On 1 June, two days after being convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments to a porn star, Donald Trump made a surprise appearance at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in New Jersey. He walked out into the arena, pumping his fist, to the soundtrack of Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass”. The crowd went wild. Trump’s political skill has long been his instinctive grasp of the potency of resentment. Never mind that he is a billionaire property magnate from a wealthy family who prefers to spend his time golfing and watching television. He has reinvented himself as a valiant underdog fighting back on behalf of the forgotten masses against the “deep state” and “corrupt” elites. As he told a gathering of conservative activists last year, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
This struggle already has martyrs. For the Trumpian faithful, the rioters convicted of storming the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 are “political prisoners” and “patriots”, whom Trump has vouched to pardon if elected. Yet no one is more persecuted than the former president. Despite being convicted, impeached, and found liable for sexual assault, to his followers this is only further evidence of how his powerful enemies have tried to stop him at all costs.
This was the Trump his supporters saw rising from the stage after coming within millimetres of being assassinated during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on 13 July: bloodied but defiant, an American flag billowing in the blue sky behind him, holding up his fist and mouthing “Fight”.
“They try to jail him. They try to kill him. It will not work,” wrote Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, on X. “He is indomitable.” Trump’s cult-like hold on much of the Republican Party took on a distinctly messianic tone. “For him to still be alive is absolutely a miracle,” said Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kansas. “God is not through with Donald Trump yet. He’s here to lead us, and we’re here to put wind beneath his wings.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted the photograph of Trump with his fist raised with the caption, “God protected President Trump.”
Look at an electoral map of America and it is striking how many states are now deep blue or deep red. As it stands, this election will probably be decided by a few hundred thousand voters in three swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin). This means millions of Americans may well feel their vote didn’t count. At the same time, political violence is increasing. Research suggests that incidents of political violence began rising in 2016 – the year Trump was first elected president – and it is accelerating, with threats against election workers, in particular, spiking since 2020. This has been accompanied by an ominous shift in attitudes towards violence. Around 20 per cent of Democratic and Republican voters surveyed in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last year said that violence would be “acceptable” if it helped “to achieve my idea of a better society”.
Joe Biden swiftly condemned the attack on Trump as “sick” but his insistence that political violence like this in America is “unheard of” is wrong. Four US presidents have been assassinated – Abraham Lincoln in 1865; James A Garfield in 1881; William McKinley in 1901 and John F Kennedy in 1963 – and many more attempts have been made. After Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead in April 1968, Robert Kennedy – who was then running for the Democratic nomination for president – denounced the “mindless menace of violence in America” that ignores “our common humanity and our claims to civilisation alike”. Two months later, he was shot and killed.
The political environment in 1968 was more febrile than it is now. The US was at war in Vietnam, where roughly 950 American soldiers were dying every month. Police officers shot and killed student protesters on college campuses. There were riots outside the Democratic national convention in Chicago (where it is due to be held again next month). National guardsmen with bayonets fixed to their rifles lined the streets. America is not back there yet, but you can see the path.
The difference between now and then is the prevalence of guns. Even in 1968, there were concerns that America’s obsession with firearms had gone too far. “All too widely, the country is regarded as a blood-drenched, continent-wide shooting range,” lamented Time magazine. Around 90 million Americans owned a gun at the time. Nobody knows exactly how many there are now, as there is no federal registry of gun ownership, but estimates suggest 393 million civilian-owned firearms are in circulation, which means that there are more guns than there are people.
There are many things we do not yet know about the assassination attempt on Trump, but it is being reported that the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, used an AR-15 style rifle. The gun manufacturer Colt, which owned the original patent, never made more than 5,000 a year in the 1960s, when they were primarily marketed as hunting rifles. But after the patent expired in the 1970s, other manufacturers began to produce their own variations and shift the marketing focus to protecting your home and family. They are powerful weapons that require little skill or strength to operate. That is why they have become one of the best-selling rifles in the country, and have been christened “America’s rifle” by the NRA.
America has normalised living with extraordinary levels of gun violence. This is a country where many children learn active-shooter drills before they learn to read. There were more mass shootings than days in 2023. When someone cuts in front of you in traffic, you remind yourself they might be armed. I drive past a gun shop every day to drop my children off at nursery. The more guns there are, the more people believe they need guns. It is a perpetual motion machine powered by fear and the fetishisation of strength and masculinity. Add racism, political polarisation, status anxiety and social atomisation to that, and the cycle accelerates until it feels like the country is rushing headlong towards calamity.
This is fertile ground for strongman leaders and would-be autocrats. They prey on that heady combination of grievance and fear. The worse it gets, the better for them; the greater the need for a self-sacrificing saviour to restore order and make the country great again. The near-assassination of Donald Trump could be an inflection point, the moment Americans turn away en masse from his vitriolic narcissism and towards a leader who will bring the country together instead of tearing it apart. If only there was a strong Democrat on the ballot who could make that case.
We are far more likely to see a deepening of this nation’s already bitter divides; more political violence; more conspiracy theories; more fear on both sides; more guns. We are heading towards the election of a vengeance-fuelled president who considers himself anointed by god. With the selection of JD Vance as his running mate, Trump has ensured that the Maga movement will not end with him. They stood together at the Republican national convention on 15 July – Trump with a bandage on his wounded ear – and chanted: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
This appears in the 19-25 July 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine
[See also: Republicans are correct that words can incite violence – they would know]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk