The U.S. faces two difficult questions as Republicans gather in wake of Trump assassination attempt

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As Republicans gather in Milwaukee for their national political convention in the wake of the attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump, the United States faces two difficult questions, and the answers will define the country even as they illustrate the challenge facing its political class.

In a presidential race that may have been altered in the long run, these two questions – thoroughly unanticipated as recently as halfway through the weekend, when the principal unknown was whether President Joe Biden would endure the growing calls for his withdrawal from the contest – now shape the short run, which we might define as the next several, critical days:

How can officials – how can the American people – reconcile a quadrennial event where emotions are supposed to run high with a moment when high emotions are dangerous?

And can the appeals for national unity from political figures be effective in an era when incendiary talk is more prominent, and more powerful, than calls for reconciliation?

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In other fraught moments, the vital questions were matters for months of contemplation: will the Union survive or is secession and a civil war imminent? (1860) Can capitalism endure the Great Depression or is fascism in the Italian model or communism in the Soviet model a more potent cure for the worst economic crisis of modernity? (1932)

The long-term 2024 question – the survival of democratic values in the largest redoubt of democracy in history – has not been supplanted in a burst of gunfire.

But the more immediate vital questions involve whether comity and calm can be imposed and, if so, how long they might endure.

“If things would have been a little bit different – if a bullet had been an inch closer – there would have been a substantially different situation in the United States,” said Arie Perliger, a professor of security studies at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “There’s a big network of far-right-wing groups who already believe there’s a substantial co-ordinated effort to prevent Trump from winning or even competing.”

That sentiment has not been snuffed out by the would-be assassin’s bullets. Indeed, it is rawer, more passionately held, than it was when last weekend – the first normal, non-holiday respite of a hot summer – began.

Now the two principal questions face immediate tests. These trials are taking place in every neighbourhood of the country, on every cable broadcast, on every spurt of social-media introspection or invective and, most vividly and most consequently, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

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National political conventions are not designed for conciliation. They are not forums for cool examination of complicated issues. They are not designed to provoke sober consideration of competing ideas. They are not public equivalents of a senior-class seminar or the defence of a PhD thesis.

They are rallies on steroids. They reward what political commentators call “red meat,” which is to say hot, sometimes incendiary language designed to inspire the delegates, first to cheer their nominee and then to return home and mobilize their friends and associates to vote. With one important exception, speakers find no premium on moderation.

The exception: the speech from an obscure freshman senator at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. While advocating the election of the party’s nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Barack Obama also said, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America.”

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As this month began, it was apparent that no Republican would repeat Mr. Obama’s remarks this week. Quoting a figure from another political party – with the signal exceptions of the Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, both partisan symbols who have surpassed partisan identity – is simply not done.

Mr. Trump had prepared what he called a “humdinger” of an acceptance speech for Thursday night. That is a signal that his early draft was not a ho-hum declamation crafted to send the delegates, drenched in bonhomie and covered by the confetti that customarily accompanies a red-white-and-blue drop from the rafters of thousands of balloons, home in mere contentment and commitment.

“Honestly,” he said Sunday, “it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

His remarks suggest he may heed the words of Winston Churchill, delivered exactly 83 years earlier. On July 14, 1941, in response to the Nazi bombardment of London, Mr. Churchill said: “You do your worst and we will do our best.”

That is the kind of language Americans have come to expect from Michelle Obama (“When they go low, we go high”), not from Mr. Trump. As difficult as it is for the former president’s foes to contemplate this, it is possible that Mr. Trump is feeling what Mr. Churchill experienced when he wrote, as a 22-year-old, after coming under fire in 1897 as a member of the Malakand Field Force fighting on the Northwest Frontier of British India, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

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Except in Mr. Trump’s case, being shot at may have another result. It will galvanize his supporters – that is already apparent. It also may change, if only slightly, if only temporarily, his rhetoric and outlook. It also may give him the kind of public-opinion boost (eight percentage points) that the 40th president received.

The failed assassination attempt could give him an opportunity to reap the benefits of a shot that didn’t kill. Ronald Reagan was attacked in 1981 and survived. I saw him in the White House shortly afterward while being ushered to another place in the Executive Mansion for a separate interview; it was clear he was at once diminished physically but enhanced psychically.

In the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting in Butler, Pa. – just days before the official opening of the Republican convention – political leaders of both parties called for calm.

Mr. Biden, who had earlier telephoned his opponent and in public referred to Mr. Trump simply as “Donald,” spoke in an Oval Office speech of “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics.” Others – church leaders, former presidents, former adversaries of Mr. Trump and especially House Speaker Mike Johnson, the leading Republican on Capitol Hill – issued similar statements.

The effect of those kinds of pleas is uncertain, particularly in a fevered environment like the one that prevails now in the United States.

The most famous such moment occurred in April, 1968, when presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy landed in Indianapolis and spoke to a crowd that did not know the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. On the airport tarmac he said: “I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”

Two months later, Mr. Kennedy also was shot dead.

“Violence against presidents and presidential candidates is a sad tradition in American life,” said Thomas Klassen, a York University political scientist who teaches North American politics. “A president has to be one of the people, has to be seen by the people, and as soon as he is in an unscripted place where he is out in the open, we know what happens.”