When 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks shot and nearly killed former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday afternoon, Americans were shocked, but not so surprised, especially in light of the extreme rhetoric during the presidential campaign, writes the Financial Times. .
The motive for the attack on Trump remains a mystery in the days after the suspect was killed, and the FBI has yet to determine the ideology that prompted him to try to kill the former president. Apart from information about his education and work, the early details of the investigation into the attacker are sketchy. Public records show that his father is a registered Republican and his mother is a registered Democrat, and that Crooks made a $15 donation to a Democratic Party cause as a XNUMX-year-old, Reuters reported.
The FBI said on Sunday that his social media accounts do not contain threatening language, and no history of mental illness has been established.
However, the wider atmosphere in which Kruks operated is horrifyingly familiar, the "Financial Times" points out.
It is an atmosphere in which party officials and activists wage bitter rhetorical battles, dehumanizing the opposing side and presenting the outcome as a matter of to be or not to be. They express their anger on social media, through the new generation of media, and even at local school and municipal board meetings, where the stakes are not usually seen as a matter of life and death.
One of the few common things in a polarized state is the feeling that every new decline will be followed by something worse, and that violence is the end point.
"The interesting aspect of our times is that it seems like we're collapsing even though there was nothing to indicate this degree of crisis," Jeremy Varon, a New School historian who has written extensively about the turmoil in American life in the 1960s, told the FT.
Back then, the country was recovering from a foreign war, youth revolts and political assassinations. Now, Varon noted, the economy is booming, the stock market is constantly hitting new records, and the nation is generally at peace.
"It is an atmosphere of intense anticipation," said Varon.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, described the US as a "disturbed, irritated country right now" and warned of worse things to come. This was confirmed by a Marist agency survey from April, which showed that one in five Americans believe that violence may be necessary to get the nation back on track.
Edvard Lus wrote in his column, after the assassination attempt, that "Donald Trump was not the only one who dodged a bullet. If the bullet had been just half an inch to the left, the shell that grazed Tramp's ear would have turned him into a martyr. It is impossible to predict what his death could cause".
As they pondered the unthinkable -- what would happen if Trump were killed -- political leaders on Sunday appealed for calm. "This is a moment when we all have a responsibility to turn the temperature down," said Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, a key swing state. Hours later, President Joe Biden repeated his appeal in an Oval Office address. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We must not allow this violence to become normalized.” "The political rhetoric in this country has become very heated. It's time to calm her down," said the US president.
Trump said in a statement to the "Washington Examiner" that "this is an opportunity to unite the whole country, even the whole world", and added that his speech at the upcoming convention in Milwaukee will be different compared to what was planned a few days ago.
After consolidating control of the party, Trump could use the prime-time opportunity at the convention to deliver a unifying message or present a grim picture of a nation under siege by a corrupt leftist elite, as he sometimes did during the campaign.
"Trump's speech at the convention will be his introduction to the general public, to people who don't follow politics closely. I think it will have even more viewers (because of the assassination attempt),” Nahama Soloveitchik, a Republican strategist who worked on Nikki Haley's 2024 presidential campaign, told Reuters. "I would say the message should be one of de-escalation and reminding people that America is better than that."
Meanwhile, Trump's campaign staff has instructed its staff to refrain from commenting on the shooting on social media to avoid escalating the situation, Reuters reported.
Many Trump supporters remain convinced that the left could never accept Trump's victory in 2016, and have set out to delegitimize him, including caricaturing him as a monster and potential dictator.
However, many continue to point fingers and blame the other side. Ayan Hirsi Ali, a conservative activist and writer, blamed the left and its allies in the media for years of turning Trump into a "Hitler-level threat," justifying any means to stop him. "We should not be surprised by what happened yesterday. It was the inevitable consequence of years of toxic, constant demonization,” she wrote on Sunday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, the highest-ranking elected Republican, said Sunday on NBC's "Today" show that all Americans should "turn down the rhetoric." He also accused the Biden campaign of over-the-top attacks on Trump.
Biden condemned the assassination attempt and ordered an independent investigation into how the gunman was able to get so close to Trump and nearly kill or seriously injure him despite the security provided by the Secret Service at Saturday's event in Butler.
Even before Saturday's assassination attempt, the nation was on the brink, the FT points out, adding that for the past two weeks, Biden's candidacy has come under scrutiny as angry Democrats plot to replace him after a disastrous debate performance that fueled doubts about his physical fitness. and the mental capacity to govern the country.
The nation endured the spectacle of the former president in civil and criminal trials that sparked predictions of violence. Although the worst was averted, a conspiracy theorist from Florida set himself on fire right outside a Manhattan courtroom in April.
The Supreme Court's recent decision on presidential immunity has deeply worried many about the erosion of American democracy, the FT points out.
Meanwhile, university complexes and public spaces have been the scene of pro-Palestinian protests for months, where violence has occasionally erupted and fueled anti-Semitism that many believed had disappeared, the paper reminds.
Still to come is the four-day Republican Party Convention, which began yesterday, and the Democratic Convention in August, followed by an election in November that is being described as an "all or nothing" fight.
"All this is happening in one year," Mitchell Moss, a professor at New York University, told the FT. "Today there is no one who can avoid politics".
For many of Trump's critics, he is the one who initiated the era of rhetorical violence when he took the elevator in his Manhattan tower ten years ago and officially entered the political arena. He began the campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and then declared that they were "very nice people on both sides" after a torch-carrying right-wing group chanted anti-Semitic slurs and marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
His Maga movement has been followed by a new generation of politicians, including Marjorie Taylor Greeney of Georgia and Lorin Bober of Colorado, who brag about guns and joke about targeting socialists. For his opponents, that culture and rhetoric culminated in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which Trump incited with baseless claims of election fraud and appeals to his supporters to "fight back."
Biden entered the White House four years ago with a promise to restore decency and civic spirit. But that did not come true, writes the FT.
As Ali noted, many Trump supporters remain convinced that the left could never accept Trump's victory in 2016, and have set out to delegitimize him, including caricaturing him as a monster and potential dictator. As a result, supporters of the Magus movement were never open to Biden's appeals for reconciliation.
Meanwhile, the nation has grown indifferent to political violence that previously seemed unimaginable. Among them was the attack two years ago on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by a man carrying a hammer who broke into their home in San Francisco.
The attack was reminiscent of a plot two years earlier by a group of right-wing militia members in Michigan to kidnap the state's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
With less than four months to go before an election that both sides sometimes call existential for the country, there is little reason to believe the atmosphere will calm down.
Trump's campaign speeches regularly warn supporters that they are on the verge of losing their country to a group of violent socialists — and that was before he was wounded.
On the other hand, a fragile Biden is trying to generate energy by returning the focus to warnings about the threat posed by Trump.
"Americans want a president, not a dictator," Biden said on Friday, the day before the shooting, at a rally in Detroit. His supporters put up billboards in key states warning of "Trump's plan to be a dictator."
Although both Trump and Biden have turned to a new message of unity and easing tensions, Varon is among those who doubt that America has reached the end of dark political discourse.
"Both sides have the initiative to continue demonizing their enemies," he said.
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