The shot seen round the world

The photograph of a bloodied Trump has turned him into a hero and captured the carnage of American politics.

To frame the question somewhat awkwardly: when did the pictures of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump start to be taken? How far back do we have to reach to take the full measure of Joe Biden’s gaffes at the Nato summit?

In 1967 John Berger published an essay in which he pointed out the striking similarities between a photo of the recently displayed corpse of Che Guevara and Rembrandt’s 1632 painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. After examining each image with his forensic eye for detail Berger moves on to the larger point that “both are concerned with making an example of the dead: one for the advancement of medicine, the other as a political warning”. Having published this short essay in October, Berger followed it up with a kind of sequel in December: “Prompted by another recent newspaper photograph, I continue to consider the death of ‘Che’ Guevara.” Five years later, in 1972, his knack for juxtaposing some of the most venerated paintings of the past with contemporary mass-produced images – nudes by Rubens with magazine covers from what quaintly used to be called the newsagents’ top shelf – attracted a wide audience with his massively influential BBC series Ways of Seeing.

What was once ground-breaking is now taken for granted. In a world of image saturation, everything looks like a quote from or version of something else. When the goalkeeper Mert Günok made a crucial save in Turkey’s match against Austria at the just-finished Euros, pundits made it seem as if he was actively and instinctively sampling Gordon Banks against Pelé in Mexico in 1970! And everything about the process of image generation – from transmission and dissemination to discussion and evaluation – has accelerated, to the extent that the slow gestation of Berger’s consideration has been reduced to minutes. (This piece, relatively speaking, is arriving as late in the race as a lapped 10,000-metre runner.)

Taken instants after the first shots were fired at Trump on 13 July, one photograph in particular, by Evan Vucci, has become instantly iconic: Trump surrounded by a triangular mountain of Secret Service personnel, forming a human shield. Behind him an American flag billows from a diagonal pole, but Trump’s clenched fist makes it seem as if the flag is flying from his hand, like a patriotic kite, all framed by a perfect blue sky. Everything about the picture works in Trump’s favour. Echoes of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph mean that the project of making America great again was pre-emptively endorsed by the marines hoisting a US flag on Iwo Jima in 1945. A compositional resemblance to Géricault’s painting of 1818-19, The Raft of the Medusa – another triangular mass of vulnerable bodies, complete with battered sail billowing under storm-drenched skies – does not exactly suggest the safe sailing of the ship of state. But the jumble of gestural (raised arm), decorative (flag) and symbolic associations with Delacroix’s allegorical Liberty Leading the People (1830) affirm the triumph of Republican values, even if these bear only a rhetorical or radically devalued relation to those of the 1789 French Revolution. In this pictorial context, the documentary record – the art of the real, as it were – of Trump’s surviving the assassination attempt serves as a prophetic allegory of his winning the forthcoming election.

That’s what these rallies are designed to do. The ostensible purpose of garnering support is intended to make the election result seem like a foregone conclusion. And the whole spectacle exists in order to generate coverage, photographs, footage. An abundance of American flags means that anything that might happen – and appear in photographs – will acquire a symbolic importance that extends far beyond any local, site-specific setting. This can cut both ways. In 1976 the photographer Stanley Forman made his way to City Hall Plaza in Boston where students had marched in protest against the policy of busing – whereby children from poor (mainly black) neighbourhoods were driven to better schools in more affluent neighbourhoods. As Theodore Landsmark, a black attorney, walked to the offices in City Hall the mob twice knocked him to the ground. When Landsmark struggled to his feet a furious white student charged forward, as if trying to impale him with an America flag on a long staff, like a spear. Forman captured the moment on film. As clear a symbolic declaration of American resolve as the shot from Iwo Jima – a display of disunity and bigotry rather than shared heroic sacrifice – it duly followed the illustrious precedent of Rosenthal’s photo by winning a Pulitzer Prize.

A different kind of contrast has been evident in the fortunes of the man who, four years ago, saved a disunited America from its own worst tendencies by beating Trump at the last election. His double gaffes at the Nato summit – introducing Volodymyr Zelensky as Putin, saying Trump when he meant Kamala Harris – were so excruciating I couldn’t bear to watch them… more than 30 times. Does it do justice to these stumbles even to call them gaffes? Gaffes are errors, mistakes, but these were so perfect they could have been scripted. And it wasn’t just the script; the delivery almost surpassed his walking-dead – shuffling-dead, more accurately – performance in the debate a couple of weeks earlier. In their own way these bloopers were up there with the best bits of speeches by presidents John F (“Ask not what America…”) Kennedy and Franklin D (“We have nothing to fear…”) Roosevelt.

Both the assassination attempt and the footage of Biden were terrible, of course. But the latter was also hilarious – or, as the saying goes, screamingly funny: funnier, even, than some of the best gags in all seven seasons of Veep. And, like the Trump photograph, this species of comedy has its own genealogy. Just as there is now a brisk trade in seeking the art-historical provenance of news photographs, it’s become somewhat of a cliché to say that everything that happens in recent history has already been reported and articulated by Shakespeare. Depending on how I calculate it, the Biden fiasco can be traced back either to 1976, when I first read a particular piece of literary criticism; to 1930 when that essay was published in a book; or to 1606 when the subject of the essay was first performed.

The essay was G Wilson Knight’s “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque”, from his book The Wheel of Fire. Knight introduces his argument cautiously, almost apologising for searching out “any sort of comedy as a primary theme in a play whose abiding gloom is so heavy, whose reading of human destiny and human actions so starkly tragic”. Yet, Knight goes on, “there is a humour that treads the brink of tears, and tragedy which needs but an infinitesimal shift of perspective to disclose the varied richness of comedy”. And so, while the play becomes more violently distressing, the tragedy is not undermined but underscored by increasingly wretched comedy as the king descends into madness and his riven kingdom collapses into war. Even a suicide attempt by blinded Gloucester turns into a pratfall. Lear is accompanied, almost to the end, by the Fool who serves as both goad and pundit.

In some respects, Lear’s predicament is the opposite of Biden’s. The Fool repeatedly chides Lear for having given away his kingdom; Biden’s pride – an apparent blindness to his perceived mental failings – prevents his passing on the baton of Democratic power to a younger successor and seems, in the process, to be in danger of handing the presidency to Trump. This would be a dreadful outcome – not just for America but for the world (as represented, in Biden’s botched speech, by the watching Zelensky, the former comedy actor turned heroically able leader and statesman). Nell in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame says, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” – but something is, evidently. I don’t know quite what to call it but I know I saw it on TV last week.

It’s sort of bad luck that, for all the good work he has done efficiently behind the scenes, all anyone sees or remembers of Biden at the moment are his howlers – as in “Howl, howl, howl, howl”, to go back to King Lear. Trump, meanwhile, seems blessed with the luck Napoleon wanted in his generals. A bullet intended for him killed a spectator: a parabolic outcome which illustrates how the people who support him are the ones most likely to pay the price for doing so. Even luckier than surviving the assassination attempt is the way that he did not do so entirely unscathed. A bullet that was meant to Zapruder his brains out barely nicked his ear, producing a harmlessly effective trickle of hi-vis blood: blood-red proof that the martyr lived, that he was the manifestly and miraculously unkillable representative of American destiny.

That ear was in better shape than both Evander Holyfield’s after Mike Tyson bit a chunk out of it and Van Gogh’s after he took a knife to it. Another example of the way the visual equivalent of the sound barrier – image barrier? – is constantly being broken: no sooner had the news photos appeared on Sunday morning than altered versions of Van Gogh’s 1889 Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear began to circulate with Trump’s glum face taking the place of Vincent’s. The ironies of this ingeniously simple Face/Off are manifold. In the Trumpian scheme of things Vincent was the ultimate loser – who has since become the biggest winner in art history. The madness that assailed the artist was his alone; in Trump’s case it’s like an internalised projection or self-realisation of the madness of American politics.

Geoff Dyer’s memoir “Homework” will be published next year by Canongate