Butler, where Donald Trump was assassinated, escaped with only a “scratch,” as the district attorney called it, by sheer chance. A photo taken by New York Times photographer Doug Mills shows a bullet passing through the former president’s head.
It is difficult to predict how the events of Saturday will affect America and its political processes. BBC commentator Mikhail Smotryayev expressed his opinion on this matter.
This type of assassination of an American president or presidential candidate has not occurred since Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981.
Commentators recall that in the recent past, the Kennedy brothers – one President John, the other Robert, the favorite in the presidential race – were shot dead. Back then, in the 1960s, human rights activists such as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. were also killed by an assassin’s bullet. and Malcolm X.
Even after these turbulent times, there were cases of shootings of politicians in the US. In 2011, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, was shot in the head at a party event and critically injured. At that time, six other people became victims of the attack.
In 2017, House Majority Secretary Steve Scalise and three others were injured in a shooting at a baseball practice for Republican congressmen.
America is as polarized as it was in the 1960s. Then, as now, someone with a gun and ready to use it can change the course of history.
The bullets fired at Butler, if they don’t change the course of history, may at least affect the outcome of the Nov. 5 election. Before this event, both presidential candidates had equal support.
“The bullet fired at Trump hit Biden”
Russian political scientist Boris Pastukhov commented on this incident. One can agree with this statement.
A few hours after the incident, current President Joe Biden – Trump’s opponent in November – appeared before the cameras to make a statement to the press: “There is no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s disgusting. We cannot accept that.”
Other prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, condemned the attack. But that did not cool down the situation.
The Republican camp also found blame for the assassination on Democrats and Joe Biden himself, recalling that the incumbent president said early last week that it was time to “put Trump in the spotlight.”
“Biden’s campaign is focused on portraying President Donald Trump as an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” wrote the Ohio senator, who some sources say will be Trump’s vice president if elected. One candidate is Jay Dee Vance. “Such rhetoric directly led to the assassination of President Trump.”
One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita X (ex-Twitter), wrote on his social network that “for years and to this day, left-wing activists, Democratic donors and now Joe Biden have made disgusting statements describing the shooting of Donald Trump… it’s time hold him accountable for it… the best way to do that is through the ballot box,” he wrote.
Noise on social networks
LaCivita talked about the ballot box, which is both a bad sign and a good sign on the other.
Disinformation researcher Amanda Rogers, senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, called the polarizing, unhealthy and conspiratorial uproar on social media following the firing of Donald Trump a “spiral of stupidity.”
It has happened before, but not on this scale, he says. The talk on social media and in the mainstream press is mostly about the shooter’s motives and how it will affect the election. But there are also those who want to use the opportunity to turn the reaction to the assassination into a call for more violence. And they spread lies to get it, they believe.
“The fact that this is an ideal environment for the spread of misinformation from all points of the political spectrum is deeply troubling to me,” Rogers said. – Because this is an accelerator’s sweet dream… But we need voices in the media to remind us that we are in a critical situation. People shouldn’t speculate.”
Accelerationists in the US are called accelerationists, whether on the right or the left, who want a civil war to completely destroy the country and build a new state on the ruins. It is noteworthy that after the assassination of Trump, the word “citizenship” was inflected on social networks.
What bothered Rogers the most was the complete deletion of messages on the far-right Telegram channels he had been following in the minutes after the Butler incident. He said it was done as a cleanup in case the shooter (whose motives are still unknown) turned out to be one of them.
Artificial intelligence is also used for disinformation, with the help of which it is possible to create “fakes”. And the emotional, historical nature of the situation reinforces preexisting biases and opens up opportunities for manipulation, notes Jonathan Ong, a disinformation researcher and professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts. “I think that’s what we need to focus on. And we had to be careful,” he said.
“Victim” Trump
Just think how many people stormed the Capitol in January 2021 to defend Trump’s “victory” that didn’t happen – when he didn’t even have the status of a “victim” as some of his supporters now claim.
“One of the strange features of secular life today is that we seem to worship the victim and the survivor – we attribute to the victim the status of a virtuous and highly moral person,” noted historian Sebag Montefiore in a post on the X social network in connection with the assassination of Trump in a post .
Vivek Ramaswamy, a former opponent of Trump in the primaries, writes on the social network X: “First they sued him. They then started criminal proceedings against him. They then tried to remove him from the ballot. More tragic than what happened is that, to be honest, this incident was not shocking at all.”
Although a former president, Trump ran his campaign as an insurgent outsider, complaining that the feds and the Biden administration had long hounded him to prevent him from returning to power.
The tone of his speeches was similar – the former president warned of “bleeding” if he was not elected, called illegal immigrants “poisoning the blood of the country” and the like.
In this sense, the failure of the assassination works in Trump’s favor because it shows that the country is headed in the wrong direction. And the photo of the former president with a bloodied face and a raised fist, which has already become a cult on social networks, is a great campaign poster in itself.
Trump’s supporters have previously seen him as an invincible hero and treated him with almost supernatural respect at rallies, noted CNN’s Stephen Collinson. Now his image of a warrior who is regularly attacked by enemies has strengthened. The footage from the Butler scene will go down in history and enrich the Trump mythology in the same way that the photo taken at the Atlanta police station or the footage of his return to the White House after recovering from covid in 2020.
The Republican National Convention kicks off in Milwaukee today, and there’s no doubt that the botched assassination will be a major topic, and that Trump’s supporters will feel increasingly resentful and alienated from the country’s political class.
The assassination of Trump is a clear example of what heightened political rhetoric and polarization can do in a country where access to guns is legal and easy.
“If the country wasn’t a dust barrel, it is now,” says Chip Felkel, a Republican activist from South Carolina.
