The US presidential campaign just received an emotional overload on Saturday, as Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt.
Fortunately, the former president is safe. Tragically, one supporter was killed, a few others were injured and the shooter was summarily executed.
Others will comment on the circumstances of the incident and the motives of a clearly unstable individual. What I am concerned with is trying to understand why this election year is marked by violence and what the possible consequences of this event will be.
Rumors and conspiracies
As usual, the attack quickly led to an outpouring of conspiracy theories. On the left, it was quickly suspected that it was staged. On the right, it was seen as a hit by a member of Antifa, which was called for to be included on lists of terrorist groups.
A more complex reality emerged when it became known that the shooter was actually a 20-year-old registered Republican. Oddly enough, no one called for the party to be designated a terrorist group.
It’s Biden’s fault!
Conspiracy theories quickly gave way to denunciations of the Democrats’ rhetoric, which several commentators accused of having encouraged this madman to take action.
Trump’s critics have long argued that he poses a threat to American democracy, and Biden recently urged (privately) a small group of donors to keep Trump “in the bullseye” Several Republicans reacted as if Joe Biden had fired the shot himself.
That’s a bit much for a party that worships a candidate who constantly says that a vote against him would mean the end of the country, who calls his opponents vermin to be exterminated, who mocked the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and who has long held a political discourse steeped in violence.
Emotional overload
In this campaign that both sides call existential, emotions were already running high. This event will do nothing to bring the debate back to the level of reason.
This week’s Republican convention in Milwaukee was already gearing up to anoint Donald Trump as the indispensable savior of a nation in decline. The attack now ensures that he will be idolized as a martyr saved by divine intervention.
As reprehensible as this attack is, it does not change the fact that Trump is a threat to democracy and the rule of law, a convicted felon, a proven fraudster, a proven sexual assaulter, and a habitual liar. He was and remains entirely unfit to serve as president.
It is still important to debate the substance of the autocratic, cruel, liberticidal and ruinous government program that Trump is promising and several aspects of which are set out in detail in the Project 2025.
These substantive debates were already obscured by Trump’s campaign spectacle and the psychodrama of Biden’s potential replacement. What comes next is likely to be even more emotionally driven and – unfortunately – even more tainted by the ever-present specter of violence.