Donald Trump never forgets that he is a candidate and he has to win the election. Even if he has just escaped certain death by chance. If the fireball of 5.56. from a semi-automatic AR-15 (essentially the commercially available US version of the M-16 assault rifle which is the primary weapon of the US armed forces), it barely moved or the head injury would have been fatal . But Trump was spared and immediately rushed to send his message to the voters, raising his fist and saying “fight”. The counterpoint to the image of President Biden’s lack of direction and constant charades is more than clear.
Of course, for America the picture was also a big shock. Let’s not forget that the last time a president was in danger of an assassination attempt was in 1981 when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Reagan. In fact, Donald Trump is the third US president to be wounded in an assassination attempt, in a country that includes a total of four presidents who have been assassinated while in office.
But a lot of thought went back 56 years to one of the most turbulent years in American political history, 1968. When we had the last assassination of a presidential candidate in Robert Kennedy (almost 5 years after the assassination of his brother and US President John. Kennedy), but also the assassination of the most important leader of the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King. Again at a time of great contradictions, as the two oppositions to the Vietnam War and the radicalization of the student movement, the civil rights movement, and in some cases the labor movement, were at odds with the way the American political system was established at the height of the Cold War.
But the issue is not just the history of political violence in the United States, but its current state. And Donald Trump himself has contributed to this in a way.
Why Trump can now accuse the Democrats of having incendiary rhetoric against him and effectively demonizing him from the hand of his closest friends, but it was Trump himself who begged, and the result of the November election 2020 he questioned, his followers go and violently storm the Conference on January 6, 2021, one of the most traumatic times for the political institutions of the great powers of the planet.
Not to mention the way in which Trump himself relies heavily on simple and simplistic rhetoric against immigrants, the Left and its political opponents that contribute to the strange environment of civil war that the USA has had in recent years.
The fact, as the New York Times reminds us, in a recent survey that 10% of respondents answered that the use of force to prevent to make Donald Trump return to the presidency and 7% that it is justified to prevent Trump from returning to the presidency.
In fact, America is once again facing its own demons. A country that is very unequal and deeply divided at different levels, with intense social opposition and “culture wars”, constantly oscillating between being a “melting pot” and being very bright, becoming increasingly difficult to have common reference points, outside of normal consumer practices. , and at the same time a violent country, from the way the police behave to the deadly literal view of gun ownership as an inalienable right, but also always prone to what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics” to describe the perennial appeal of conspiracy theory in US political controversies.
A country at constant war with itself. A war of which Donald Trump was almost a victim. A war that will continue whoever and if the next president of the USA ends.