The Trump Shooting Changed Everything

The Trump Shooting Changed Everything

The nation narrowly averted (ward off, avoid) tragedy Saturday. Is it enough to ease our political polarization?

The shots that grazed Donald Trump and killed a spectator at Saturday’s rally in Western Pennsylvania upended a presidential campaign that has already seen its share of chaos. Few anticipated Mr. Trump’s victorious return in this year’s Republican primaries following his defeat in 2020, the riot at the Capitol a few months later, and an unending series of legal cases filed against him by Democratic prosecutors. Nor did they foresee President Biden’s fumbling (not good) comments and misstatements during the June 27 debate, which provoked several members of his own party to call for his withdrawal from the race.

Now, following Saturday’s events, the campaign is frozen again, and poised to turn in new directions.

Nothing quite like this has happened in U.S. political history. There have been four presidential assassinations and at least seven botched (unsuccessful in a bad way, mostly in surgery, botched eye job, etc.) attempts, most recently an attack on President Reagan in 1981 and two against President Ford in 1975. The closest parallel (related case)  might be found in the attempted assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt a few weeks before the election of 1912. TR suffered a minor bullet wound but defiantly (v. defy, overcame a setback)  finished his speech (ironically, in Milwaukee). But he wasn’t a nominee of one of the major parties, and the shooting had little or no effect on the campaign then in progress.

But up to now there hasn’t been a failed assassination attempt on the eve of (the night before) two party conventions and in the midst of a hotly contested and sharply polarized presidential campaign. It’s anyone’s guess whether Saturday’s events will tamp down the polarization, or make it worse.

The immediate consequence is that Mr. Trump will enter this week’s convention strengthened, emboldened and with a new campaign narrative. Before the shots rang out Saturday he said that with his wealth, he might more comfortably spend his time relaxing by the ocean instead of fighting off prosecutors and campaigning on behalf of his supporters to “save the country.” His supporters chanted in reply: “Thank you President Trump.” His supporters now see that in addition to everything else, he has taken a bullet on their behalf, likely causing them to redouble (double down) their support and enthusiasm. The GOP convention will look more like a coronation than a nomination, as Mr. Trump presides as the wounded martyr (die for a greater cause)  in the fight against Democratic lawfare. That tees up (in golf.  it starts , brings up)  a new and powerful campaign theme: Mr. Trump is fighting a “climate of hate and division.”

The Democrats have lost their narrative, at least for the moment. They have claimed for years that Mr. Trump is an existential threat to democracy and the Constitution, a criminal and an insurrectionist (a person who starts a revolution) . They have sought to demonize him as a person who can’t be allowed to return to the White House. Democrats will have to dial back that rhetoric lest (or) they be accused of fomenting (stir up, start, ) more violent attacks. That means they will have to campaign on Mr. Biden’s record. That is unlikely to work: The president is underwater in polls on every major issue save abortion.

The assassination attempt has also frozen efforts by Democrats to force Mr. Biden out of the race. Many fear, perhaps correctly, that his fumbling in the debate will repeat itself many times during the course of the campaign, and for that reason Mr. Biden will lose to Mr. Trump—an unacceptable alternative. But time is running short before the Democratic National Convention. Delegates are due to vote online for their nominee at some point after July 21. Mr. Biden may try to run out the clock before skeptics can mount a campaign to replace him.

There are nearly four months to go before Election Day. Democrats have time to reorganize and reposition themselves. Memories and images of the events in Pennsylvania will fade. After all, Mr. Trump wasn’t killed or seriously wounded. Democrats may make some headway in blaming our polarizing environment on the former president himself. If they can make that case, the campaign may return to its previous form by Labor Day.

It is also possible that the assassination attempt casts a pall (pall has to do with death, makes everything dark) over the election in the way John F. Kennedy’s assassination served as a backdrop to the 1964 campaign. In that situation, President Lyndon Johnson and the liberal leadership of the nation said that the assassination had been caused by a “climate of hate” in Dallas and across the South amid right-wing opposition to the civil-rights movement. It didn’t matter that Lee Harvey Oswald was an active communist and probably acted out of impulses linked to the Cold War. It was Johnson’s interpretation that stuck. He won a landslide victory in part because the nation wished to tune out the polarizing rhetoric thought to be the cause of JFK’s assassination.

One hopes that this campaign will focus more on issues of economics, immigration and foreign affairs. That can’t happen immediately, but in time it could develop as an appropriately chastened (having a moderate affect on something)  response to the shots fired in Pennsylvania. It was a miracle by the smallest of margins that saved the country from another tragedy of the kind it has endured too often in the past.

Mr. Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.”