Donald Trump was winning the election before 20-year-old Thomas Crooks took his shot at that most American of habits — an assassination attempt — and missed. That event, a “historic moment” for 24 hours, has now been moved on by the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s vice-presidential candidate.
Now Trump’s campaign is surely strengthened substantially, most particularly by his quick thinking in making a show of physical defiance when he realised he wasn’t badly hurt. One of the defining images of the 2016 campaign was Hillary, collapsed from pneumonia, being bundled into the back of a limo, all very Hunger Games/ruled by space lizards vibe. It could have been made into a testament to her commitment. Instead, it helped to sink her.
How much Trump will be helped by this event remains to be seen. Obviously I’m not saying he’ll be harmed by it. But the assumption that this is a defining moment in the campaign is part of a different agenda.
Trump’s core supporters will be doubly enthused, will revel in notions of conspiracy and the deep state, but they were always on side. Trump’s wider support, the margins of 3-5% he is consistently winning in the rust-belt states, seem to me to be the same people he got in 2016, but all the more so.
These voters have no love for Trump, and don’t particularly respond to the heroic narratives around him. Some voted for him twice and will do so a third time. Those who went from Trump to Biden, and are now thinking of trying Trump again — or didn’t vote previously — are doing it for three reasons. First they feel the Democrats lied to them about illegal immigration, saying they would control it, and then letting it expand to unheard-of levels. Second, they want system interruption to respond to the relentless rise in the cost of living, and against the blithe repetitions by the Democrats that things are getting better.
Those two factors were both in place before Biden’s infirmity from age made itself known in the presidential debate, and that adds a percentage point or two. But the repudiation of the Democrats comes from a sense among sections of the electorate that the Democrats repudiated them, as soon as they got into power. Biden’s most obvious recourse would have been to do what Woodrow Wilson did in 1912: steal the other side’s populist policies and reorganise the party around them.
Thus, leaving aside things he should do but never would — like pull back the US empire, and devalue the dollar to reduce debt — Biden should have shamelessly taken Trump’s tariffs, his border policies, made them his own in a modified form, strengthened union power, and glued all this to a new industrial reinvestment program, getting the working- and middle-classes on side with green tech.
This would have left the Republicans as a squabbling outfit of free marketeers and goldbugs, without a program. It would have driven the cultural progressive left of the party wild, which would have allowed Biden to de facto run against them. There would have been no split, no third party, if the Democratic program was sufficiently economically left. Biden would have sailed home, until his debilitation became obvious, at which point someone else could have taken up the program. In that case, Trump might never have jumped in.
That’s how things have been for a while, and with a sense of grinding invariance, which is why there’s a curious lack of intensity to this assassination attempt. Can you feel it slipping away into the background? Weird isn’t it? It’s got all the elements of a great assassination, it’s a lot like the JFK shooting, and yet it feels like it has little real impact. Everyone’s talking about the Evan Vucci photo as one of the great photos of the century blah blah. Does it feel that way? Not at all. It has about the same impact as any one of a half a dozen shots on your phone.
But the media and political establishment desperately want it to be a moment, an event. They want Trump either to be vengeful, or to come to the centre and bring everyone together, for something to happen. But things don’t happen like that anymore. The relationship between politics, media and events is moving beneath the surface. Hence the grasping at that image, as if it was a Life magazine classic — because there is a desire for the historical moment such as existed back in the day, when one magazine carried the world to us in photos.
There is a powerful nostalgia at work — especially among an increasingly irrelevant media — for the time when events would happen in a way predictable within the media-life nexus. The current disconnection is not merely a matter of structures; it is the breach between a mass no longer connected to the elite — a mass from which the shooter himself came — and unwilling to be guided by the elite’s political imperatives.
Thomas Crooks sought to make history erupt again. We don’t know the fullness of his motives yet. They are already being psychologised because he was scruffy, and a bit of a loner. There is surely something paradoxical about sending a relentless volley of warnings about what a unique danger that Donald Trump is, and then treating someone who came to the same conclusion — and acted on it — as crazy. He must have known that his death would soon follow his act. Assassination is wrong, morally, politically and legally, but it’s also strange to damn as uncourageous someone many may, in years to come, whether they would admit it or not, wish had succeeded.
That doesn’t mean that nothing “happeny” will happen in the coming months. But it does mean that whatever could throw this contest in another direction is not of an older order of events, such as is making this bloody and lethal incident seem like a TikTok version of past crises. In 2016, Trump himself was the irruption of the new into the real, the man who could survive the Access Hollywood scandal and become president of the United States without a program or an incoming administration to speak of, the first gonzo presidency. Quite possibly there is nothing that will get in the way of his return. The dismissal of the classified documents case by a Trump-appointed judge is yet another boost.
But whatever might change the race, none of us outside of the deep heartland have any way of knowing what it will be. But in the US, in 2024? It’s gotta be more than, of all things, an assassination attempt.
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