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An inch from civil war?

The attempt on Trump’s life reveals how terrifyingly normalised political violence has become.

Sean Collins
US correspondent

Topics Politics USA

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Watching the Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, I was amazed at the images on my TV. ‘That’s blood coming from his ear’, I said to my wife. Witnessing those now-iconic scenes of Trump pumping his fist and mouthing ‘Fight!’ as he was led off the stage by Secret Service agents, I said, ‘He’s just won the election’. No doubt there were millions of Americans across the country offering that same bit of instant punditry at that exact moment.

Of course, neither I nor my fellow Americans know for certain the outcome of the November election. But the sheer gangsta-like defiance of Trump – reminiscent of Omar’s ‘You come at the king, you best not miss’ (for those who watched The Wire) – made him appear invincible in that moment. The contrast with the frail and doddering Joe Biden was unmistakable. While Trump’s survival of this attempt on his life may not make him a shoo-in for a return to the White House, I feel very safe in predicting that his supporters will now crawl over broken glass to vote for him.

Amid those remarkable scenes, it was also easy to wonder about ‘what ifs’. The bullet aimed at Trump only had to be one inch closer to his head, and he would have been dead – and American history would have been dramatically changed forever.

Again, I was not the only one pondering this. Indeed, many have argued that the Trump assassination attempt brought the US inches away from a civil war. As one commentator, Ben Domenech, put it in Spectator World, the sniper ‘came a hair’s breadth away from a live-on-television assassination that could have plunged the nation into a very real civil war’.

Of course, we’ll never know what the reaction would have been if the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had in fact killed Trump. To me, a ‘very real’ civil war seems a big stretch. The masses lining up behind Antifa or the Proud Boys seems unlikely. But it is certainly easy to imagine that a very destructive cycle of retribution and violence could have occurred in the wake of a Trump assassination (and, to be fair, perhaps that is all Domenech and others really have in mind).

As we know, there is a terrible history of presidential assassinations in America, including Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F Kennedy. Now Trump joins the list of presidents who survived assassination attempts, including Teddy Roosevelt, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. While political assassinations are not new, the social context in which they occur differs and influences how people respond.

In this respect, the Trump assassination attempt is likely to set off further political conflict precisely because it comes at a time when US society is already on edge. The chaos we saw at the Trump rally following the shooting, as people scrambled in fear, was an extreme, visual version of the chaos we have been experiencing in society. While it’s not likely to trigger a civil war, the attempt to kill Trump looks like it will deepen our pre-existing divisions.

In a way, it’s not a surprise that a dramatic event like the attempted assassination of Trump would spark a discussion of possible civil war. It seems that we in the US have for some time been talking more and more about the prospect of such a war. It has definitely entered our collective imagination. The immediate reason has to do with how divisive our politics are today: partisans don’t just disagree with their opponents, they find them hateful and destructive of all they believe is good.

The divide is also more severe due to the way politics has become intertwined with the culture war. The other side doesn’t just have a different view of, say, the role of the state in the economy. No, they represent an entirely different set of values and morals. It is hard to see how those who don’t believe men should be allowed to enter women’s bathrooms or prison cells can live in a society with those who do insist on men being able to occupy those spaces. These two groups live in radically different moral universes that are impossible to reconcile.

In the aftermath of the Trump shooting, many noted that the rhetoric deployed by political figures has reached a level that threatened to encourage violent acts like what we saw in Butler, Pennsylvania. And while both Republicans and Democrats engage in apocalyptic talk, the mainstream media only criticise such talk when Trump engages in it. In contrast, when Biden and the Democrats refer to Trump as ‘Hitler’ and an ‘existential threat’ to democracy, as they constantly do, the media amplify those messages. It’s not that Biden’s incendiary rhetoric directly incited Crooks’s assassination attempt on Trump (not even when he referred to putting a ‘bullseye’ on Trump), but this does create an environment where violence may appear to be justified to some. After all, if Trump is truly ushering in a Third Reich, why wouldn’t some conclude they must stop him at all costs, including resorting to violence?

And yet, while deep political and cultural divides, as well as reckless political rhetoric, make it easier for many to imagine a descent into civil war, I believe there is more to it. It’s not just the inflammatory rhetoric, but the reality of political violence in American society, which has become increasingly accepted by sections of the US elite.

Again, while Trump has downplayed violence when it has suited him – like when he waved away the rioting on ‘January 6’ – it’s the Democrats who have been the worst offenders, looking the other way if rioters agree with their political aims. They, along with the media, excused – if not celebrated – the destructive BLM-led riots across the country in 2020. These rioters, which included Antifa thugs who smashed up government buildings, mostly got off scot-free.

In 2022, a man upset ahead of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v Wade abortion decision was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and accused of attempting to murder him. His arrest was treated as a non-story by the media. Despite the emergence of more threats to the Supreme Court justices, attorney general Merrick Garland has refused to provide additional protection for them.

In 2023, Aiden Hale, a trans-identified female, killed three children and three adults at a school in Nashville, Tennessee. A judge blocked the release of Hale’s writings, and the media quickly moved on from the story, the largest mass shooting in the state’s history. Many people believe the authorities and media kept a lid on it for political reasons – because they feared a backlash to transgender people generally.

The notion that the ‘correct’ politics can justify violence reached a new low in the US last year, when thousands of Americans – mainly in cities and university campuses – celebrated the Hamas massacre of Israelis on 7 October. If you can rationalise the murder and rape of innocent civilians, then it’s not a great leap to think it’s acceptable to physically attack politicians you view as the enemy.

Little by little, the veneer of civilisation is worn down, as violence is resorted to in the pursuit of politics. While the elites look the other way, and even encourage this, most people notice how standards are slipping. This is why the assassination attempt on Trump is viewed as so dangerous and destabilising, to the point where some can imagine a civil war resulting from it. Our elites have already laid so much kindling – having engaged in such aggressive rhetoric and excused actual violence – that we immediately fear an assassination attempt could be the spark that sets off a major social conflagration.

Perhaps the assassination attempt on Trump will force our political leaders to try to pull back from the abyss. I believe most Americans want a return to ‘normal’ life, including a politics that speaks to their interests – and not the normalisation of political violence, to which both Trump and Biden have contributed. Most support the democratic process, which means fighting over ideas rather than physical fights. We need leaders who recognise this desire among the mass of people, and seek to unite us on the basis of what we have in common. Failing that, I fear America is on a perilous path.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.

Picture by: Getty.

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Topics Politics USA

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