The second assassination attempt on Donald Trump It was still the weekend, just two months after the first. The Republican candidate was playing golf in Palm Beach, Florida, when an FBI agent discovered an armed man nearby.Ryan Wesley Routh58 years old, armed with a rifle and ready, if the authorities do not deny it, to murder. Social unrest was immediate.
It is true that violence is a traditional element of American politics: four of the 45 presidents have been assassinated; the last one, the Democrat John F. Kennedyin 1963. But the few weeks between one effort and the next, as well as the poisoning of public debate, made the difference in a campaign full of stunts.
The last candidate or president to experience something similar was a Republican. Gerald Fordsuccessor of Richard Nixonwith two assassination attempts in September 1975. The first attack was carried out by a follower of the Satanist movement Charles Manson: The gun jammed and there was no shot. The second came from a left-wing fanatic: the bullet left the magazine, but it missed its target. During an election campaign, analysts wonder about the positive impact of surviving an assassination attempt in the eyes of voters. Especially in a campaign like this one, where the two candidates are tied in the most reliable polls.
For Ford, a year later, it was all for nothing: he lost to Jimmy Carter. But with Trump, the mystery reopens again.
The July attack propelled the Republican in the polls, where he was already progressing with the wind in favor of the debate against the president. Joe Bidenresigned to resignation. Barely a week later, Trump was confirmed as the nominee at the Republican Convention in a triumphant atmosphere. That Democrats would remove Biden from the race and put Kamala Harris This allowed them to gain many points in the polls and to contain the enthusiasm of their opponents.
Many analysts wonder whether, on this occasion, we can expect a similar boost for Trump. There are no photos of the attack. There have been no more videos to be broadcast for days and days on the networks and the news. They point out that the attack actually fuels the debate on easy access to weapons for any madman ready to commit a bloodbath. And something else: the difficulties of the secret services to anticipate events, which led President Biden to recognize that they needed “more help.”
The Trumpist right, however, is trying to seize the opportunity to link the assassination of two men to the Democratic Party’s electoral campaign.[El asaltante] “He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris and acted on it,” Trump himself said yesterday when asked by the conservative Fox News network. “That rhetoric is causing them to shoot me when I’m the one who’s going to save the country, because they’re destroying it.” The tycoon Elon Muskally of the Republican candidate, tweeted a doubt. “Why is no one trying to kill Biden or Kamala?” He later deleted the message saying it was a joke.
Charles CW Cookeone of the editors of the conservative magazine National Reviewexpanded on the ideas floated by the Republican candidate in an op-ed. “Harris maintains that Trump ‘is a threat to democracy and fundamental freedoms,’ he has called him a ‘dictator,'” he wrote. “Trump is regularly presented in the press as an ‘authoritarian,’ as a ‘Hitlerian’ project, as the likely author of America’s collapse. Am I to conclude that these words will bring a happy outcome simply because they come from the mouth of a Democrat, a columnist, or a thoughtful person?
The truth is that the White House and the Harris campaign have condemned political violence and issued separate statements celebrating Trump’s unscathed exit. Within the media that Trumpism has singled out, the line is the same. “One of the things that worries me most right now is the normalization and increase in political violence,” the Democrat says, for example. Jason Crow In The New York Times. “This is the second attempt in a few months, and it shows how bad the situation is.”
Some analysts have suggested reasons why Trump blames the attempted murders on his political rivals.. “It is possible,” writes the analyst. Roger Senserrich in your newsletter“May the news serve to break the endless cascade of ridicule, fascism and Trumpian nonsense that has dominated the campaign, forcing Harris and the Democrats to start over when the assassination attempt hits the headlines.
Thus, the scandal caused by the feeding of conspiracy theories according to which Haitian immigrants steal their neighbors’ dogs and cats to eat them, theories too extreme even for famous fans of these storieswould be diluted by the seriousness of the last incident, useful to change the subject and focus, for a few days, on a different place than last week.
