Trump's Close Call And Inside America's Long History Of Presidential Assassination Attempts

New Delhi: “WAIT a minute,” Donald Trump told the secret service personnel covering him and punched thrice in air with a tight fist as he looked like shouting “fight, fight, fight,” before he was whisked to safety. As that bullet grazed past Trump’s right ear in Butler grounds of Pennsylvania, Saturday, the assailant did succeed in killing one candidate’s bid for presidency. And that’s not Trump. But let me come to that in a bit.

The United States political history is not unfamiliar with these kind of political assassination bids. Four sitting presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy, have lost their lives to an assassin’s bullet. With that attempt on his life, Donald Trump becomes the thirteenth US president or candidate targeted by an assailant with political motives. One shouldn’t be surprised if this is the highest such targeting of the occupants of highest office of the land for any nation in the world. Wonder what makes this distinction possible for American democracy.

Personality Plays a Role

For one, the presidential system of government by itself is personality centric, making the candidate the pivot of all attention. The candidate comes to represent the good, the bad, and the ugly of his or her party and its ideology. The attention in turn attracts emotions both positive and negative. And when you add to this mix a personality which is charismatic (like Kennedy) or polarising (like Trump), or both (like Lincoln), it becomes a magnet for even greater emotional engagement, again both positive and negative. The assassin is the negative element of that attention, the bullet its engagement.

Second, winner takes all American politics is theatre by design. Look at those House and Senate committee proceedings where the camera is the most important prop. From words to histrionics, everything is meant to make an impact before the national audience. In effect it's the political version of reality TV where attention is half the battle. Eventually it cuts both ways. For the political assassin, attention to the cause is as much a target as the victim.

Easy Availability of Gun a Contributing Factor 

Three, and this might be only a peripherally contributing factor, the easy availability of gun – even machine guns meant for urban warfare. The frequent lone wolf shootings due to permissive gun culture, resulting in mass civilian casualties, would have got aggressively tackled by now in any other society. Not in the United States.

Close Call For Trump

Saturday attack on Trump is a summation of above, and much more. The outlier former president has been a target of left establishment hate like no other in recent history. It is remarkable how Trump kept his mojo in the face of such danger to his life in that moment in Pennsylvania. Faced with death he proved to be little more than sharp as a tack! But that resolve was perhaps building up over the last couple of years. From impeachments to indictments, from getting mug shotted to undergoing process as punishment, Trump has been subject to the most sustained attack on his political life. Without getting into the merits of the cases, all those have arguably strengthened him from inside.

At different points in time over the last year, Trump has been branded the enemy of state, and got called as more dangerous than Hitler and Mussolini. His return to the White House has been projected as certain death of democracy in America. There’s at least one instance where a Democrat State Senator in Missouri was under Secret Service investigation for wishing in public that President Trump was assassinated.

With all this, the Democrat establishment created an echo-chamber which perhaps made an impressionable Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, pick up the gun and go for it. As per information pieced together now, Crooks was fresh out of high school, meritorious enough to get a math scholarship, had once donated to a Democrat PAC, perhaps out of his pocket money, and held Republican party membership ticket when he was taken down by the Secret Service team protecting Trump on Saturday.  

I see both the stories - of Trump and Crooks together – as symptomatic of a struggling superpower. Trump’s acceptance as the candidate at the Republican National Convention that starts in Milwaukee today is a foregone conclusion. Only that the juggernaut would roll faster and heavier for any Democrat rival to counter, let alone a stuttering Biden.

Only months ago, the United States had something to say on Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest. Earlier this year, the US subjected the Sheikh Hasina government to tremendous pressure, bordering on arm-twisting, to give more concessions to opponent Begum Khaleda Zia during elections. Lofty as the principle is to champion the cause of democracy around the world, America could practice some of it home first. Doddering gerontocrats baying for blood, figuratively or literally, is sure not the picture the strongest democracy would want to project to the rest of the world.

There is lesson for the left liberal establishment in India in all this. With the kind of abuse and attacks we have seen on Narendra Modi, both as Prime Minister and before that as Chief Minister, the danger of a similar echo chamber with same consequences cannot be in the realm of impossibility. In fact, candidate Modi did face a murderous terror attack in Gandhi Maidan of Patna in 2013. Six rallyists had lost their life, and a bomb was recovered from under the dais from where Modi spoke a while later. It's a warning for us.