For nearly 80 years, the only notable contribution of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to popular culture has been the Doomsday Clock. Featuring on the cover of every Bulletin, the Clock shows how close its publishers believe the world is to being destroyed according to how many minutes it is to midnight.
On the 13th July, avoiding Doomsday felt like a matter of millimetres rather than minutes. Four American presidents have been assassinated. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in rural Pennsylvania, Donald Trump nearly became the fifth.
If he hadn't been leaning forward, and hadn't had his head turned to the side, the bullet seen below would have pierced his head, rather than his ear, and he would not have been in any position to be pumping his fist while the Secret Service took him away.
If you've been watching the presidential campaign over the month that's passed since this incident, you may find it hard to believe that it even happened. While at the time soon-to-be-former US president Joe Biden called the attempted assassination 'unprecedented in American history' - an overstatement, given the fatal shootings of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy - it didn't take long for the tone of the campaign to switch back to as it was beforehand, almost overcorrecting from the drama of the moment.
Perhaps is just a result of our human instinct to think of what is happening right now as the most important thing ever, which has only been fuelled further in the internet age...but it seems more than that. The United States is not in a good place right now, and while that country goes through cycles of crisis regularly, this moment - both the shooting and the aftermath - may well be a sign of serious trouble being near at hand.
A history of violence and crises
Every country tends to have 'original sins': attributes so wrapped up in the culture of that place and its people that there seems to be no way to get rid of them. As far as the United States goes, individualism is one of its original sins. An obsession with 'race' is another. And a third is political violence, most often seen coming out of the barrel of a gun (as opposed to France, for example, which prefers rioting).
Just as 'live free or die' was the mindset of many of its founding fathers, and slavery was accepted as standard practice, so too was the United States born from an act of revolution-by-rifle, and with the country thus established with the notion that a noble enough cause to free the people from tyranny should be effected through the bearing of arms, so was it to continue.
While Lincoln may have been the first president to die from being shot, he probably should not have been. Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, was saved by the pistol aimed at him misfiring at point blank range, and the back-up pistol also misfiring, allowing Jackson to give Richard Lawrence, his would-be assassin, a good caning.
Jackson was the first US President that could be considered a real agitator, and (as the founder of an upstart party upsetting the established norm) the first to be regarded as a genuine threat to America by his opponents. That doesn't necessarily explain the attempted assassination, as Lawrence was found to be not guilty by virtue of insanity, but it does seem to be a consistent enough theme; if someone with their mind in a bad place believes strongly enough that they have a righteous cause in killing the leader of the United States, why shouldn't they?
One could try and argue back against the idea that this is uniquely American. After all, American presidents are powerful figureheads, so that alone could be enough for someone to aim to kill them. Ronald Reagan's nearly-assassin shot him because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. Many of the more recent attempted assassinations (since the late 1970s) have come from outside the US, owing to America's foreign policy more than anything else.
But the United States isn't the only large country with a powerful leader, so why is it that assassinations and attempted ones are so common within the country, if it isn't something more deeply embedded in the culture? It's not only presidents that get assassinated - Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were killed in the same year, as part of widespread unrest in 1968.
It is particularly noteworthy that political violence in the United States seems tied to moments of national crisis. Every forty years or so, the US will start naval gazing, worrying that the country may be about to fall apart because of some disaster or another. Given that the United States was formed through armed warfare at a time of crisis, it makes sense that this pattern would also continue from then on.
The US has been able to muddle its way through each crisis, seemingly in spite of itself. Some of the muddling has been rather more muddlesome than others - compare the Civil War to the New Deal, for example - but each time, some new way of perceiving the role of government comes about, and the country keeps on its course.
But the course of history shows us that all empires fall, and each American crisis brings it one step closer to collapsing. So what about this one?
Fall of a republic
In a world that seems more determined that ever to cycle information through its collective head as quickly as possible, this event may seem like ancient news. After all, the sitting president has decided to quit (or, rather, was rather forcefully removed from the process and has barely been sighted since), and Trump appears to be back to normal, and each party has been focussed on their national conventions, and the Olympics have been on, and there's now been a debate with the two current major party candidates, and so on and so forth.
But imagine, if you will, that the bullet did not miss.
The former president - and favourite to win in the upcoming election - is dead. His voters are in uproar, many convinced that the government has let (or even ordered) him be killed by a political radical (Gab founder Andrew Torba seems to be the best lead in knowing what Crooks was thinking, as he reports that Crooks had a pro-Biden account on the plaform, though it was in 2021). The sitting president, meanwhile, is barely functioning in the role, with pressure on him to quit from running again. Perhaps he would still bow out in this imaginary world as he did in the real world.
Either way, this scenario would not so much be a country divided, but shattered. In the real world, the tone of the Democratic campaign has barely shifted after the shooting. In fact, Biden's 'farewell' speech even used the same 'saving democracy' argument that Republicans argue has been so dangerous in the first place. With Trump out of the picture, it seems likely that they would use the same argument against whoever replaced him, warning that the replacement would try to bring retribution on the Democrats (and therefore against democracy and so on) if they took office.
This would undoubtedly be a red rag to the Trump supporting bulls. In fairness, Democrats have used this line of argument against pretty much every Republican presidential candidate since Thomas Dewey, save for those who actually fought in the Second World War, in much the same way Republicans will accuse the Democrats of being disguised communists.
On the other hand, not every circumstance is the same. It's one thing to accuse an opponent of being the continuation of Hitler a week before the election. It's another for the same tone to be used for nearly a decade, as has been done to Trump despite his four years of presidency being quite similar in practice to every other US presidential term (the reason for which will be fiercly debated by partisans).
For all that we don't know the motivations of Thomas Crooks, we do know that there plenty of people that have stated publicly over the past decade that they would like to see violence come upon Trump because they disagree with his political decisions. More widely speaking, the tone of American politics has been quite hysterical for the past few election cycles, and hysteria tends to beget more hysteria, especially when alternative viewpoints are not given air to breathe. The Covid panic was an obvious example of this.
To put it another way, the language of Trump-as-Hitler and other such remarks can't be said to be to blame on their own for the former president's near-death experience until so proven, but what can be said is that they reflect the torrid state of affairs in the US. There is little trust in governance, and there are no leaders - not just in politics, but also in adjacent circles like the media - that seem able to arrest the momentum of a country heading in the direction of catastrophe.
The rise of Trump himself shows this as well, as there is no chance someone using the language he has done would have any cut-through in a high trust society. In fact, he himself would not have presented himself as basely as he does today, because he wouldn't have needed to. Just listen to him talk during interviews in the 1980s and even 1990s - the content is the same, but the tone is different. Trump is a symptom of a low-trust society, not a cause.
In the imaginary world where the bullet hit its mark, that catastrophe would become reality. The inability of the FBI and Secret Service to provide a motive for Crooks' actions or a defence for their failure to protect Trump would be taken by many as a deliberate action to allow Trump to be assassinated by many. Indeed, the lack of clarity they have given even more than a month afterwards does not inspire confidence in them in the real world.
Because Trump survived, they have not been under as much pressure as they would have been if he had died. Tens, even hundreds of millions of people would be demanding immediate answers, in a culture that - unlike during the time of the Kennedy assassination - already largely distrusts their leaders. Any inability or reluctance on the part of anyone involved in government to find out who is to blame would be taken as a sign of guilt, and at that point, all bets are off.
Bear in mind, local law enforcement is no longer co-operating with the FBI about the assassination attempt because they believe it to be politicised. This is a group of officers in small-town Ohio. On released video we hear one of them state their disappointment about what happened because he won't be able to get a picture with Trump after the rally.
If a group of policemen no longer trust the federal government to such a degree that they won't co-operate with them, what would less law-abiding citizens do in a situation where Trump was actually killed?
Ignoring the precipice
The most disturbing part of the shooting wasn't the event itself, but rather the aftermath over the two months since then. Watching the Republican National Convention a few days afterwards, the shooting was ignore. Watching the Democratic National Convention five weeks later, it seemed like a distant memory. Watching the first debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, it was as though it never happened.
Rather than turn the temperature down, the political discussion in the States has remained as hot as ever. Not because of the average American - the vast majority of people are not 'extremists' in any sense, some of them vote and some of them don't, and many in both groups find it all quite tiresome - but because of poor leadership that tries to paint opponents as evil, blaming them for an ever-increasing number of failures.
When opponents are evil, there is no room for compromise - a difficult thing to pull off without consequences in a system of democratic representative government.
With the endorsements of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump has ensured that that a vote for the Republicans is a vote for anti-establishment grievance. This is not unlike 2016, but it has a different flavour. In his first campaign, Trump was seeking to bring dissaffected working-class voters into the Republican Party in an alliance with the Republican establishment, forcing the latter to work with them.
In the years since then, these establishment types - people like the late John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan - have mostly refused to work with Trump unless there was some temporary mutual benefit. Mike Pence was the symbol of this alliance, and his 'backstab' on Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election ended the likelihood of Trump running the same strategy again.
Backing that he will have the majority of Republicans onside anyway, Trump has instead sought to win over anyone else that feels cheated by 'the system', and blame those in charge for the misery that the United States appears to be in right now.
Grievance politics has a long history, and some use it as little more than a cynical ploy to gain power in a country or region with serious issues. But for Trump, it seems personal. He may have taken over the Republican Party (as affirmed with installation of his daughter-in-law as GOP Co-Chair), but there are plenty of others in Congress, former members of his staff and cabinet, in other arms of government, in the media, in tech organisations - pretty much anywhere that wields any kind of power - that ran interference against him during his time in the Oval Office. And now, seemingly on the cusp of a second (or, in his mind, third) victory, he came ever so close to being killed.
That is personal, and it makes his pleas to vote for him all the more real for anyone else with grievances against people in positions of power. In the most powerful country in the world, with a population over three hundred million, there's a lot of powerful people, and a lot more who feel powerless and are looking for someone to blame.
Kennedy and Gabbard both have personal grievances against a party that they, in truth, have more in common with than they do with Trump. But they've been cast aside due to raising uncomfortable questions for the Democratic establishment, and Trump is the only one they can see people able to shake that establishment up.
The biggest issue with grievance politics is that it crystallises us-against-them as the lens through which politics is seen. This neccesitates that 'the other side' is, in some sense, morally wrong, not just intellectually wrong. With this mindset, one can excuse all kinds of behaviours from 'their side', which railing against the 'other side' doing the same things.
Grievance politics can be successful as an electoral tactic, and isn't necessarily a cynical ploy either. Governments can be bad. Successive governments can completely ignore major issues that they have created if they believe admitting that there is a problem would cause them to lose face or lose votes.
But if the grievance is not dealt with, it can create more long-term problems. Grievance politics sections off parts of society from each other, and results in an atmosphere of distrust in the public square. This is dangerous for any democratic system, as elections are meant to be a pressure valve, releasing the tension in air by getting all the voters to agree on who should be trusted to lead them.
If a major portion of the country does not trust that system, does not trust the people who run it, and/or does not trust the people who are meant to inform them about what is happening in their world, the system falls apart.
There's every chance, then, that this isn't just another minor crisis of self-reflection that the United States is going through. If anything, it appears to be the opposite. Most American leaders don't want to self-reflect, and don't want to engage with the people that have become increasingly positioned against them, even as a multitude of metrics have the United States slipping from being the world's leading power.
The greatest national crisis the US has ever had - the American Civil War - was the product of leadership spending years kicking cans down the road, and a failure to seriously grapple with issues in the public square in good faith, causing different parts of the country being locked into increasingly opposing positions due to perceived moral superiority.
The United States of 2024 is in a similar position, cans and all. Ongoing questions around immigration, trade, morality and governance are seriously impacting social cohesion, and competing worldviews are painting completely different images of the world they see, with no room for compromise. If the collective leadership of the country does not realise this soon, and the next election fails to release the tension that has been building up, that country's clock could very well reach midnight before too long.
Comments