"Fight, fight, fight"

Iconic photograph of a defiant Trump after the attempt on his life at his 13 July campaign rally, by AP photographer Evan Vucci.

As everyone knows, Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for the 2024 presidential election, was nearly assassinated yesterday at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. Many people – including many of my readers – have predicted that something like this would happen for a very long time.

A 20-year-old sniper named Thomas Matthew Crooks fired as many as eight shots in Trump’s direction, nine minutes after he began speaking. Crooks was perched on the roof of a building just north of Trump’s podium, and he succeeded only in wounding the president in his right ear; two other spectators were critically injured and another was killed. The Secret Service Counter Assault Team brought the attack to an end with a fatal shot to Crooks’s head (here is a graphic image of the aftermath). Trump, meanwhile, ducked to the ground while agents shielded him with their bodies. Half a minute later he stood up, demanded that his protectors allow him to get his shoes, and raised a defiant fist to the audience, shouting “Fight, fight, fight.”

Almost anything I say about these events will be superseded by media reporting within hours, so I’ll limit myself to three points:

1) The failed assassination represents a security failure by United States Secret Service that is so astounding, it will rightfully inspire conspiracy theories for years to come. Kevin Rojek, who heads the Pittsburg field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acknowledged that it was “surprising” that Crooks was able to take so many shots unchallenged. And I can think of no reason why Trump’s detail should’ve drawn their security perimeter to exclude a prominent, elevated firing position a mere 130 metres away from Trump’s podium. Finally, there is the fact that Crooks and his rifle were visible to spectators for minutes before he opened fire; multiple rally attendees tried to alert police, fruitlessly. There is even a screen grab of drone footage circulating on social media, showing Crooks climbing onto the building.

2) Initial media reports included many ridiculous headlines – the worst of them this utter failure by CNN:

But there were others, which reported only on “loud noises,” despite the fact that all journalists had access to footage of unmistakable gunfire and Trump with blood on his face:

That these clumsy attempts to downplay an assassination attempt were no fluke, is confirmed by the terrible aftermath commentary of broadcast news analysts like Samantha Vinograd, who declared that “the biggest threat” following this attempt to shoot a major presidential candidate in the head is “retaliatory violence” from the right:

We know that tensions were already high before this incident, and the counter-terrorism officials and homeland security officials that I’ve spoken to … are deeply concerned that this event will be used as a rallying cry to launch attacks against individuals associated with the Biden campaign and lead to broader domestic distress, so right now the goals are to investigate the incident … as well as to try to tamp down any tensions that may arise coming out of it.

“President Trump nearly killed – Biden campaign and the establishment American left most affected.”

3) Maybe the emptyheaded Vinograds of the media should direct a few more of their admittedly scarce IQ points not to the tensions arising from this incident, but to the tensions that led up to it. It was not just Joe Biden who was caught telling supporters that it is “Time to put Trump in a bullseye” a few days ago. Insane rhetoric has attended Trump since the very beginnings of his presidential candidacy in 2015, with legions of purportedly respectable politicians and journalists claiming that he is an agent of foreign powers and an enemy to American democracy. There are hundreds if not thousands of articles and political pleas asking “Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?”, declaring that “Fascism is everywhere on the march, and it’s Trump who sets the pace”, announcing that “Donald ‘Dictator on Day One’ Trump is an existential threat to our democracy”, shouting that “A second Trump presidency is an existential national security threat”, and proclaiming that “A Second Trump Term Will Bring an End to the American Century” and that “Donald Trump ‘will destroy’ U.S. democracy if he wins 2nd term as president.” All of these inflammatory and unfounded claims hail precisely from those corners of the discourse that also eagerly blame every last tepid misdeed against their own political tribe on nebulous “extreme right-wing” forces.

Anybody who is so deluded as to think that this way of speaking about one’s political opponents isn’t dangerous, should consider the case of Sebastian Hotz, the self-proclaimed “shooting star of social media in Germany,” and a writer for the repellent German state-media comedian Jan Böhmermann. After news of the failed assassination broke, Hotz his expressed his regret in since-deleted tweets that the assassin had “unfortunately just missed” the American presidential candidate, and said that “I find it absolutely fantastic when fascists die.” There are literally millions of people out there who share Hotz’s feelings. They are the product of a very deliberate and malign press campaign to cast Trump as the greatest threat to Western prosperity and democracy since that mythological arch-enemy Adolf Hitler. All of them have blood on their hands.