Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures with a bloodied face while he is assisted by U.S. Secret Service personnel after he was shot in the right ear during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Penn., on July 13.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Nobody wanted the pop of gunfire and the spurt of blood at the site of a farm festival in the critical political landscape of rural Pennsylvania, the battleground state that could hold the balance of power in the autumn election.
Not the thousands who crowded onto the grounds of the Butler Farm Show, an Americana pageant that began 77 years ago with a plowing contest conducted a year after Donald Trump was born.
Not the millions of supporters who helped propel Mr. Trump to be five days from being anointed a major-party presidential nominee for the third time – a record held only by five other Americans, all iconic figures known as battlers in their own time: Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.
Not the ardent Trump opponents who may wish for the departure of their nemesis from the political scene, but not in a way that transforms him into a martyr and enhances the longevity of his cause.
Not the vast majority of Americans, aghast at this burst of gunfire from a semi-automatic weapon, who view with a combination of horror, disgust and fear the growing talk about political violence in the United States.
Not the advocates of gun control, who might calculate that the Butler episode could jolt Mr. Trump into acknowledging the need for restrictions on the sale and possession of firearms but who will surely be disappointed. Gun rights are central to Mr. Trump’s campaign, an essential link between an urban tycoon and rural hunters.
And surely not the inner sanctum of the White House, which now is dealing with a campaign on life support while Joe Biden’s opponent was shown, defiant fist in the air in a photographic image that will outlive Mr. Trump, leaving the scene of an assassination attempt only to send a strong signal shortly afterward in a message that screamed he was ready to continue the fight.
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It will not injure Mr. Trump’s campaign that the attempt on his life was an echo of the shooting of another former president seeking a non-consecutive additional term.
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt – like Mr. Trump a blustery onetime Republican chief executive and congenital iconoclast – was shot at a campaign rally. The bullet went through the 26th president’s eyeglass case and entered his chest. He continued his speech in Milwaukee, where Mr. Trump will arrive Monday for the Republican National Convention.
It also is an echo of the assassination attempt on Jackson, whose portrait Mr. Trump placed in the Oval Office even as the reputation of the seventh president was undermined as fresh attention was focused on his ownership of enslaved people and his ruthless combat against Native Americans.
After a would-be assassin’s two pistols misfired at the funeral of Representative Warren R. Davis of South Carolina at the Capitol – the shooter was subdued by, among others, Representative Davy Crockett of Tennessee, a frontier folk hero – the president’s survival was immediately explained as proof he was both divinely chosen and protected, a theme often blared from microphones outside Trump rallies. The incident was instantly transformed into political advantage. “The Almighty protected me,” he said. “I am not afraid. Nothing can harm me.”
Put aside the passions surrounding Mr. Trump, the incident Saturday night is but another stain on a country that cherishes democratic traditions in its politics and the centrality of guns in its culture.
For decades, Americans have fought over the meaning of the Second Amendment – does it speak narrowly to “a well regulated Militia,” in the language of the measure, or to the other phrase at the end of the amendment, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms?” This question has prompted books, PhD theses, Supreme Court arguments, university debate tournaments and neighbourhood dinner-party debates.
And over those decades, that question has been unresolved – while gun violence grew.
There were 18,884 gun deaths in the country last year, about 50 per cent more than only nine years ago, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Gun violence has gone from a public-policy issue to a public-health issue – and even in that characterization, there is no apparent solution.
“There is moderate evidence that violent crime is reduced by laws prohibiting the purchase or possession of guns by individuals who have a history of involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility,” according to a 2023 study by the RAND Corporation. “There is limited evidence these laws may reduce total suicides and firearm suicides.”
Guns have been part of American history from the start, centuries before the cult of the cowboy and the popularity of Western novels and, later, films. By 1609, two years after the planting of the first permanent settlement, Jamestown, in Virginia, the 500 colonists possessed 300 muskets. Now, 415 years later, there are more guns than people in the U.S.
“Every country and every society has some degree of violence and violent crime,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh Law School expert on crime in the United States. “But here in the U.S., with its superabundance of guns, any impulse toward violence is much more likely to be lethal than in any other country except for those places experiencing actual wars. When our leaders and institutions do little or nothing to protect people from this lethal violence, we get what we have now: a tragic and savage epidemic.”
Political leaders across the American ideological spectrum swiftly condemned the shooting. Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, leading Democratic voices, were among the first to express their horror. So, too, was former president George W. Bush. President Biden also made a statement. “The Trump rally was a rally that … should’ve been able to be conducted peacefully without any problem,” he said.
More than six decades ago, the U.S. was shocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, also apparently from an elevated position. Hours later, James Reston, then the country’s leading political commentator, expressed the nation’s distress in a front-page analysis in The New York Times. He wrote:
“America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young President, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best.”
Mr. Reston argued that the tragedy of the shooting in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, “extended beyond the assassin” to “something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence.” That strain – that stain – remains, now well into the third decade of the 21st century.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column incorrectly said that only four other Americans had received their party’s presidential nomination three times. This version has been corrected.