhetoric against their political opponents, and the polling remains largely unchanged. We’re not yet at a place where we can definitively say a second Trump term is inevitable, but it’s clear that he’s a strong enough candidate that something as galvanizing as a murder plot barely moves the needle. That was already the problem.
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