Trump, the messiah? No one can script where this goes now

Republican candidate Donald Trump is seen with blood on his face surrounded by secret service agents as he is taken off the stage at a campaign event at Butler Farm Show Inc.

Even an assassination attempt becomes just another marketing angle in our world of 24/7 politics.

We will find out the details of ballistic analysis, but on the basis of the video images it looks as though Donald Trump dodged death by about two centimetres.

By American standards, Trump is not especially religious. This event might lead him to conclude that God wants him in the White House. How does US politics play out in the coming days after this incident?

Trump’s lucky survival and his utterly instinctive reaction to stand defiantly after taking the shot, fist clenched, shouting “fight” to his global audience – all these things play to the image he creates of strength and physical capacity. By contrast, it took the White House two hours to issue a statement, and slightly more time for President Joe Biden to totter to a podium to read it out for the cameras, taking no questions.

No one could script this, but that is how the story unfolded. It plays definitively to deeper impressions that Trump has the drive and determination to win the presidency, while Biden is well past his best. Expect this to be reflected in US opinion polls.

This will focus voters like nothing we have seen thus far in 2024. It will probably help Trump – a sympathy vote, perhaps, but more likely one that admires his grit and luck.

The risk for Trump is that the incident reinforces a messianic tendency of the type we hear when he tells Americans he’s their retribution – goodness knows for what. How Trump deports himself at the Republican convention will be a test of whether the near miss makes him more manic or alternately perhaps more quietly philosophical. Few of us will ever dodge death quite so narrowly.

George W. Bush speaks to volunteers and firemen as he surveys the damage at the site of the World Trade Centre.

For Biden there probably is no dodging the political judgment that is heading his way. If opinion polls swing even more decisively towards Trump in the weeks before Biden’s Democratic convention in August, that situation may force the President out of the race.

How could Biden dodge this likely political setback? One possibility would be to launch immediately into a nationwide campaign to stop gun violence in America. Biden has long championed the need for more civility in political discourse, although it must be said he has a reputation for having a vile temper in dealing with his own staff.

But in America the move towards harsher, more divided politics is becoming louder and more alienating to mainstream voters.

An animated, lively, opportunistic White House might well try to harness the moment – think of George W. Bush in the hours after the 9/11 attacks. But there is little evidence to show Biden or his team have the capacity to define events rather than be defined by them. There is a strong likelihood that Trump may face a different Democrat candidate. That should temper any Republican overconfidence.

Anthony Albanese’s rather trite statement on Sunday to the effect there is no place for violence in politics also struck me as a lost opportunity. Australia too has been subject to a process of increased radicalisation and latent violence around the fringes of national politics since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

I have written regularly about this in these pages. Our government has been willing to tolerate angry, threatening protests, to be less than fully engaged by the threats directed towards Jews, and to put up with graffiti vandalism on statues, war memorials and politicians’ offices.

What this has evinced from the protest movement is more frequent and larger-scale offensive acts. Politics has become angrier, more about performance than substance and more utterly dismissive of opposing points of view.

This is confronting to mainstream Australians and something that undermines faith in our political leaders to keep debate within appropriate guidelines.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

A leader alive to that community sentiment might have used the alarming assassination attempt on Trump to start a national discussion about the need for more civility in our own political system.

As it is, the resort to tired rhetoric about there being no place for violence in politics offers not much hope and even less of an understanding about the coarsening of Australian politics.

Australia is not the United States. Gun violence here is much less common than in the US, but we have our own history of political violence and should take no comfort in the thought that a similar incident could not happen here.

I have had a very deep concern that the growth of tolerated protests and political radicalism since the Hamas attacks is taking Australia closer to the risk of further terrorist acts or political violence.

The Trump assassination attempt should prompt an urgent review in Australia around the safety of our politicians. In particular as we move to an election campaign, where there will be many rallies and open political meetings.

The risk of political violence may be less than in the US, but it is not negligible in Australia, and is growing. How well prepared are our police and protective service units for that risk in the lead-up to our federal election?