Given that Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection in 2021, regularly endorsed or urged violence during his presidency, has been invoked as an inspiration for racist violence scores of times, and endorsed calls for his own vice president to be hanged, it’s perhaps unsurprising that America’s culture of political violence has engulfed Trump himself, at a tragic cost of one man’s life, along with injuries to two others.
The name of Corey Comperatore, shot dead at the rally at which Trump was injured, shouldn’t be forgotten — yet another victim of American gun culture, as well as its long history of political shootings.
This political shooting, however, was on the campaign trail, and significantly increases the likelihood that Trump will win the White House against a feeble Joe Biden, perhaps with Republican majorities in both houses, off the back of his near-martyrdom.
Trump has already indicated that he intends to act like a dictator in his second term, go after critics and political opponents including Biden, and strengthen police and military forces to use against protesters. His commitment to a radically more authoritarian presidency has been clear and unabashed. The assassination attempt now provides Trump with the basis for an even more aggressive plan to pursue critics and opponents if he returns to the White House.
Already, his supporters are blaming Democrats and Biden, with calls for the prosecution of Biden (conveniently forgetting that Trump’s Supreme Court victory handed presidents legal immunity). Trump supporters worldwide are seeking to place responsibility for the shooting on critics of Trump.
While Trump, in the aftermath of the shooting, was calling for unity, his long record of incitement to violence and threats to opponents, including the media, whom he has called an “enemy of the people”, suggest he will seize on the narrative of “liberal” political violence as justification for a radical assertion of presidential power — perhaps further strengthened by a Republican Congress.
Trump has already been seeking to exploit pro-Palestine protests in the US, stating that he would defeat what he termed a “radical revolution”, including by deporting protesters. “We’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he promised at a private meeting with donors. Publicly, Trump has said “when I’m president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals, and if you come here from a violent country and try to bring jihadism, or anti-Americanism, or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you.”
This conflation of legitimate protest with terrorism complements efforts by Republicans to label protesters terrorists.
(Anthony Albanese made a similar conflation here on the weekend. Asked about election-related violence in the US, Albanese said “I’ve expressed my concern that people who just dismiss actions outside electorate offices, these things can escalate, which is why they need to be called out unequivocally, and opposed. The sort of incidents that we’ve seen outside some electorate offices are inappropriate.”)
With the groundwork already laid for protesting against Israel to be deemed illegitimate, conflated with political violence and made the basis for deportation, it’s a much shorter step to deeming all protest illegitimate, to be dealt with — as Trump has promised — with federally controlled troops and a weaponised Justice Department. The Trump narrative will be that “liberals” stole the 2020 election, tried to jail him and failed, and then tried to kill him and failed — justifying his taking extraordinary steps to suppress the threat they pose. The only appeal will be to a Supreme Court stacked with Republican appointees who believe a president has monarch-like immunity.
Thus armed legally and morally, Trump can finally restore order to America.
The danger from this looming authoritarian turn isn’t merely to Americans. The Trump and Biden administrations both went after Julian Assange using US espionage laws to prosecute a non-US citizen for publishing US documents, and the Biden administration secured a conviction. There’s now a precedent for a future president to go after foreign critics using US laws and extradition requests.
In the febrile atmosphere of a Trump presidency cracking down on dissent, who can guarantee it won’t be used?
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