Buckle Up: A Storm Is Coming

The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump is a calamity for the Biden-Harris campaign, the US political system and the 2024 presidential race.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

It’s not quite accurate to say the US presidential campaign and the world have been transformed by the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump; they were transformed and transforming long before the former president took the stage Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.

What this singular, shocking act of political violence, and the images of the blood-spattered candidate defiantly raising his fist moments later, will do, is amplify trends already under way. The approaching storm just got bigger and darker, by orders of magnitude.  Where it goes now, to borrow a term from the late Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary to President George W. Bush, is an unknown unknown.

The shooter, identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, is dead; he was shot by Secret Service snipers within seconds of opening fire from a nearby rooftop. The forensic analysis into his background and possible motivations will continue for months and years to come.

That won’t cause so much as a beat of delay, however, as conspiracy theorists on either side of America’s political chasm rush to the judgment that best serves their immediate political interests.

For Trump’s supporters on the right and far right, including some in Congress, the attempted assassination will forever be blamed, is already being blamed, on President Joe Biden and the Democrats. Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk, as is his habit, weighed in with unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, suggesting in a post that the Secret Service may have deliberately allowed the shooting to occur.  Trump’s diehard opponents on the left and far left, meantime, will buy into the equally unsubstantiated view that the shooting was staged for the former president’s political benefit. Like the moon landing, they’ll say, it was all faked. Saturday evening, the Washington Post reported Sunday, thousands of posters shared theories that the shots had been fired from a BB gun. (This, despite that one bystander was killed and two others critical wounded, according to reports.)

What is undeniable is that this is a calamity for the Biden-Harris ticket, the US political system and the 2024 presidential campaign.

Biden and the Democrats were already on the ropes, as they struggled to explain away the president’s egregious stumbles in the June 27 CNN debate, and ensuing concerns about his health and mental fitness. Whether Biden could survive the escalating chorus of influential voices within his own party, calling on him to step aside, was already in serious doubt.

Indeed, before Saturday, judging by his debate performance and public appearances since, it seemed unlikely that Biden could face Trump again in a live debate, or sustain a bruising summer campaign, while doing the world’s most demanding job.

Now, Biden faces an opponent who has defiantly survived an attempt to kill him. Whatever facts investigators eventually unearth, Trump and his campaign will inevitably frame this as a desperate attempt by the Deep State -- the institutions he has for years claimed were out to get him --  to destroy his movement. And millions of Americans will believe this.

In an information ecosystem in which facts can be established, reliably reported and believed, there would be some hope of pushing back against such a narrative. We no longer live in that world. Moreover, the Biden campaign’s ability to campaign hard against Trump, given the natural sympathy that will accrue to him now, is severely constrained. The White House’s only recourse is to appeal for calm and a return to civil discourse, as they are already doing, and hope that events settle in the weeks ahead.

For Canada, the upshot of Saturday’s violence is stark: We need to assume the odds now favour Trump’s return.

He has promised to impose a ten-per-cent tariff on imports to the United State. We should take him at his word. Trump has further promised to insist that America’s NATO allies pay more for their own defence or be pushed outside the US security umbrella. We should take him at his word.

The first Trump presidency was marked by chaos, as the unpredictable and erratic former reality TV star and real estate developer stumbled from crisis to crisis, switching out staff at a dizzying pace, inventing US policy on Twitter, now X.

A second Trump presidency, it is already clear, would be a more focused and determined effort by the MAGA movement to fundamentally change how the United States is governed. Because of the recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, conferring immunity on any US president for “official” law-breaking while in office, it’s no exaggeration to say that democracy itself is on the ballot.

Buckle up. A storm is coming.