Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinso Associated Press Donald Trump, at the end of a campaign rally at the Dodge County Airport, Sunday, in Juneau, Wisconsin
Fabien Deglise
Published at 15:55 Updated at 16:46 Analysis
- United States
He said he returned to the scene of the first assassination attempt on him last Saturday to “finish” what he was supposed to do the first time: a political rally to drum up the momentum of his political movement in a rural corner of Pennsylvania.
But by landing this weekend in Butler, where a sniper’s bullet grazed his ear on July 13, former President Donald Trump sought above all to do more: to revive the indelible image of the fighter whose life was saved, according to him, by divine intervention to allow him to save the United States. An attractive message for his electoral base, which the Republican candidate must keep alive in the final weeks of this very tight presidential campaign, where no gain — especially in key states — can be overlooked.
“The multiple assassination attempts against Donald Trump only make him more likeable” to his voters, wrote Thomas Gift, a political scientist at University College London, in the pages of Newsweek in mid-September. It was the day after a possible new attack on the populist was foiled outside his West Palm Beach golf club on September 15. The second assassination attempt in two months. “Trump continues to insist that he took a bullet to protect democracy, and that could be enough to win the vote of a certain segment of Americans.”
The Republican and his campaign team understood this well. At the first attack, they easily took advantage of the image of the strong man with a bloodied face, fist in the air, calling on his troops to fight. The event proved providential in accentuating the divide with a tired Joe Biden who, at the time, had just lost the only televised debate between the two men. The Democrat was still in the race at the time. The tragedy led to a slight increase in the former president’s approval rating, to around 43%.
The arrival of Kamala Harris changed the tone of the contest, making it even more necessary for Donald Trump to exploit his status as a martyr, a unique candidate whose power of change and ability to shake up the established order would be such, according to him, that he must now live under the threat of death in order to carry out his political project.
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“For the past eight years, those who would prevent us from achieving [the future proposed by the Make America Great Again movement] have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to exclude me from the ballot and, who knows, maybe even killed me,” the former president told the crowd of supporters gathered in Butler on Saturday, implying — without proof — that his political opponents could be behind the jeopardy of his existence. “But I have never stopped fighting for you.”
A few days ago, the leader of the American radical right was not afraid to accuse Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of having refused him additional security resources, which would prevent him from holding his political rallies where he wants and how he wants. On Fox News, he called it “interference in the election,” even though the FBI significantly increased security around him, the places he lives, and the places he frequents in the aftermath of the second assassination attempt.
Some 300 agents now surround him, more than three times the number normally afforded to a former president. The security framework around his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence is also similar to that in place when he occupied the White House.
Stoking Political Violence
Ironically, after years of stirring up political violence in the United States with personal attacks and inflammatory comments that draw as much on lies as on conspiracy, Trump and his entourage are even going so far as to take advantage of this climate of fear to blame their opponent for all the ills of resentment and division that they have publicly stoked for years.
“No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last two months, while two people have tried to kill Donald Trump,” Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance told a church gathering in Georgia in late September. “That’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down its rhetoric and stop its bullshit.”
The former president’s visit to Butler might have seemed like a comeback. In fact, it served mainly to reinvigorate the hero narrative that boosts the ego of a candidate who never misses an opportunity to point out that only great presidents become targets for gunmen.
A video preceding his arrival on stage in Pennsylvania crossed the powerful image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River in 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, with the famous shot of the populist, fist in the air, emerging unscathed from the assassination attempt in July. “This man cannot be stopped. This man cannot be defeated,” the voiceover summed up.
While speaking later of “the hand of Providence” and “the grace of God” that prevented “a bad guy” from stopping his “movement,” Donald Trump also sought to make the site of his political rally a “sacred place”—no less—that those in attendance would remember as a monument to the courage that “so many incredible American patriots have shown,” he said.
No doubt Donald Trump knows, as Nietzsche wrote in his Twilight of the Idols, that in this campaign, anything that doesn't kill him will make him stronger. But to take full advantage of it, he must also exploit the most politically profitable threat to his life: the first (and ultimately only) one that has conjured up the most compelling narrative of triumph and glory he desperately needs to resolve a presidential race in which the two candidates remain neck and neck despite the weight of the stakes.