White House Race Frozen by Assassination Attempt, Calls for Cool Land on Smoldering Electorate
Biden's calls to turn down the temperature met with simmering rage and conspiracy theories after assassination attempt
LOWELL, Indiana — The attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump could serve as a wakeup call to an enraged and afraid electorate, or may only fuel further rage in an already fraught contest.
A lot will depend on what message Trump and his MAGA supporters land on this week as the Republican convention starts in Milwaukee today.
Trump told one of his longtime chroniclers, Salena Zito, who popularized the Trumpsplaining phrase “seriously/literally”, that in the wake of the Saturday’s shooting he was rewriting his nomination acceptance speech to focus on “unity” instead of attacking President Joe Biden. Trump’s campaign team said they would be pivoting away from the apocalyptic messaging that has defined his political career to date.
Biden, in a brief primetime address Sunday evening told the nation to “cool it.”
But it’s unclear yet that either Biden, who has warned repeatedly that Trump would be the country’s first dictator if he is returned to office, or Trump, who has built a successful career out of enraging his loyalists with fabricated stories and promises of vengeance, can turn around a political world clouded by conspiracy theories and payback.
In the immediate aftermath of Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted assassination of Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Biden and the Democrats pulled back campaign ads and withdrew plans to blast Republicans at their convention.
And Trump’s buttoned-down campaign operation directed staff not to fan the flames online. In a post to Trump’s social media site, which is a hotbed of political violence, former first lady Melania Trump said that now was the time for love.
But the underlying dynamics, as Lincoln Project co-founder Mike Madrid wrote online, appear to have changed little.
The race is a rematch of the two men who battled fiercely in 2020. It was born out of the historic January 6th insurrection, in which Trump directed his throngs of supporters to the Capitol in an attempt overthrow the election, and has been molded by historic criminal charges, civil penalties and a conviction on 34 felonies for Trump — all before the Supreme Court decided that presidents, including Biden and Trump, are “immune” from criminal law for “official acts” in office.
Trump, who has campaigned claiming he was a “martyr” and promised revenge and imprisonment for his political opponents has successfully convinced his supporters — intentionally or otherwise — they already live in a dictatorship and Biden is the feeble tyrant lording over them.
Biden and his campaign have painted Trump as an aspiring dictator, speculating that he won’t leave office after his second term (something Trump himself has said as well) and would plunge the nation into an existential crisis on par with the Civil War and other grave American traumas.
And their respective supporters have heard them — and believe them — which is probably why immediate calls to stand down will fall flat.
In the hours and days following Saturday’s assassination attempt, wild conspiracy theories and unfounded claims flooded social media — which has fueled a significant rise in political violence in the past decade. Partisans on the right, including top top Trump advisers and members of Congress, falsely alleged it was an assassination attempt by Biden himself. Partisans on the left online grimly wrote, at times, their disappointment the assassination did not succeed.
Heading into Monday’s start of the convention, Trump’s team said the former president would be tamping down his rhetoric. And Trump himself said he would be revamping his words.
But Monday morning, after Federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents criminal case against Trump, deciding that the prosecutor, Jack Smith, had been wrongly appointed, Trump took to his social media site to declare victory and attack Democrats.
“The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME,” Trump wrote online.
Keep your heads down