Donald Trump raising his fist, spitting out the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as blood streams down his face from a bullet wound in his ear — it is the sort of image that used to be called iconic back before that word degenerated into a synonym for famous. The attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, a year ago this weekend was the great symbolic moment of his 2024 presidential victory. There are certain events so transformative that we mark their anniversaries as a way of measuring the change they’ve wrought on us. The near-assassination of Trump is one of these.
We know that the 21-year-old sniper Thomas Crooks, a zitty and cerebral loner from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, brought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the roof of a warehouse 180 yards away and fired eight shots at Trump, hitting three bystanders and killing the 50-year-old fireman Corey Comperatore. But there is still no consensus about the larger meaning of what happened at Butler.
Certainly, the attack shaped the election. It changed the moral climate. In the spring of 2024, four criminal prosecutions dating to Trump’s first term approached resolution almost simultaneously. They had been strung along by Democratic-party prosecutors to fall just then, in election season, for maximum dissuasive effect. Oddly, the New York case in which Trump’s opponents prevailed was the weakest and most convoluted of them. Trump was now a “convicted felon”. But an argument persisted on the campaign trail that summer over whether Trump was being righteously held to account for his own corruption, or persecuted by adversaries who were corrupt themselves. The bullet fired at Trump settled that controversy. Not in any logical way, of course. But in an emotional way it validated the notion that “they” — meaning something in society and the spirit of the times — were out to destroy Trump.
It thus reinforced a shift that has been evident in American politics for quite some time. Voters used to respond to rational appeals based on policy differences. Now they prefer emotional appeals based on group allegiances. Pundits usually point out this change only to deplore the new system’s superficiality. But it’s not that simple. The “policy debates” in the old system were often phoney. Having conducted them, the political parties went off and did what they wanted anyway. Voting publics prefer the new, populist style because it actually gives them more information. Conservative policy wonks used statistics to deplore mass immigration, but then did nothing. Trump blustered and burbled — but then acted.
Donald Trump raising his fist, spitting out the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as blood streams down his face from a bullet wound in his ear — it is the sort of image that used to be called iconic back before that word degenerated into a synonym for famous. The attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, a year ago this weekend was the great symbolic moment of his 2024 presidential victory. There are certain events so transformative that we mark their anniversaries as a way of measuring the change they’ve wrought on us. The near-assassination of Trump is one of these.
We know that the 21-year-old sniper Thomas Crooks, a zitty and cerebral loner from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, brought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the roof of a warehouse 180 yards away and fired eight shots at Trump, hitting three bystanders and killing the 50-year-old fireman Corey Comperatore. But there is still no consensus about the larger meaning of what happened at Butler.
Certainly, the attack shaped the election. It changed the moral climate. In the spring of 2024, four criminal prosecutions dating to Trump’s first term approached resolution almost simultaneously. They had been strung along by Democratic-party prosecutors to fall just then, in election season, for maximum dissuasive effect. Oddly, the New York case in which Trump’s opponents prevailed was the weakest and most convoluted of them. Trump was now a “convicted felon”. But an argument persisted on the campaign trail that summer over whether Trump was being righteously held to account for his own corruption, or persecuted by adversaries who were corrupt themselves. The bullet fired at Trump settled that controversy. Not in any logical way, of course. But in an emotional way it validated the notion that “they” — meaning something in society and the spirit of the times — were out to destroy Trump.
It thus reinforced a shift that has been evident in American politics for quite some time. Voters used to respond to rational appeals based on policy differences. Now they prefer emotional appeals based on group allegiances. Pundits usually point out this change only to deplore the new system’s superficiality. But it’s not that simple. The “policy debates” in the old system were often phoney. Having conducted them, the political parties went off and did what they wanted anyway. Voting publics prefer the new populist style because it actually gives them more information. Conservative policy wonks used statistics to deplore mass immigration, but then did nothing. Trump blustered and burbled — but then acted.
The striking thing about Trump’s behaviour on 13 July 2024 was that it was excellent, and it was excellent in a way that was unreflective and spontaneous. Everything about it was at odds with the American postwar conception of leadership. In a culture where equality of opportunity is everything, the public came to believe there was something reprehensible about the idea that anyone has any special aptitude for anything. We’re not living in a democracy, they felt, unless anyone can go out and become a leader, through hard work or a degree-granting course. Nothing could be more repugnant than the notion that leadership is something you either have or you don’t. And yet here was Trump, in a moment of disruption, behaving like a born leader.
“The most striking thing about Trump’s behaviour on 13 July 2024, was that it was excellent.”
The effect was electric. Within minutes of Trump’s being rushed offstage, Elon Musk stunned the country by endorsing him. “We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs,” Musk would later say, recalling the long decline of Joe Biden. “And another president who was fist-pumping after getting shot.” It is often forgotten that Biden’s rambling, mumbling, senescent performance in a June debate did not immediately end his candidacy. It was the shooting that did it. Biden was still hanging on at this point. It was only after Trump’s demonstration of relative vitality that Biden’s withdrawal became inevitable. He ended his candidacy the following weekend.
But the event was about more than vitality. “On a personal note,” Mark Zuckerberg said that week, “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air, with the American flag, is one of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life. At some level, as an American, it’s hard not to get emotional about that spirit.” Trump was doing something archetypal: the pose in which many photographers caught him that day was almost exactly the one you will see in Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, the great symbol of revolutionary republican patriotism that hangs in the Louvre: the raised right hand. The flag. The rallying of wounded followers. Trump was not just being brave or strong. He was, without meaning to, summoning Americans to feelings buried so deep that they had forgotten they had them. It was a powerful irruption into politics of reality, and even of religion.
Trump himself, though not conspicuously conversant in the language of faith, could see this. Seconds before the shooting, he had been excoriating Joe Biden as “the worst president in the history of our country”, and had planned to continue in that vein when he spoke at the Republican National Convention, due to convene two days later. That changed. “It went from the world’s most vicious speech,” Trump informed Senator Lindsey Graham the following day, “to ‘Let’s bring the country together’. May not be as exciting, but there it is.”
When he returned to Butler for a campaign rally three months later, on the eve of the election, Trump credited “the Hand of Providence and the Grace of God” for having brought him through the ordeal. Increasingly, he discussed the incident as a homespun and prayerful old lady might, dwelling on fateful coincidences: What made him turn his head to look at a graph behind him on the stage? What made him decide to ask that the graph be shown earlier in the speech rather than later, as he usually did? Whether we think of this as sincere religious reflection or electoral pandering, Trump was reacting as most reasonable people would after such a trauma — groping towards a language through which to understand how contingent, how out of human control everything that happens to us is, a quest that, even if it doesn’t lead one to belief in God, can teach one humility. In theory, at least.
Politicians of both parties sensed that something special had happened, that the voting public had come to feel a new kind of connection with their leaders. American officeholders have, in the past year, striven to place themselves in similar filmable situations in which the politician appears to be battling for the people, not metaphorically but physically, thwarted by evildoers while pushing indomitably against them. Fight, fight, fight. It is probably to the Butler assassination attempt that we owe a new sort of campaign stunt, the ideological tableau vivant. At a Los Angeles press conference held by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem in early June, California Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, moved along an aisle towards the podium and, when he got too close, was stopped, expelled from the room by security agents and handcuffed, as any American would have been. His office then circulated the video. A few days later, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander staged a similar disruption, clinging to a migrant being removed by customs officials and demanding that they “show me the judicial warrant”, even though, as The New York Times noted, warrants are not needed for arrests made inside courtrooms.
If Republicans, for now, appear to be better than Democrats at this kind of myth-making, half a century of government by experts is probably responsible. Republicans have a fair claim to represent the uncredentialed masses who were not at the table when the rules were drafted. Democrats are inclined to work the regulations and technicalities, never the most mythopoeic part of any constitutional order.
What the Trump shooting has not yet yielded up, one year on, is a consensus interpretation. Feelings about the event have tended to skew according to feelings about Trump himself. In testimony almost two weeks after the incident, FBI director Christopher Wray, a longtime Trump nemesis, cast doubt on the idea that Trump had been hit with a bullet at all. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray said. He resigned in January as Trump took office. At Butler, Sean Curran was one of the Secret Service agents who rushed to Trump’s aid. He can be seen in sunglasses protecting the candidate’s left side while Trump pumps his free (right) hand. In January, Trump named Curran head of the Secret Service.
A similar division besets the public at large. For Trump supporters, certain details have given rise to suspicions of conspiracy: the grounding of the Secret Service’s drones that day in Butler, the speed with which the suspect Crooks was cremated (“faster than most household pets”, in the opinion of Trump’s son Eric), the paucity of information about Crooks’s internet browsing habits (although we do know that he queried before the rally: “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?”). But the cloudier the circumstances surrounding the shooting, the more miraculous Trump’s emergence from them. Trump’s detractors are only beginning to assimilate the unquestionable virtues Trump showed at Butler into the unquestionable vices that mark his presidential style. A typical verdict is that of Peggy Noonan, the literary speechwriter in the administration of President George H.W. Bush back in the Eighties, who calls Trump “a fearless man with bad judgment”.
That is the state of Donald Trump’s reputation one year on from what is probably the most extraordinary thing he ever did. The shooting at Butler is hardening into legend — but only a partisan one. Becoming a national legend takes longer, and may not ever happen. When Delacroix painted his depiction of the July 1830 Revolution, half a century had passed since the French Revolution, half a century during which much of the country viewed it as an ordeal of destruction, gore and institutional collapse. He was painting for the first generation of Frenchmen to understand the Revolution, and revolutions more generally, as their common inheritance. Whether Trump gets that treatment from future generations will depend on how his own revolution fares. A year ago this weekend, he inspired his followers through his rage to endure, fight, and lift himself off a speaker’s platform in Butler, Pennsylvania. Future generations may be similarly moved, particularly if he can summon other virtues than these.
