The Assassination Attempt and the Election

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

 

If you will permit me some license to be crass — a moment of bloodless dispassion utterly divorced from the response we expect from properly socialized adults — I’d like to dwell on what we’re all wondering but is still too gauche to ask in mixed company: How will the second attempt on Trump’s life matter?

 

Perhaps it’s natural that the unsuccessful assassination attempt foiled over the weekend has not generated the same sense of shock. It’s clear now that the kind of introspection that followed the July 13 attack on Donald Trump will not be forthcoming. It’s not just that, this time, the alleged assailant didn’t get a shot off and produced no iconic images. Trump supporters expected that the former president would once again come under fire. The press seems blind to the incitements on their side, and they dare not acknowledge the violence too often perpetrated in the name of “resistance.”

 

For their part, Trump’s opponents have had their fill of soul-searching. Propriety demands they keep their conclusions to themselves, but they see the Republican ticket’s eagerness to promulgate false narratives that excite America’s undermedicated fringes as an exercise in sowing the wind. Whatever sympathy they had for Trump when a bullet passed centimeters from his head is gone. They think he has been asking for it.

 

So, it was with remarkable speed that the media organs that can be counted on to transmit Democratic narratives transitioned from horror over the news that Trump had once again been targeted for death to outrage over Trump’s objections to his own potential murder.

 

Politico bristled at the Trump campaign’s efforts to leverage the attempted assassination for maximum benefit as reflected in a fundraising email accusing Democrats of “trying to incite the most extreme elements in her base” and dispatching surrogates out to accuse Kamala Harris’s allies of complicity. “It’s a strategy Trump’s advisers view as a way to hold Democrats accountable for rhetoric they argue — without evidence — has endangered the former president,” the outlet fumed.

 

The New York Times highlighted Trump’s post-attempt efforts to link the attack “to statements Vice President Kamala Harris has made and to the four criminal cases he is facing.” They note that he, too, has alleged that the election represents an opportunity to “save our country” because “we can’t have a Marxist communist president.”

 

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump read the subtext aloud. “Trump and his allies seek unilateral disarmament, the ability to bemoan Democratic criticisms of Trump as unacceptable and immoral while shrugging at what Trump himself says,” he seethed. Indeed, this second attempt on Trump’s life represents an opportunity. “Another chance for Trump to frame Democrats as dangerous has emerged,” the headline read.

 

The Democratic Party’s instigators in the press want Trump’s opponents to take the gloves off, abandon demure appeals to national comity, and make explicit the implication that the former president is the author of his — and our — insecurity. And it is true enough that the Trump campaign and its surrogates have not shied away from making the attack on Trump into a wedge issue to divide the country and enliven the MAGA base.

 

We can make a normative judgment about how this behavior is untoward and reckless — it most certainly is. A political class with a better sense of responsible stewardship would instinctively eschew the incentives to capitalize on this national trauma. But that is not the political class we’ve voted for ourselves. So, the only question that matters now is: will it work?

 

On the one hand, this latest attack on Trump does represent an opportunity for the campaign insofar as it drags the former president, his vice-presidential nominee, and their center-right media backers out of the rabbit hole down which they’ve been spelunking since the last debate. At the risk of not overthinking things, the campaign’s frenetic efforts to backfill its claim that Haitian migrants were absconding with, gutting, and eating household pets was not a winning message. If you have to “create stories” to crystalize the border crisis for voters — which is already a primary voting issue across partisan lines — you don’t belong in the communications business. The attempted assassination pulled the Trump campaign out of that quagmire, and it gave Republicans an opportunity to put Democrats back on defense.

 

But will voters evince the kind of solidarity with Trump they showed in July? That’s an open question. A New York Times-sponsored post-debate focus group of “young, undecided voters,” which was conducted prior to Sunday’s attack, found that six out of ten participants came away from that contest with an improved opinion of Harris. Just one participant said the same of Trump. Can Trump erase the negative perceptions he created in the debate by leaning into his own victimization? That may be a harder sell.

 

YouGov’s polling following the first attempt on Trump found that, while the vast majority of respondents (85 percent) blamed the assailant for the attack, “about as many blame Trump and Republicans (26 percent) as President Joe Biden and Democrats (25 percent).” Trump and his Republican allies were not actively arguing that Democrats bore some blame for his assault at the time, so more GOP-leaning voters might be inclined to follow Trump’s lead today. But it’s unlikely that a second bite at this apple will produce results with the few persuadable voters on the margins — the only voters that matter now — following this second attack.

 

Undecided voters might be convinced that the response to the attack on Trump from his liberal critics is graceless and churlish, but they see those qualities in Trump, too. In the end, for many, a contest over which party has become the coarsest will end in a draw.

 

Trump might find that he would highlight the fact that he and his administration’s officials find themselves in the crosshairs of Iran, which is also dead set on murdering “a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil,” according to the Justice Department. That was the language they used following the arrest of a Pakistani national who pleaded guilty to being dispatched by Iran with orders to avenge the humiliations Iran suffered under Trump. That narrative — while (so far) disconnected from either of the two attempts on Trump’s life — highlights Trump’s record in office containing the Iranian menace. Voters strongly dislike the Iranian regime, and they’re unlikely to shrug off a hostile foreign power’s efforts to spill American blood. Such a narrative would have the incidental effect of underscoring the Biden-Harris administration’s permissive approach to the Iranian threat. But the Trump campaign is not taking that road.

 

The attacks on Trump should light a fire under Congress. It shouldn’t take “weeks” to commit all the resources necessary to Trump’s safety. In the absence of those resources, Trump will be unduly constrained. He will not be able to go wherever he wants, meet voters where they live with relative spontaneity, or hold the kinds of events on which he thrives. That, too, would induce sympathy, but it’s off-message insofar as railing against Congress and the U.S. Secret Service draws voters’ attention away from where Trump wants it: on their apprehension toward four more years of Democratic governance in the White House. Still, executive branch agencies are the province of the incumbent administration, and Trump is never more comfortable or confident than when he’s arguing from a position of persecution.

 

In sum, there are ways the Trump campaign can maximize the opportunity here. That is an admittedly vulgar and cynical calculation, but politics ain’t beanbag. And yet, the Trump camp hasn’t taken the most fruitful avenues, preferring instead to speak primarily to its base voters and reinforce their negative assumptions about Democrats. Those voters are already a lock for Trump. If he wants to expand the base, and he should, he should think about broadening his message beyond the uncouthness of his opponents.