As an assassination attempt on US President Donald Trump, the unsuccessful bid by a suspect identified in US media as Cole Tomas Allen, from California, scarcely makes the grade. The alleged shooter failed to get past the checkpoints on the floor in the Washington Hilton above the cavernous hall where the White House correspondents’ dinner was taking place, with the President and his senior lieutenants in attendance.
Perhaps the most important question about the attack will never be answered: what proportion of the American population would have given a silent sigh of relief if Trump had been assassinated? Some 63 per cent of Americans disapprove and 50 per cent strongly disapprove of Trump according to the latest NBC poll, and one does not have to talk long to Americans to discover how many loathe Trump with a deep passion as the gravedigger of American democracy, whom they believe is fast turning their country into a rogue state.
No US administration has relished inflicting violence and death on others at home and abroad as much as Trump in his second term. In Minnesota, two innocent people are shot dead by federal agents. In the Caribbean, Venezuelan seamen clinging to their upturned boat are killed in a US air strike. In Iran, a US Tomahawk slams into a school killing 168 people, including around 100 children.
Trump’s implicit encouragement of violence against those he identifies as his opponents is scarcely news. In 2017, he refused at first to condemn a white supremacist who had driven his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one and injuring 17 others. On the first day of his return to the White House, he issued a blanket pardon to 1,600 people in jail or awaiting trial for the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
America has always been a violent society. The 60s and 70s saw a president and many other leaders assassinated. Protesters were beaten and shot down in the streets, while cities were torn apart by riots that resembled uprisings. Abroad, the US was engaged in the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 Americans and over one million Vietnamese died.
More than most nations, the assassinations of famous figures marks eras in American history: the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F Kennedy in 1963, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Compared to these killings, the incident at Washington Hilton on Saturday may appear of little significance, yet it does fuel a sense that American politics is getting more violent and out of control.
This feeling has reached a crescendo since Trump ordered the surprise attack by US forces allied to Israel on Iran on 28 February. Wars are the ultimate expression of state violence and they provoke acts of violence by individuals, alone or in concert with others, against established governments. When the US Secretary of State for War, Pete Hegseth, expresses open contempt for “the stupid rules of engagement”, he can hardly expect others to stick by the rules.
The war on Iran, which opened with the assassination of the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with his family and senior members of the Iranian government, marked a new low point in international lawlessness. Trump later joked about this, jovially comparing the air strike with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, an act that president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had famously described as “a date which will live in infamy”. Such public cynicism about any form of legal or moral restraint will lead some of America’s enemies to conclude that the only way to counter such arbitrary actions is by acts of terror like 9/11.
Americans and non-Americans alike may dismiss this by saying they see little new in Trump’s actions – or the explosive reaction they provoke. They will say that the United States has always been a violent society where firearms are widely available and in use. For critical foreigners, this has long been a piece of conventional wisdom about America. In 1886, for instance, Rudyard Kipling, a young reporter in India, wrote a disapproving article called “Violent America”, in the wake of the Haymarket riot in Chicago in which both protesters calling for an eight-hour day and police repressing them were killed. He wondered if an American civil war might “not be far off”, but supposed that the US authorities would act to suppress such violent incidents.
Kipling, who had not been to America at this time, later went there and found all his prejudices confirmed. By the 60s, the saying that “violence is as American as cherry pie” had become commonplace. Many believe this still to be the case today, but this is not entirely the case. Violent crime has halved since the 90s and the murder rate is the same now as in 1900.
This has not stopped Trump making fantastical claims about soft-on-crime, Democratic-controlled cities (along with London) having collapsed into murderous anarchy, but in reality the reverse is true.
Could we be entering a new era of assassinations? The political temperature is high and rising in the US and the Middle East. Wars on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran are being fought without mercy or restraint. The US has adopted the Israeli policy of “mowing the grass”, a sinister, understated way of describing repeated state-led assassination campaigns, as a strategy – and might even work until the enemy strikes back in kind.
Trump ramps up his belligerent bombast, speaking of ending Iranian civilisation and returning the country to the Stone Age, but such words have consequences. The world from Minneapolis to Tehran has learned that the only way to deal with Trump is to resist and counter violence with violence. A nastier, more vicious world is in the making.
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