It’s hard to overstate the sense of shock as Secret Service agents huddled and led a bloodied Donald Trump from that Pennsylvania stage.
Bullets have turned American history before.
John F. Kennedy’s assassination sixty-one years ago is just the most prominent on a lengthy list of US politicians and public figures threatened and sometimes killed by gunfire.
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Each case is shocking. The attack on the 45th and potential 47th US President shocks us for multiple reasons, not least because it almost denied Americans their democratic choice just as they struggle with threats to their democracy.
For the first time in November, Americans will vote for their President with tens of millions of voters believing their elections can be — and have been — corrupted.
Just as the election process needs to be calm and credible, it is anything but.
Perhaps ‘calm’ is too much to ask from any US Presidential election, and ‘credible’ is not possible when the leading candidate says the last election was ‘rigged’.
But there is a slower ‘shock’ that was developing long before the Pennsylvania rally and yesterday’s events have only accelerated it; that Donald Trump is a Presidential candidate at all — let alone the frontrunner.
Consider the moment the then-President and First Lady walked across the White House Lawn to Marine One on January 20, 2021.
Joe Biden was about to be sworn in as President and Donald Trump was about to do what no other modern US President has done; snub his successor by not turning up.
Two weeks earlier, Trump had inspired thousands of his followers to lay siege to the US Congress in an effort to overturn the 2020 election.
One week earlier, the US House of Representatives had impeached him — for a second time. There have only been four Presidential impeachments in US history.
I don’t doubt any number of people will claim they knew Donald Trump would come back from that low point. It will be an article of faith for Trump supporters to say as much. It didn’t look that way in early 2021.
For most, Donald Trump’s political resurrection is a mystery — beyond explanation.
Australia’s Ambassador in Washington for five years just before Trump’s first Presidency, Kim Beazley admits the Trump comeback is “a surprise”.
He says it’s all the more difficult to explain because “Biden has been an arguably very successful president.”
So why is Trump now favoured to win in November?
“It’s because of how ordinary Americans feel and the ordinary American does not feel good, does not feel that … he or she has become more prosperous … That is a worry to them.”
When voters are unhappy, oppositions thrive. For all the economic numbers that suggest Americans should be happy, the polls suggest they’re not.
Kim Beazley agrees with many observers of US politics on the likely effect yesterday’s shooting will have on November’s election. It improves Trump’s chances and polls consistently had him in front well before photographers snapped his bloodied face and clenched fist in front of a US flag.
There are still more than 100 days until Americans decide, any amount of time for more shocks to knock the campaign onto a new course.
Joe Biden needs a shock or two (though heaven forbid there’s another violent one).
If it holds to its current course, the 2024 Presidential election will finish with a historic shock — a political comeback like no other.