CNN
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Donald Trump will re-emerge as an even greater mythical hero of his MAGA movement when the Republican National Convention opens on Monday after an extraordinary two weeks that transformed the 2024 campaign after an assassination attempt.
More than 24 hours after Saturday’s shooting, the horror is only just beginning to emerge as a shocking new national trauma, but both the former president and President Joe Biden are trying to figure out how to navigate the political fallout.
The assassination attempt on a presidential candidate, with all its historical overtones, threatens to take an even more sinister turn in the toxic politics of the past decade, raising fears that bloodshed will beget more bloodshed.
“A former president was shot and Americans killed simply for exercising their freedom to support the candidate of their choice. America cannot and must not go down this path,” Biden said in an Oval Office speech on Sunday night, calling for calm and uniting a divided nation. The president also paid tribute to Corey Comperatore, a firefighter and father who was killed shielding his family at a Trump rally. Comperatore joins a heartbreaking list of Americans killed by political violence.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the calls for restraint, telling CNN: “This is a dark time in our country’s history. This is a dangerous time. We’ve suggested that the president and all of our elected officials make a serious effort to unite the country. We need a unified message. We need to de-escalate.”
In his first interview since the assassination attempt, the former president promised that his keynote address at Thursday’s Republican National Convention, expected to be an update on his 2017 “American Carnage” inaugural address, will be “a lot different.”
“This is an opportunity to bring the whole country and even the whole world together,” Trump told the Washington Examiner’s Salina Zito.
Two weeks have passed since CNN’s presidential debate, and it has completely transformed what had, for all its quirks, been a relatively stable, hard-fought race between two unpopular candidates that Americans didn’t really want.
Trump will escape an assassin’s bullet, appear at a convention before many supporters who already saw him as a godlike superhuman, and clinch his third consecutive Republican nomination. The weekend’s horrific events will further tighten his grip on his party, and pollsters will be watching to see whether sympathy for them will widen his already wide lead in battleground states.
Biden, meanwhile, has been fighting to defend his nomination over the past two weeks after a debate debacle in Atlanta exposed the 81-year-old Biden’s struggles with aging and sparked panic among Democrats that Biden would hand the White House to Trump and give Republicans a monopoly on power in Washington. The furor over the assassination attempt on Trump may give pause for now to the intraparty rebellion against Biden, especially as Biden assumes his role as leader of a nation suddenly in crisis.
Only the oldest Americans survived the political assassinations of the 1960s, and those who remember the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 are now middle-aged, meaning that millions of people who have already endured recent political upheaval are now experiencing for the first time the resulting sense of terror that the axis of the nation has been knocked off balance.
But despite the shock of the past few days, politics always fills the void, especially after political tragedies. Indeed, Trump’s defiance — he was photographed with a bloodied face and clenched fists as Secret Service officers hurried him off the stage on Saturday — would have been the defining act of his career and his life.
“A lot of people are saying this is the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump told the New York Post on Sunday. “They’re right, and I’m not dead. To get an iconic photo, you usually have to die.”
It is too early to say how voters will react to the highly unsettling events at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the incumbent president’s vow to remain eligible to serve until January 2029 despite his debate performance. But the decisions each candidate makes in the coming days and the tone they choose to strike will determine how the race unfolds.
One thing about the election likely won’t change: In an already deeply divided country, a core of votes for both Trump and Biden are likely locked in. Tens of thousands of voters in a handful of battleground states probably still hold the fate of the White House — and the future of the country — in their hands.
The convention, taking place at the Milwaukee Bucks’ arena in the battleground state of Wisconsin, will see Trump formally nominated by state rosters. Republicans are wary of him choosing a running mate after a reality-TV-style process narrowed the field to include North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
The former president told supporters on Truth Social on Sunday that he had planned to postpone his trip to Wisconsin for two days but “decided that I could not allow a ‘gunman’ or potential assassin to force me to change my schedule or anything like that.”
Trump has argued that his cases, including his conviction in a hush money trial in New York and two pending trials for trying to thwart the will of 2020 voters, are evidence of political persecution and has framed his attempt to retake the White House as a campaign of personal and political revenge.
An assassination attempt on a candidate is an attack on democracy and cannot be justified. But if Saturday’s attack grew out of a toxic political culture, Trump has been an enthusiastic accomplice, frequently using rhetoric that incites violence and coarsensate in public, including racist conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace and apparent mockery of the injuries sustained by Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was attacked with a hammer in his home. On January 6, 2021, the former president called protesters to Washington and to “fight like hell” prior to the storming of the U.S. Capitol and the beating of police by his supporters.
Trump faces a choice: He can interpret the assassination attempt as a catalyst for less venomous rhetoric, which might be a politically wise move at a time when many Americans feel scared. But given his past behavior, many voters will have a hard time trusting him.
Another approach is to frame the assassination attempt as fitting into Trump’s claims of personal persecution by vague “leftists” seeking to crush his political ambitions, deny him his freedom through the courts, and even take his life. (The motive of the lone shooter in targeting Trump remains unclear as the investigation continues.)
If Trump were to respond to the attack on his life by vowing revenge, the current phase of political crisis and national upheaval could become significantly worse.
Many Republican lawmakers, along with Democrats, have called for calm and abstention from political rhetoric in the wake of the shooting, but some have appeared to use the rhetoric to silence criticism of the former president, who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has vowed to “retaliate” in a second term.
For example, Vance wrote to X that “the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” adding that “this rhetoric directly led to the assassination attempt on President Trump.” Thus, selecting Vance as Trump’s running mate would send an unmistakable message.
Johnson then called for calm and suggested Democrats may have somehow aided and abetted the assassination attempt by promoting an anti-Trump rhetoric.
“It’s an objective fact that Donald Trump is probably the most persecuted and attacked politician in history, at least since Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War,” the Louisiana Republican told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “That takes a toll. … I have colleagues who say, ‘If Donald Trump wins the election, democracy will be over, the republic will be in a state of emergency,’ and that’s just not true.”
He added: “When they say that kind of rhetoric and they say it with that kind of passion, there are people out there who are going to take it to heart and act on it.”
Biden’s new political challenge and beginning
Biden now faces his toughest test of presidential skills in years: He accepts his obligation to defend political discourse, even that of his opponent, and has called for an investigation into the apparent Secret Service missteps in the attack, all while trying to revive his own political fortunes by acting more presidential, while still trying to counter Trump.
Biden’s display of the symbolic power of the presidency and the focus on the Republican National Convention this week may ease Democratic fears about his future, but only a more fearsome and erratic public performance would reignite public concern.
The Oval Office speech was moving but marked by several verbal gaffes that Trump has mocked relentlessly and that, after his debate disaster, have made every public event a severe test of his abilities.
Biden now faces a tough decision about when to return to the offensive against Trump — a decision that may depend on the tone of his rival — but in his Oval Office speech he casually suggested he has no intention of toning down his warnings that his predecessor and would-be successor pose a threat to the democratic freedoms that define the soul of America.
He listed several incidents involving Trump, his supporters and far-right groups, including “the targeting and shootings of lawmakers from both parties, the mob storming the Capitol on January 6th, the brutal attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spouse, threats against election officials, a plot to kidnap a sitting governor (Gretchen Whitmer, Democrat of Michigan) and an attempted assassination of Donald Trump.”
“There is no room for this kind of violence, any violence, in America,” Biden said.
His sentiments are shared by many, but bitter experience tells us he may not be the last president to say so.
