On March 31, 1981, at the dawn of his presidency, Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Mr. Reagan was frightening to some Americans back then because of his seemingly bomb-happy hawkishness. But the shooting, and his reaction to it, made him a more sympathetic figure.
While being wheeled into the hospital, the former screen star looked up at his wife Nancy and quipped, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” At least that’s what his press guy told me and the other assembled scribes standing outside the hospital that day.
Over the next couple of months, the Gipper got a substantial jump in opinion polls. Today, as a result of the attempt on his life on Saturday, Donald Trump is likely to improve his standing as well – and at a critical campaign juncture.
Mr. Trump, too, has handled the trauma with aplomb. He had the presence of mind, immediately after being grazed by a bullet, to think politics: As blood streamed down the side of his face, he raised his fist in a defiant pose, hollering “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The resulting photo, backgrounded by the star-spangled banner waving against a blue sky, is poster-perfect political imagery. It was an “Iwo Jima” moment, recalling the famous image of Marines triumphantly raising the U.S. flag on a mountain in the Pacific War.
The moment meshed ideally with the Trumpian theme of fighting for the people against the threat of a weaponized deep state. After he was hit with a federal indictment last year, Mr. Trump told a rally: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.”
He has dodged bullets throughout his career – bankruptcies of his businesses, the Access Hollywood tape, the classified-documents case that was dismissed by a Florida judge on Monday – and when Saturday brought real ones from an assault rifle that he opposed banning, he dodged them too. And what timing: The shots rang out just as the Republican national convention was getting set to kick off. As Democratic commentator David Axelrod put it, Mr. Trump will likely be greeted “as kind of a martyr.”
Combined with President Joe Biden’s collapse in the presidential debate last month, what happened in Pennsylvania is decidedly grimmer news for the Democrats, further lowering their chances of winning in November.
The assassination attempt at least shifted the focus away from questions surrounding Mr. Biden’s cognitive capacities and whether he should be the Democratic candidate. Unity and stability are in big demand after such traumatic events, and with all his experience, old Joe provides that.
But if the shooting increases Mr. Biden’s chances of keeping the nomination, that plays in Mr. Trump’s favour as well, since he would prefer the predictability of going up against the diminished President as opposed to a new Democratic nominee.
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Mr. Biden, in a brief address Sunday, and Mr. Trump have both called for unity. The latter told the Washington Examiner that he has rewritten his convention speech; it will no longer be a harsh partisan attack, but rather a call to bring the country together.
There could be a lowering of temperatures for a few days, but don’t expect it to last. While some reports from the Trump campaign suggest the attempt on his life has had a spiritual effect on him, others note that he is emboldened and will press his radical agenda harder.
Some Republicans were going so far as to blame Democrats for the shooting. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Ohio Senator (and Mr. Trump’s pick as vice-president) J.D. Vance wrote. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
The “authoritarian fascist” characterization is probably not one a lot of Democrats would care to dispute.
One thing they can be thankful for is that the shooter does not appear to be a hard leftist or an immigrant who had illegally crossed the southern border. The motivation of the assailant, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is currently unknown. He was a registered Republican but he had also made a donation to the Democratic Party.
His high-school classmate Sarah D’Angelo, who described Mr. Crooks as quiet and non-threatening, told the Wall Street Journal about taking an American history class with him. One assignment was to write about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: how they thought it happened, where the fatal shots were fired from, that sort of thing.
With better aim with his AR-15, Mr. Crooks would have ended Mr. Trump’s chances of becoming president again. But his shot will now probably have the opposite effect, making the demagogue’s return to the White House all the more likely.