| As the news of shots fired at former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump continues to reverberate across the globe, a few tidbits from the not-so-distant past come to mind. “I can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa eight years ago, drawing boisterous laughs from his supporters. It was Trump again who mocked Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul when Paul was brutally assaulted in their home in September 2023 by a Canadian far-right conspiracy theorist. The Trump camp, or people who support him, has also been promoting physical violence against Joe Biden, as this video footage from a Republican fundraising event attests. Last but not least, Donald Trump has been a staunch ally of the gun lobby, his power base, while the Biden administration has taken a number of steps to try to combat gun violence, Trump has pledged to continue to defend the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), which he claims is “under siege,” and has called himself “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House”, even as the US faces record numbers of deaths due to mass shootings. These elements of reflection come to mind after Trump himself was injured in what appears to be the most serious attempt to assassinate a US president or a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot at in 1981. Joe Biden and leaders of the world were fast to condemn the assassination attempt as an attack on democracy. Reportedly Biden upended his strategy in the wake of the shooting, and his team was pulling down television ads and suspending other political communications, including those that had highlighted Trump’s May felony conviction in New York state court relating to hush money paid to a porn star to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 US election. But Trump’s supporters, who include figures like Elon Musk, decried the lack of empathy in the liberal media, which they traditionally accuse of demonising their political enemy and creating an atmosphere of hate.
This is only the beginning. | 