Former President Trump comes within an inch of losing his life at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter, a bullied 20-year-old incel, lies dead on the roof of a barn with an AR-15-style rifle at his side. A firefighter is killed while diving heroically to protect his family. And my own cousin from New Jersey tells me it was all a staged incident using fake blood, as in the movies, designed to restore Donald Trump to power. What planet is she on? I try reasoning with her but she is off in a fantasy world of her own, while insisting she is “not a conspiracy theorist”.
This is the absolute state of affairs in America. Democrats are behaving as if they are crazy QAnon cultists. Republicans have turned into maiden aunts, shrieking it is all Joe Biden’s fault for using violent rhetoric such as, “It’s time to put a bullseye on Trump.” Good grief. You would think nobody had ever shouted “Hang Mike Pence” while waving their MAGA flags and kicking down the doors of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Meanwhile, there are 400 million firearms in circulation in America with almost no checks on their use.
Trump and Biden have both called for unity following Saturday’s assassination attempt, but they mean different things
Trump and Biden have both called for unity following Saturday’s assassination attempt, but they mean different things. Trump wants the nation to unite behind him as the once and future president, hoping to foster an air of inevitability about his return to power. Biden wants the Democrats to unite behind him as the once and future presidential nominee. They may both get their wish, for if Biden remains on the ticket, Trump’s election seems fairly guaranteed. It is not too late to change the narrative, but time is not the Democrats’ friend.
This week’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will be a triumphal procession, with party grandees bowing down before the Great I Am. The iconic photograph showing the bloodied Trump defiantly waving his fists at those who would seek to destroy him has provided the perfect visual metaphor for his campaign – that of a warrior king crying “fight, fight, fight” and vanquishing his enfeebled opponent. His rhetoric will lean into his role as a martyr who has been persecuted in court and nearly died for his beliefs – for “you”, his flock. On Truth Social, Trump suggested God may have a plan for him: “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
Biden’s call to “unite as one nation,” in last night’s presidential address had the disturbing air of a proof of life video. He stared straight into the camera and botched his words, twice referring to the “battle box” rather than the ballot box as the best place to settle disputes. Was it a Freudian slip? A week earlier, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation responsible for Project 2025 (plans for a second Trump term in office) had said ominously: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
There is the opportunity to make the case for a less chaotic, calmer, more tolerant America, without ceding power to a vengeful Trump
Now, though, as if frozen in horror at the attempt on Trump’s life, all the fight has gone out of the Democrats. According to a report in Axios, a senior Democrat said, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” This seems unnecessarily defeatist. Following the shooting, there is the opportunity to make the case for a less chaotic, calmer, more tolerant America, without ceding power to a vengeful Trump. It was the message that helped Biden win in 2020, but in 2024 it will need a new messenger.
Surprisingly, it was Melania Trump who found the right grace note after the attempt on her husband’s life, referring to the “fabric of our gentle nation” and calling on Americans to “look beyond the left and the right, the red and the blue”. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, also gave a moving speech praising the slain firefighter Corey Comperatore as a hero, a father, church-goer and “avid supporter of the former president”. We all need to calm down, including my overwrought cousin. But the Democrats should not take this as an invitation to do nothing.
