Hard not to think that that’s the election in the bag for The Donald. Surviving an assassination attempt was always going to be a bounce in the polls, no question. Trump not only survived one but – improbably enough, given he’s a 78-year-old man and he was surrounded by a passel of burly, supposedly highly trained security guys whose only job was to put him on the deck and sit on his head till the fun was good and over – fought his way to his feet and had the presence of mind to raise a fist of defiance and shout ‘fight, fight, fight,’ to his supporters.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it might well have been the end of America as we know it
Fair play to the man. The resulting image, captured by Evan Vucci, took its place as one defining of the images of the 21st century less than 24 hours after it came into existence. It’s iconic – in the sense of having real-world power and being an occasion for prayer – in the old-fashioned sense. It has a compositional connection to that famous shot of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima; it vibes with ‘Invictus’ (‘bloodied but unbowed’) and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (‘our flag was still there’); and I see in it a little echo of Thom Gunn’s poem imagining the Statue of Liberty, obscured by fog, ‘saluting with her fist’.
That image wins him the election, doesn’t it? It may not surprise readers to hear, given my role as this magazine’s token wishy-washy centre-left liberal, that the prospect gives me no joy whatever. President Trump seems to me, on the available evidence, to be venal, vicious, stupid, unprincipled and dangerous. He is the worst possible ambassador for the set of political positions he affects to represent and which, in other hands, the likes of me might oppose but would pay the compliment of respecting. And yet, I think it wasn’t just Trump who dodged a bullet on Saturday night. It was all of us.
Let me put it this way. If we were presented with the choice between another four years of President Trump and a second American civil war, which would be our preferred option? We may not unite around much, but we can surely unite around that. Had that bullet been the end of Donald J. Trump – every part of this story is extraordinary, and the part where the bullet nicks the top of the man’s ear without making a mess of his skull is one of the most extraordinary parts – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it might well have been the end of America as we know it.
There are very many supporters of President Trump in the US. Even before Saturday, he was considered likely to win a majority. A large minority of his supporters are very fervent. A large minority of the very fervent ones are heavily armed. A boring old lost election was enough to lead to the invasion and sacking of the Capitol. It doesn’t seem at all hysterical to suppose that their guy being martyred on live TV would lead to something even more exciting.
Double-figure percentages of the US population, according to polls, are subscribers to the QAnon view of the world – in which Trump is the hero in an existential battle against the Satan-worshipping, baby-eating representatives of the Deep State. Trump’s assassination would stir those guys up. It’s reasonable to suppose that they might think the Deep State had something to do with it, and since the Deep State’s representatives look a lot like what the rest of us would just call ‘the state’, trouble would follow.
As it is, Trump survives. He will go on electioneering in the conventional way, burnished as he now is by the apparent hand of the Almighty, and he will very probably win the election. That will grieve the likes of me, and it will likely have all sorts of medium-term consequences we won’t like – indeed, in five years’ time we might be saying ‘we told you so, you fools’ – but it won’t cause the most powerful nation on earth to lose its damn mind altogether right here and right now.
Indeed, if President Trump decides that the wise way to play this episode is to be statesmanlike about it, and enjoy the win without trying to weaponise it, we could see the political temperature going down in a welcome way. Though, that said, if his instincts under fire are to shout ‘fight, fight, fight’ and raise a clenched fist that might be what we could consider a data point.
In any case, we’re better here than the alternative. That’s not to say that we’re not in for a bumpy ride. Already, social media is doing what social media does. The whackoes on one side are wondering who the shooter was working for and who allowed this to happen; the whackoes on another side are speculating that the whole incident was a set-up, like the moon landings and the assassination of JFK. Images are rhetorically powerful, but being images they can be dangerously ambiguous. There’s plenty of room to look at the near-miraculously perfect iconography of Evan Vucci’s photograph and read into it what you will.
But Donald Trump is alive, and the machinery of US politics is still working, and there was only one gunman – and that’s something that everyone with a lick of sense, it seems to me, can be grateful for.
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