If the 2024 presidential election was a television series we would say it had jumped the shark by now — reached the point of such incredulity as to have lost the plot. The characters are all at each other’s throats. Donald Trump is behaving like a spoilt mean girl, posting “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on social media, while a crazed gunman is lurking for 12 hours with an AK-47 in the bushes at his Florida golf club, hoping to succeed where an earlier would-be assassin had failed. Switching gears, Trump goes into full Churchillian mode and thunders: “I will NEVER SURRENDER!”
This is a crackpot election. With the outcome uncertain, it would be funny if it were not so sinister. Didn’t Trump’s friend, Tucker Carlson, recently declare that Winston Churchill was no big deal anyway? Carlson, who gave a prime time speech at the Republican convention, proudly interviewed a historian on his internet show who claimed Britain’s greatest statesman was a bigger “villain” than Hitler and touted the world’s weirdest excuse for the Holocaust, that the Nazis killed millions of Jews because they lacked the resources to care for them properly.
Trump is a chaos agent in a world filled with accelerants of his own worst instincts. Take Laura Loomer, the gal pal who has been jetting about on his private plane in Melania’s very obvious absence. Loomer flew with Trump to a commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero, despite calling the World Trade Center attacks an “inside job”. In 2022 she was filmed with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, toasting the “hostile takeover of the Republican party”. Then, she was trying and failing to win a Republican primary for a seat in Congress for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago district in Florida. Now that the former president has rallied to her defence and applauded her “free spirit”, who knows what her next move will be?
If the far-Right British provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, is right, Loopy Loomer, 31, is not just palling around with Trump and feeding him oddball lines for last week’s debate with Kamala Harris. Milo, the platinum blond friend of Katie Hopkins and the neo-Proud Boys, has been sharing X-rated theories about Loomer on Elon Musk’s platform, after being banned from Twitter in another era.
Still, Loomer can dish out the abuse. Last week she claimed, “The White House will smell like curry and speeches will be delivered via a call centre”, if Harris were to win. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the wackiest Republican conspiracy theorists in Congress, denounced these comments as “appalling and extremely racist”. Loomer gleefully shredded Greene’s sex life in public.
Is nobody willing to talk sense anymore? Keeping a low profile as best he could was JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, whose wife Usha is Indian-American. Prodded into commenting on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday, he meekly said he didn’t agree with Loomer’s views and cracked a lame, borderline racist joke about Harris, who has Indian and black heritage. “Whether you’re eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken, things have gotten more expensive thanks to her policies.”
Bomb threats have forced the evacuation of primary schools, colleges and local government offices as tensions have soared
Let’s not feel sorry for him either. Vance has spent the past week peddling false information about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbours’ pets and linked their arrival to the spread of HIV and tuberculosis. As a senator for Ohio, he should be ashamed of himself. Bomb threats have forced the evacuation of primary schools, colleges and local government offices as tensions have soared.
Vance declared on CNN. “If I have to create stories so that the American media pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I am going to do.” In this, he was only echoing his master’s voice. Trump is considered to have lost last week’s debate when he yelled, “They’re eating the pets”. But has done a fair job of turning the tables on Harris by banging on about immigration, a sore point for the Democrats.
Trump almost always benefits when he is at the centre of the narrative. That’s entertainment, folks! At this point, I should probably lower my voice and announce gravely that two assassination attempts within two months on a former president (and candidate) are very serious matters. They are indeed. The US secret service appears badly over-stretched. It must be horrendously difficult to protect public figures when there are 400 million guns in private hands and the country is split between Republicans and Democrats.
With the blame game underway, cool heads are in short supply. Trump has accused the Democrats of putting his life in danger by claiming he is a mortal threat to democracy. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country,” he told Fox News.
But what if he is a threat to democracy? Trump fomented political violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and has cast doubt on the fairness of the upcoming election. He is both a flamethrower and victim. Either way, American nerves are frayed.
New conspiracy theories are contributing to the festering atmosphere. General Mike Flynn, a hard-Right election denier who served as Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, has claimed Ryan Routh, the alleged would-be assassin, may have been “directly working” for the CIA. Routh’s militant pro-Ukraine activism makes him a prime target of suspicion for the pro-Putin wing of the Republican party. According to American volunteer fighters in Ukraine, Routh tried to join them last year but was rejected as a “whack job”.
Pandering to Trump’s distrust of the FBI and the Department of Justice, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has promised his own state investigation into the assassination attempt rather than leaving it to the allegedly unreliable feds. All this is casting an unpredictable pall on the election, now 49 days away. Some voters are beginning to receive postal ballots.
Harris will be seeking to build on her debate momentum with a softball interview with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday. Most polls show Harris with a lead of roughly four points, but the battleground states remain desperately close. After the first attempt on his life in July, Trump claimed God had saved him. It gave him a bump in the polls that saw off Joe Biden as a candidate.
Trump invoked divine intervention again after emerging safe from the second threat. “Perhaps it’s God, wanting me to be president to save this country,” he said. We can expect more plot twists before November.
