The shot that created a martyr Biden's defeat is now inevitable

In roisterous social discourse, I’ve repeatedly expressed my amazement that no one has ever taken a shot at Trump. I’ve even tossed off callously, “Where’s American gun nuttery when you need it?”  (Sorry.)  But until Saturday evening, the former president having neglected to provide target practice for his rabid detractors is doubtless more due to the diligence of his security detail than to the restraint of his foes. As for his perhaps unjustly maligned security service in Butler, Pennsylvania, you know what they say: nobody’s perfect.

I’ve written two novels that employ a parallel-universe structure, so my mind compulsively reels with alternative worlds. Now that Trump’s right ear has been bloodied like Vincent van Gogh’s, we are literally one inch from a very different present — in which the 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks pulled off a clean head shot.

On the Right, all hell breaks loose. Mass demonstrations, possibly riots. Trump becomes an instant martyr. Photos and murals of Trump’s mug shot spring up on the sides of buildings, in front yards, on cars and T-shirts. Marches consume main streets, their pavements painted in tribute. Trump Tower in New York is smothered in flowers and baptised in tears by weeping women. Trump’s memorial service is a vast international hullaballoo, his casket gold. This explosion of anger and bereavement is easy to imagine, because that’s exactly what happened after the death of a mere petty criminal in 2020.

If it’s not delayed, this week’s Republican convention is mobbed. In the chaos, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum bicker among themselves over whom Trump intended to anoint as his vice-presidential running mate, the closely held choice now forever unknown and following Trump to the grave. In the Trump era, Republicans have so narrowed their bench to sycophantic Trump loyalists and so winnowed their brand to one man that a substitute candidate for November is anything but obvious — a political lesson that both parties might take to heart (always have a backup).

In my fantasy world, boring-but-sane Florida governor Ron DeSantis steps up to unite his shaken party, or  my distant second choice Nikki Haley takes Trump’s place on the ticket. But sanity wouldn’t necessarily prevail in an aggrieved, febrile atmosphere that fosters extremes and strengthens the radical Right. So maybe instead the conspiratorial firebrand Steve Bannon seizes the nomination and runs from prison — just as it was once supposed that Trump might!

Whoever it is, the last-minute replacement makes the campaign all about Trump, demanding a Republican victory as the only just result, which will show the world that Americans will not be intimidated, and killers won’t be rewarded. The ticket’s slogan “Vote for The Donald!” is so effective that some idiot mourners take the imperative literally and write in the late president’s name in November. In any case, Republicans sweep the election up and down the ballot, taking not only the White House but both houses of Congress. As usual, however, the pressure building on the GOP over the summer to finally support stricter nationwide gun control measures inevitably dissipates, and lots of budding Thomas Matthew Crookses can grow up to take potshots at the political leaders of their choosing.

Physical violence having been so effective at rocking American politics, the tumultuous post-election uproar on the Left, which months ago I predicted in the event of a Trump victory, is even more destructive when the country elects President Steve Bannon or President Tucker Carlson. The Left goes nuts. Widespread looting and arson help pop the Wall Street bubble, and the markets tank, along with the dollar. Foreign commentary roils with suppositions about the fall of the US, its descent into a lawless third-world country…

Would Trump’s successful assassination cause a proper American civil war? Maybe I’m naïve, but I think…probably not. Yet it’s worrying that we’re even inclined to pose that question, after we’ve come that literal one inch from facing just such a successful assassination.

So let’s wake up. Where are we in real life? President Biden’s dementia is suddenly old news. All political rhetoric is tamped down. Both parties can only call for peace, love, and understanding. That’s not an oratorical landscape in which to call for symbolic defenestration of anybody, even on your own team.

In other words, Biden’s stubborn digging in after his ignominious debate performance and building Democratic calls for the president to step down may have paid off. That is, a deus ex machina (did the Lord descend from the heavens after all?) has intervened, and the Dems won’t likely have an appetite for a metaphorical assassination on their side after an attempt at a literal one on the Republican side. If so, Biden’s victory is Pyrrhic and purely penultimate. It may be foolhardy to make any predictions whatsoever in this weirdest of all American election years, but from this vantage point? The chances of Biden prevailing are now scant to non-existent. Biden has only won for himself the opportunity to lose. Good show, Joe. Boy, are your supporters gonna love you for hanging in there.

It doesn’t take a political genius to conclude that this near miss is a massive boost to the Trump campaign — so much so that I predicted to myself on Saturday night that a handful of furious Democrats would accuse the Trump campaign of having organised the assassination attempt as a publicity stunt. Sure enough, a subsection of Democrats is far more demented than our current resident, and thus genuinely believe that the notoriously “narcissistic” Trump is so careless of his own physical survival that he hired a 20-year-old amateur marksman to nick off the top of his ear from 100 metres — and by the by to shoot one bystander dead and critically injure two others, but that’s just the cost of doing business. Uh-huh.

We don’t know much about the shooter. Much has been made of the fact that Crooks (is this another instance of people being bizarrely influenced by their given name?) is a registered Republican, although he donated to a Democratically affiliated group in 2021. But his home state of Pennsylvania restricts primary voting to those registered in that party. Dems in PA have urged their voters to register for the opposition, the better to support the weakest of Republican candidates — a cynical ploy that echoes Democratic financial support for maximally terrible, Trump-endorsed Congressional candidates in 2022. In other words, we can’t assume that this guy was a Republican “Never Trumper” or far-Right loon aggrieved that Trump wasn’t nearly conservative enough. We can’t assume that he was a Republican in sincere political terms at all. I’ll go out on a limb, then, and predict that Crooks had Left-of-centre predilections. But wherever his party loyalties lay, anyone who tried to shoot Trump in the head didn’t want him to be president again — didn’t want him to be president very badly indeed.

Anyone considering making history with political violence take heed, then. Crooks may have influenced which party secures the White House this year. But if we look at the hypothetical alternative universe in which his assassination succeeded and our real-life present in which he failed, both scenarios benefit the Republicans. Both scenarios elevate Trump’s national standing, sacralise his status, embellish his hagiography, boost the policy goals in his platform, improve the prospects of other candidates who ride his coattails, and alchemise the man into a mythic hero.

Both scenarios achieve the perfectly opposite results that anyone contemplating an attempt on Trump’s life would surely aim for. Shooting at politicians has an effect, all right, but what effect is beyond an assassin’s control. The chances that your noble sacrifice for the good of all will backfire spectacularly in your own terms are extremely high.