Former President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he is rushed offstage during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
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Donald Trump will reemerge after an attempted assassination as an even greater mythical hero of his MAGA movement with the Republican National Convention opening Monday after an extraordinary two weeks that have transformed the 2024 campaign.
More than 24 hours on, the horror of Saturday’s shooting is only beginning to distill into a shocking new national trauma. But both the former president and President Joe Biden are gaming out how to navigate the political aftershocks.
And there was another stunning development on Monday morning, when a district judge in Florida threw out special counsel Jack Smith’s case regarding Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The shock move swept away one of the four criminal cases hanging over the ex-president in a huge victory for his campaign as the convention opens. It cements the notion that, apart from his hush money conviction in New York, he will not face legal accountability before November’s election.
The latest twist in Trump’s legal dramas came as the country was still processing the aftermath of Saturday’s horrific events.
An assassination attempt against a presidential candidate, with all the historical allusions it evokes, raises fears that bloodshed will beget more bloodshed as the toxic politics of the last decade threaten to take an even more ominous turn.
BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA – JULY 13: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is shown covered by U.S. Secret Service agents after an incident during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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“A former president was shot, an American citizen killed while simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing. We cannot — must not — go down this road in America,” Biden said, calling for calm and for a polarized nation to unite in an address from the Oval Office on Sunday night. The president mourned Corey Comperatore, a firefighter and father, who died at the Trump rally shielding his family and joined the haunting roll of Americans lost to political violence.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, joined calls for restraint, telling CNN: “It’s a dark time in the history of the country. This is a dangerous time. And we’ve been suggesting that all elected officials, from the president on down, really try to draw the country together. We need a unified message. We need to turn the temperature down.”
In his first interview since the attempt on his life, the former president pledged that his RNC keynote address Thursday — which had been expected to be an update on his “American carnage” inaugural address in 2017 — would be a “lot different.”
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” Trump told Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner.
An earth-shaking two weeks since the CNN presidential debate has rescripted a race that had, for all its quirks, been a relatively stable grind between two unpopular candidates, neither of whom the public really wanted.
Trump will show up to a convention in front of many followers who already saw him in almost a divine, superhuman light, having escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet, to claim his third straight GOP nomination. The weekend’s terrible events will only reinforce his control over his party. And pollsters will be watching to see whether sympathy over what happened swells his already broadening lead in swing states.
Biden, meanwhile, spent the last two weeks fighting to save his own nomination, after his debate debacle in Atlanta exposed the 81-year-old’s struggles with age and unleashed panic among Democrats that he’ll hand Trump the White House and the GOP a monopoly on Washington power. The uproar over the Trump assassination attempt may pause the intraparty rebellion against Biden for now, especially as he assumes his role as the leader of a nation in sudden crisis.
Only the oldest Americans lived through the political assassinations of the 1960s, and those who remember the attempt to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981 are now middle-aged. So, millions of people, who have already endured political paroxysms of recent years, are now experiencing the consequent and frightening sense of a nation off its axis for the first time.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
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But despite the shock of the last few days, politics will always fill a vacuum — especially after a political tragedy. Indeed, Trump’s defiance — he was pictured with blood streaking his face and clenching his fist while Secret Service rushed him offstage Saturday — was a gesture that is likely to define his career and his life.
“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump told The New York Post on Sunday. “They’re right, and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”
It is too early to say how voters will respond to the deeply disturbing events at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, or the sitting president’s pledge that he’s fit to serve until January 2029 despite his performance at the debate. But the decisions that each man makes in the coming days and the tone they seek to strike will be critical to how the campaign evolves.
One thing about the election likely won’t change. In a nation that was already deeply divided, the core vote for both Trump and Biden was probably locked in. Tens of thousands of voters in a handful of swing states probably still hold the fate of the White House — and the nation’s future in their hands.
Trump’s tactical choices
The convention, taking place in the home arena of the Milwaukee Bucks in the critical battleground state of Wisconsin, will formally nominate Trump in the fabled roll call of the states. And the GOP is on alert for him to name his vice presidential pick, after a reality show-style process in which he’s teased out potential ticket mates, including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
The ex-president told supporters on Truth Social on Sunday that he’d been planning to delay his trip to Wisconsin by two days, “but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else.”
Trump has conducted his attempt to regain the White House as a campaign of personal and political vengeance amid his claims that his legal cases, including his conviction in a hush money trial in New York and two pending trials over his attempt to thwart the will of voters in 2020, are proof of political persecution.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., Saturday, July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
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There can be no justification for an assassination attempt on a candidate — an assault on democracy. But if the attack on Saturday sprung from a fetid political culture, Trump has been an enthusiastic participant with rhetoric that often seemed to incite violence and that coarsened the public square. This included his racist conspiracy theories about the birthplace of former President Barack Obama and apparent mockery of the injuries suffered by Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi who was attacked with a hammer inside his home. The ex-president’s summoning of protesters to Washington on January 6, 2021, and his call for them to “fight like hell” preceded the assault on the US Capitol and the beating of police officers by his supporters.
Trump faces a choice. He could interpret the assassination attempt as a catalyst for less poisoned rhetoric. This could be a politically astute move at a time when many Americans are feeling frightened. His past conduct, however, would mean many voters would struggle to believe him.
The alternative course would be to fit the assassination attempt into his claims of personal persecution by an amorphous “left” that is seeking to crush his political ambitions, end his freedom through the courts and even take his life. (The motivation of the lone gunman who took aim at Trump is so far unclear as the investigations continues.)
If Trump reacts to the assault on his life by vowing vengeance, the current political crisis and moment of national upheaval could worsen considerably.
Many Republican politicians issued calls for calm and an easing of political rhetoric after the shooting — as did Democrats. But some GOP lawmakers also seemed to be using their comments to try to shut down criticism of a former president who sought to overturn the 2020 election and who has vowed to seek “retribution” in a second term.
U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) talks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on June 28, 2024 in Washington, DC. Johnson said that members of President Joe Biden’s cabinet should “search their hearts” and evoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office after his performance at Thursday’s presidential debate against former President Donald Trump.
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Vance, for instance, wrote on 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.” He added: “that rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” The choice of Vance for Trump’s running mate would therefore send an unmistakable message.
And Johnson accompanied his calls for calm by implying that Democrats — in advancing their arguments against Trump — had somehow abetted the assassination attempt.
“It’s objective truth that Donald Trump is probably the most persecuted and attacked political figure in history, certainly among presidents, maybe at least since Abraham Lincoln, Civil War era,” the Louisiana Republican told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “That takes a toll, … When my colleagues go out and say, ‘Democracy will end, the republic will be in an emergency stage if Donald Trump wins for president,’ it’s just not true.”
He added: “When they say that kind of rhetoric and they heat it up like that, there are people out there that take these things to heart and act upon them.”
Biden’s new political challenge — and opening
Biden now faces one of the most intricate tests of presidential dexterity for years. He is embracing his duty to protect political discourse — even that of an opponent — and has called for an investigation of apparent Secret Service failings in the attack. At the same time, he’s trying to revive his own political fortunes by looking presidential, while still taking on Trump.
President Joe Biden speaks after his Republican opponent Donald Trump was injured following a shooting at an election rally in Pennsylvania, at the Rehoboth Beach Police Department, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, July 13, 2024.
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Biden’s flexing of the symbolic power of the office — and the spotlight on the Republican National Convention this week — may serve to blunt attention on Democratic anxieties about his prospects, although all it would take to revive public concerns would be more alarmingly shaky public performances.
His Oval Office address, while moving, was marked by several of the verbal flubs that Trump has mercilessly mocked and that after the debate disaster have turned every public event into an excruciating examination of his capacity.
Biden now faces the difficult decision about when to return to the offensive against Trump — one that may be conditioned by the tone his rival adopts. But he subtly signaled during his Oval Office address that he will not water down his warnings that his predecessor and possible successor represents a threat to democratic freedoms that define the soul of America.
He did so by citing several events in which Trump, his supporters or far-right groups were involved — mentioning “members of Congress of both parties being targeted and shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or … intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor (Michigan Democrat Gretchen Whitmer) or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever,” Biden said.
His sentiments are shared by many. But bitter experience suggests he may not be the last president to say so.