Donald Trump will not only be crowned this week at the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, he will be deified. If the assassination attempt he suffered on Saturday temporarily serves President Biden by making us forget the intra-Democratic debate surrounding his cognitive decline, it has above all served, in a few seconds, to magnify the image of savior that Mr. Trump cultivates among the electorate. Trump himself did not take long Sunday to boast on his Truth Social network: “God alone prevented the unthinkable from happening.” By escaping death and having the instinct, out of showmanship, to bounce back immediately, his ear grazed and his fist raised, he could hardly have dreamed of a scenario more useful to his electoral campaign and to the political circus beast that he is.
What happened Saturday around 6 p.m. in Butler, Pennsylvania, is exceptional at the same time as terribly banal. Banal because assassinations and attempted assassinations of presidents have repeatedly marked the history of this democracy. Banal because political violence and violence in general, armed or not with AR-15s, deeply contaminate an American society exhausted by divisions. “We cannot allow this violence to be normalized,” Joe Biden declared Sunday evening in a brief speech to the nation. However, there is already a dangerous tendency towards normalization, in a context where, moreover, elected officials of all sides, especially Republicans, who are all politicians whose campaigns are well-funded by the infamous National Rifle Association (NRA), have always been reluctant to vote for the essential, namely strong gun control measures.
It is necessarily too much to expect that this assassination attempt will contribute to calming minds and the political climate in the long term. The event had barely occurred when, through unheard-of disinformation, influential Republicans such as the speaker House Speaker Mike Johnson accused the Biden camp — and media outlets like CNN — of inciting violence because of their unfounded demonization of the former president.
“The rhetoric which consists of depicting [Trump] “As an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs led directly to the assassination attempt,” argued Senator J.D. Vance (Ohio), whom Trump named Monday afternoon as his running mate for the November 5 presidential election, with much pomposity. His remarks were immediately accompanied by the dissemination on social media of conspiracy theories that the police, starting with the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting heads of state, were deliberately slow to neutralize the 20-year-old shooter.
The police response raises questions, indeed. An investigation will be conducted. And the Democrats have their share of responsibility in the deterioration of the social climate. But a responsibility is obvious, not comparable to that of the Republicans. The most astonishing thing is that Trump and his Trumpists, who are primarily guilty of calling for violence, if not civil war, have managed, through a thirst for power, bad faith and populist delirium, to make large sections of public opinion swallow the idea that their cause is just and democratic. As if Mr. Trump’s speeches were not woven with verbal aggression, as if the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 did not constitute an attempted coup d’état, and as if the former president still refuses to recognize the results of the 2020 election.
Trump and his clique were quick to politically exploit the assassination attempt. It presents this attacker with a new, unexpected way to victimize himself. The attack comes on top of the “judicial persecution” he claims to be the victim of. He will be able to conveniently use as proof the decision handed down on Monday by a Florida judge who canceled the trial opened against him for withholding classified documents after he left the White House.
Mr. Trump’s entourage seemed to have been instructed on Monday to tone down their tone. In an interview with the ultraconservative newspaper Washington Examinerthe man declared that he wanted to make his closing speech at the convention on Thursday evening an “opportunity to bring the whole country, and even the whole world together.” Some dare to expect from him, in the wake of the attack, a kind of epiphany. As they expected, after his election in 2016, that he would calm down and “presidentialize.” In vain. A French-style “Republican front” (or rather a “Democratic front,” in the American context) may arise on November 5 to block the extreme right that has flocked to him. Because if re-elected, which is something to be increasingly feared, Mr. Trump would still be a president for whom the words “unity” and “reconciliation” are foreign.