2024-07-15 19:53:00
Trump suffered only minor injuries, but it wasn’t nearly enough — a photo taken by The New York Times reporter Doug Mills appeared to show a bullet streak through the air near the former president’s head.
There has not been such a dramatic act of violence against a president – or a presidential candidate – since 1981. John Hinkley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan.
It recalls a darker period in US history, when two Kennedy brothers fell to assassins’ bullets more than half a century ago, one a president, the other a presidential candidate. Civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X also died from political violence.
As it is today, the 1960s were marked by extreme political polarization and dysfunction, where a firearm and the person willing to use it could change the course of history.
It is difficult to predict what effect Saturday’s events will have on America and its political discourse. There have already been bipartisan calls to tone down the rhetoric and pursue national unity.
A few hours after the incident, US President Joe Biden – Trump’s likely opponent in November – appeared on camera in Delaware and made a statement to the press.
“America has no place for this kind of violence. It’s disgusting, he said. – We can’t be like that. We can’t put up with that.”
Later, the president spoke with the former president on the phone. He cut short his weekend at the beach and returns to the White House late Saturday night.
But the violence also quickly morphed into the bare-bones partisan struggle that has characterized American politics in recent decades. Some Republican politicians have blamed the attack on Democrats, who have used dire rhetoric about what they say the former president poses as a threat to American democracy.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who is reportedly on the short list to become D, posted on social media. .Trump’s vice president.
“This rhetoric directly led to the assassination attempt on President Trump,” he testified.
Trump’s campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, said that “left-wing activists, Democratic supporters and even Mr. Biden” must be held accountable at the ballot box in November for the “vile remarks” that he believes led to Saturday’s attack.
Democrats may object, but many on the left used similar words to describe the fault of the right’s rhetoric in the months leading up to 2011. the near-fatal shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Arizona.
The violence in Pennsylvania has undoubtedly cast a long shadow over the Republican convention, which begins on Monday. Security protocols will be tightened, and the protests – and counter-protests – near the convention site may be accompanied by a new sense of anxiety.
Meanwhile, on Thursday night, when the party’s candidate takes the stage, he will be even more brightly lit by the national spotlight.
Images of the former president, bloodied, fist raised, are sure to become a focal point in Milwaukee. The Republican Party had already planned to make strength and rugged masculinity a central theme, and Saturday’s incident will add new energy to that.
“This is the fighter America needs!” Eric Trump wrote on the social network, to which he attached a photo of his father after the shooting.
The US Secret Service will also be under intense scrutiny for how it handled security at the Trump rally. Still, a person with a high-powered rifle was able to approach the presidential front-runner at a distance.
House Speaker Mike Johnson promises his chamber will conduct a thorough investigation. True, such research takes time.
But for now one thing is clear: in an election year marked by the shadow of uncertainty, American politics has taken a new, deadly path, the BBC concludes.
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2024-07-15 19:53:00