RECENTLY, there was another Donald Trump assassination attempt. This one showed no great images or fatalities, and the assassin was quickly subdued.
The assassin, one Ryan Routh, had tried to take out Trump with an AK-47 and had strong feelings about the Ukrainian-Russian conflict.
Surprisingly, the American media blamed the attempt on Trump himself, accusing him of creating violence through his speeches and policy proposals. And that framing is the reason why I get the feeling that the US election is going to involve further violence.
Assassinations or near assassinations are nothing new in American politics, and US Presidents have been shot at before. The assassins were condemned or dismissed by the wider American public.
What makes Trump’s situation different from other presidential assassinations is that the US political system seems like it is supporting it implicitly, and a large portion of anti-Trump people explicitly.
The assassination attempts have become more than just about killing Trump. They are an escalation in political violence. Trump’s enemies blame him and his supporters for violence by pointing to their rhetoric, and by doing that, they are giving themselves free reign to escalate the violence, since, in their minds, it is Trump who started it.
There are now Americans who speak about Civil War or the possibility of Civil War, and they point to Trump’s assassination attempts as proof of their thesis. Before the first assassination, I don’t think that America was in a civil war. It was socially and politically unstable, but it wasn’t in a civil war.
But after the second attempt? And only a month from the first one?
Now, there’s news that there are five assassination teams targeting the Presidential aspirant. I don’t know how all this will turn out.
Maybe the November elections will be largely peaceful, and the assassination attempts will be forgotten, but real, armed political crisis is equally just as possible, one that can turn into something else./PN
