“Every political assassination is a joint communiqué,” wrote Ashis Nandy four decades ago. “It is a statement which the assassin and his victim jointly… co-author… Even when the killer is mentally ill and acts alone, he in his illness represents larger historical and psychological forces which connect him to his victim.”
We don’t know the motivations behind the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. All we know is that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman, was a registered Republican who also gave money to a progressive cause and who did very well in mathematics and science in high school. Whatever his motives, the implications of the attempted assassination are very serious. They say something about Trump, who is likely to win the presidency again, and something about the moment in which American politics finds itself.
America has a substantial history of political assassinations. Four presidents lost their lives to the bullets of assassins, including Abraham Lincoln (1865) and John F Kennedy (1963). These assassinations, broadly speaking, were committed during a period of intense political polarisation. But Americans also sought to come together after each such act, at least in the short run. An attempt was also made to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, the last such attempt before July 13. Patti Davis, Reagan’s daughter, wrote recently: “There was the stunned mood of the country over the days that followed – strangers coming up to me gently, compassionately. Politics became irrelevant, at least for a while… I long for the America that wrapped itself around my family after my father was shot, and I pray we can find that in ourselves again.” (The New York Times, July 14)
Will America come together this time? The chances are slim. Two of the Republican front-runners for Trump’s vice presidency have already blamed the attempted assassination on the Democratic party’s election campaign. The Democrats have, of course, been recalling January 6, when a mob of Trump’s supporters attacked the US Congress. Though this moment can potentially be used to lower the rhetoric and unite the country, one cannot ignore the fact that Trump has often used rhetoric encouraging violence.
Donald Trump surrounded by US Secret Service agents. (AP photo)
The fundamental issues dividing the country are as old as the American Republic itself, how to combine freedom and inclusion being the most important of them all. Samuel Huntington used the term “creedal passions” for such conflicts. Both freedom and inclusion are integral components of the American creed. But does freedom mean that Americans are also free to exclude groups from the larger political community? This question has repeatedly shaken US politics, leading once to a civil war. The key question then was whether slaves could be brought in as equal members of the nation.
Voting and immigration are the most significant contemporary manifestations of this age-old problem. Framing rules and laws to restrict suffrage is a Republican project today. Minorities and immigrants of colour vote mostly for the Democrats. Attracting communities of colour away from the Democrats could be one way for the Republican party to structure its modern quest for power, but its current belief is that the party would be more successful if the system did not freely incorporate these communities. Many Republicans dread the possibility laid out by the US census that the US will become a White-minority country by the 2040s. The latter used to be the fear of Democrats in the American South in the decades after the Civil War. It is today a Republican fear.
Democracy is a system that, in principle, allows for a non-violent resolution of such conflicts. But America’s gun-owning laws add a violent edge to the political struggle. Virtually alone in the modern world, the US allows “bearing arms” as a constitutional right. The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, affirms this right.
The rationale was two-fold. James Madison, a founding father, argued that a militia could defend a community against oppressive federal armies. Drawing lessons from British colonial rule, the founding fathers were unwilling to give too much power to the national government. The second argument had to do with personal safety. Modern policing came late to the US. In 1838, Boston was the first to develop a police force, followed by New York in 1844 and New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1852. But this was all urban policing. America became an urban-majority society only in the first decade of the 20th century. Security in the vast rural expanse of the country was left to gun owners. And in the American South, policing essentially meant “slave patrols” ensuring Black submission.
Even today, as the Pew Research Report of 2023 showed, 47 per cent of adults in rural areas of the US are gun owners, a share that drops to 30 per cent in suburbs and 20 per cent in urban areas. The report also revealed some other patterns. Nearly a third of American adults own a gun, the highest such ratio in the world. Moreover, 38 per cent of White Americans are gun owners, as opposed to 24 per cent Blacks, 20 per cent Hispanics and 10 per cent Asians. The Republican-Democrat divergence is also worth noting. Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to own a gun; 79 per cent of Republicans say gun ownership increases safety, whereas a roughly equal percentage of Democrats say it does not. A similar pattern marks the urban-rural distinction — 65 per cent of rural Americans say owning guns adds to safety, whereas 64 per cent of urban Americans think it leads to lower safety.
In short, rural and small-town America is overflowing with guns, with strong beliefs about their value. Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, where the gunman attacking Trump grew up, is such a town, with a population of a little over 33,000, according to the 2020 census. The great irony of the attempted assassination is that a registered Republican sought to kill the leading presidential candidate of the party that is more favourable to gun ownership in a town that perhaps has an abundance of guns, which Republicans deem desirable for public safety.
In the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week, it is unclear how, apart from confirming Trump as the party’s presidential candidate, the campaign narrative will be formed. Will an intra-party debate on limiting gun ownership be also initiated? Perhaps it is a forlorn hope.
The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute
