Would You Rather Have Butter or Guns?
Trumpism and the menace of political violence.
Even if you harbour nothing but contempt for the 45th President of the United States and what he represents, it was hard not to recognise the poignancy of the moment he gathered himself after surviving, by an inch, a bullet to the head, to fist pump to the crowd and shout “fight!”. The political significance of the moment, the first assassination attempt on a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1979, was evidently not lost on Trump who, ever the showman, knew that his response would be fuel to the fire of his enflamed base. The already-iconic photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci, is a feast of Americana; the supersized, fluttering Stars-and-Stripes, the crew-cut, shaded secret service detail, and the blood-splattered Republican candidate himself, a pose of pure defiance, fist clenched in the air and mouth gaping mid-shout, appearing as the archangel of MAGA beneath God’s flag. If the MAGA movement has a mythology of America for which Trump is the physical manifestation thereof, the photograph captured the myth at the moment of its ascendance. All that the picture was missing was the audio of the crowd chanting “USA! USA! USA!” Only, as the saying goes, in America.
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, there has been a rush to declare political violence as “un-American”. The New York Times ran an article with the title, Political Violence May Be Un-American, but It Is Not Uncommon, which echoed President Biden’s comments in response to the attempt on Trump’s life that political violence is “un-American” and “unheard of”. The article seemed to rest its case on the peaceful transfer of power, which takes a fairly myopic definition of political violence. The list of assassinations and attempted assassinations speaks for itself; there have been 20 assassination attempts on sitting presidents, of which four resulted in the murder of the president: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Three presidential candidates have been wounded in assassination attempts: Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Robert Kennedy was assassinated and George Wallace was paralysed from the waist down. This does not even include leaders of civil rights movements such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and George Lincoln Rockwell. To say that political violence is “un-American” is a demonstrably laughable claim; it is about as American as apple pie and AR-15s.
The aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump predictably brought forth numerous hot-takes about how the incident would influence the election in November of this year. But a perusal of the history of presidential assassinations and attempts reveals no discernible support for this proposition, and indeed no discernible patterns. The four assassination presidents include the revered and hallowed Lincoln and Kennedy, and the afterthoughts of Garfield and McKinley. Assassinations and attempted assassinations have occurred at times of social unrest in American society, such as the 1933 attempt on Franklin Roosevelt (which resulted in the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, being killed), Lincoln and Kennedy, and in periods of prosperity and calm such as McKinley’s presidency.
In terms of campaign influence, Teddy Roosevelt went on to lose the 1912 election despite finishing his speech with a bullet lodged in his chest (if the attempt on Teddy Roosevelt had occurred during the social media age, it would have been orders of magnitude more ‘Muricah than Trump’s fist pump), while the attempted assassination of Franklin Roosevelt occurred before his first of three inaugurations. Ronald Reagan received a surge in popularity but it was not likely instrumental in his election campaign as he was already streaks ahead in polls, while poor Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in the same year, both by women, which had no bearing on his forgetful one-term term in office. Arguably the most consequential assassination was JFK, as it altered the trajectory of the Vietnam War.
Thus, history is little guide for considering the potential ramifications for Trump and the Republicans. A further factor in the present context is the levels of polarisation in American society and politics, which render it unlikely that an incident like this would result in dramatic swings or support towards Trump. The attempted assassination will only entrench his supporters and, likely, deepen their conspiratorial views about the “Deep State”, while his virulent opponents are hardly going to find themselves swelling with sympathy for a man they consider evil incarnate. This leaves swing voters, for who the key issues are the economy, inflation, and jobs, and who already favour Trump on those specific issues. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates that the status quo remains and the assassination attempt has had no discernible impact on polling preferences. The report did, however, highlight that Americans are concerned about political violence.
And concerned they should be. This is perhaps the real irony of the attempted Trump assassination; it was an attempt against the Republican candidate, the candidate of the party of the sordid New Right in America. The irony is found in the fact that since 1994, Right-wing domestic terrorism has accounted for the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks and plots within the U.S. While both sides of the American partisan divide have been quick to try and paint a picture of the politics of the shooter, this is irrelevant. One important distinction is that historically, assassination attempts in Europe have generally been carried out by political and/or paramilitary organisations (e.g., the IRA attempted to blow up Margaret Thatcher's hotel room). In America, conversely, they have primarily been individuals acting alone, irrespective of whether they were acting on their political motivations. This appears to be the case with Trump’s would-be assassin, and focusing on the personal politics of the shooter is to miss the forest for the trees, where “the forest” is the resurgence of Right-wing domestic terrorism in the U.S. and its proliferation in recent years among any number of militia and anti-government groups.
This is clearly illustrated in the line graph, below, from a 2020 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), with the sky blue line depicting Right-wing terrorism. The spike in 1995 reflects the most devastating terrorist act committed on American soil other than 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, motivated by Right-wing militia anti-government conspiracy theories and revenge for the Branch Davidian massacre at Waco, Texas, by the FBI and ATF. Following the Oklahoma City Bombing, there was a steady decline in Right-wing terrorism until a defining moment in U.S. history stimulated a profound revival in the scale and activity of Right-wing domestic terrorism: the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president, in 2008. The number of anti-government and “patriot” militia groups, which had previously peaked at 858 in 1995-1996, swelled to 1,360 by the end of Obama’s first term in office.1 These groups were, and are, characterised by recruiting military veterans and law enforcement personnel, and by a view of their role as defenders of the Constitution (as they interpret it) and of “liberty” (as they define it) against “tyranny” (as they perceive it). By 2020, over 90% of all recorded domestic terrorism incidents in the U.S. were attributable to Right-wing groups.
This leads me to the question I’ve been thinking about since the bullet skimmed Trump's ear: what if he goes on to lose the election in November?
We’ve been spared the question of “what if the shooter hadn’t missed” because he survived, for which I am thankful; I believe in democracy, however naive that is of me, and we decide elections by the ballot box, not bullets. Had Trump been killed, I fear we would be getting an answer to this question as I write this. With Trump standing defiant and campaigning, the original question is thus the pertinent one: what if (by some miracle, it seems at this point) the Democrats win the November election?
Right-wing militia and anti-government groups constitute a mirror of the dark corners of the Republican Party that are no longer in the dark but form the very visible face of Trump's GOP. Their information ecosystem is so poisoned, and their resulting worldviews so deeply detached from reality, that a Democrat win in November will only serve to confirm their view that a “Deep State” conspiracy has usurped the government to trample on Real Americans (i.e., them).
The seething mass of resentment that fuels Trumpism and the American Right is, it is important to note, often justified in sections of American society that have felt the brunt of deindustrialisation, of the 2008 crash, of America's Forever Wars. To quote Marilynne Robinson, resentment “is what anger becomes when its legitimacy is not acknowledged.” This American underclass, as the title of Arlie Hochschild’s book put it, feels like “strangers in their own land”.
Yet this is also fundamental to grasping why the movement has invested its emotional turmoil in Trumpism, because he channels their animosity and disaffection. This movement has no endgame other than some form of restitution it believes is their due, whatever that looks like, or burning the whole rickety wooden frame of American democracy and institutions down with it. When the crowd chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention this week, these were not empty words; for the militias, the nihilistic “boogaloo bois”, the “sovereign citizens” and the anti-government “patriots”, this is an expression of a sincerely held intent.
A near-decade of fermenting in an ecosystem of paranoia and disinformation will come to a head in November. January 6th offered all the required insights into the lengths Trump was willing to go to incite a seditious insurrection. It is difficult to see how a Republican loss in November would not make that day look like child’s play. Just how far would the fringes of the American Right be willing to go?
Hoffman, B., & Ware, J. God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. New York: Columbia University Press; 2024.
I worry a lot less about how the far right will respond if they lose in November than how they'll respond if they win, especially as a current resident of the DC area where so many people are civil servants. But I'm originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, so for many years the American brand of Christian conservatism was the only cultural/political framework I knew. No doubt some of the resentment on the Right is justified, as you mentioned, but honestly so much of it is delusions of persecution. The Trump supporters in my own family and in the area where I'm from are insanely privileged. They're upper-middle class, live in McMansions or otherwise nice homes on one-acre lots with swimming pools, own multiple properties, can afford to pay their kids' college tuition... For them, it's little more than chauvinism, arrogance, and a "fuck nerds" worldview. And for others, voting Republican is "just what they do" because it's what everyone around them does, and no one around them is particularly thoughtful. Our schools are mediocre, our people are gullible, and probably most important, which you alluded to, is the media ecosystem -- especially the conservative talk radio that instills this noxious anti-intellectualism and manufactures resentment toward some largely imagined Bad Guy. All this to say, they'll be pissed if Democrats win, but I think they'll be even more emboldened/dangerous if Trump wins.
Excellent piece and so very alarming: “A near-decade of fermenting in an ecosystem of paranoia and disinformation will come to a head in November.” As you said, if the democrats win, we’ll likely see widespread civil unrest and uprising.