He said he returned last Saturday to the scene of the first assassination attempt against him in order to “finish” what he had to do there the first time: a political rally to stir up the strength of his political movement in a corner rural Pennsylvania.
But by arriving this weekend in Butler, where a sniper’s bullet grazed his ear on July 13, former President Donald Trump above all sought to do more: revive the indelible image of the fighter whose the life was saved, according to him, by divine intervention to enable him to save the United States. An attractive message for his electoral base, which the Republican candidate must keep alive during the final weeks of this very tight presidential campaign, where no gain – particularly in key states – can be overlooked.
“The multiple assassination attempts against Donald Trump only make him more sympathetic” to his voters, Thomas Gift, a political scientist at University College London, wrote in mid-September in the pages of Newsweek. It was the day after a possible new attack on the populist foiled on the edge of his West Palm Beach golf club on September 15. The second assassination attempt in two months. “Trump continues to argue that he took a bullet to protect democracy, and that could be enough to win the vote of a certain portion of Americans. »
The Republican and his campaign team understood this well. At the first attack, they easily took advantage of the image of the strong man with a bloody face, fist in the air, calling on his troops to fight. The event proved providential in accentuating the divide with a tired Joe Biden who, at the time, had just lost the only televised debate between the two men. The Democrat was then still in the race. The tragedy led to a slight increase in the former president’s popularity rate, to around 43%.
The arrival of Kamala Harris changed the tone of the contest, making it even more necessary for Donald Trump to exploit his status as a martyr, a singular candidate whose power of change and capacity to upset the established order would be such , according to him, that he must now live under the threat of death to carry out his political project.
“In the last eight years, those who want to prevent us from achieving [l’avenir proposé par le mouvement Make America Great Again] slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to exclude me from the vote and, who knows, maybe even kill me,” the ex-president said Saturday in front of the crowd of supporters gathered in Butler, thus leaving hear — without proof — that his political opponents could be behind the endangerment of his existence. “But I never stopped fighting for you. »
A few days ago, the leader of the American radical right was not afraid to accuse Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of having refused him additional security resources, which would prevent him from holding his political rallies where he wants and how he wants. On Fox News, he called the thing “interference in the election”, even if, the day after the second assassination attempt, the FBI considerably strengthened security around his person, places where he lives and places he frequents.
Some 300 agents are now around him, more than three times the number normally offered to a former president. The security framework around his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, is also similar to that put in place when he occupied the White House.
Fueling political violence
Ironically, after years of spurring political violence in the United States through personal attacks and inflammatory comments drawing as much on lies as on conspiracy, Trump and his entourage are even going so far as to take advantage of this climate of fear to bring to their adversary all the ills of resentment and division that they have publicly nourished for years.
“No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last two months, while two people have tried to take down Donald Trump,” Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, declared at the end of September before a religious assembly in Georgia. “This is pretty solid proof that the left needs to calm down and stop the bullshit. »
The ex-president’s visit to Butler could give the impression that the man was seeking to come full circle. In fact, it served above all to give a boost to the narrative of the hero who inflates the ego of a candidate, never missing the opportunity to remind us that only great presidents become the target of shooters.
A video preceding his arrival on stage in Pennsylvania combined the strong image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River in 1776, during the American War of Independence, with the famous photo of the populist, fist in the air, exiting unhurt from the July assassination attempt. “This man cannot be arrested. This man cannot be defeated,” the voiceover summarized.
While then speaking of “the hand of Providence” and “the grace of God” which prevented “a bad guy” from stopping his “movement”, Donald Trump also sought to make the site of his political rally a ” sacred place” — no less — which those present will remember as a monument to the courage that “so many incredible American patriots demonstrated,” he said.
No doubt, Donald Trump knows, as Nietzsche wrote in his Twilight of the Idolsthat, in this campaign, everything that will not kill him will make him stronger. But to take full advantage of it, he must also exploit the threat to his most politically profitable life: the first (and ultimately only), which has given rise to the most compelling narrative of triumph and glory that he sorely needs to unravel. a presidential race where the two candidates remain neck and neck despite the weight of the stakes.