It is a riveting image that will long resonate and may well decisively shape American history by securing Donald Trump’s re-election: the former president, face bloodied, fist clenched, roaring to the crowd “fight, fight”.
The shocking attempted assassination by a lone gunman of former president Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, has rightly been condemned across the US political divide and around the world. Such political violence, all echo, has no place in a democracy.
As violence breaks out into the open, the stakes in the presidential election continue to rise. Some Trump supporters seized the moment, not least on social media, where poison has already fuelled such bitter political divisiveness and helped to create an undercurrent of violence.
Senator JD Vance, one of the contenders to be Trump’s running mate on the presidential ticket irresponsibly chimed in: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.”
The voices of sanity appealing for a dialling down of the rhetoric of violence and a focus on the facts will be quickly drowned out. It is a dangerous moment, which malign forces will seek to weaponise to sow dissent and promote unrest.
Although the attack on Trump is the first instance of a president or presidential candidate being harmed in an act of violence since president Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981, America fears the worst. With some 43 per cent of legislators saying they have faced threats of violence, there is talk of the country’s politics returning to the troubled 1960s which featured the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Martin Luther King jnr and Robert Kennedy.
Recent polls have recorded 14 per cent of citizens strongly agreeing that there will be a civil war in the US in the next few years, while 59 per cent say elections will not solve the country’s most fundamental problems. Democratic politics itself is coming under threat – and Trump himself bears some responsibility, not least for his actions after the last presidential election.
Fortunately, the former president was not seriously injured, though one attendee was killed and two were critically injured. Joe Biden has temporarily suspended his advertising campaign.
But the lull will be brief.
Trump will attend this week’s Republican National Convention to confirm his presidential nomination. No doubt we will hear much more there about the events in Butler and the mettle of the party’s candidate.
The 2024 US presidential race was always likely to be a defining event for America’s troubled politics and the country itself. Now, suddenly, the stakes – and the dangers – are even greater.