Former President Trump, blood coming from his ears, appeared to pump his fist and say “fight” three times while obscured by Secret Service agents, creating the most enduring image of his life built on it.
After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, Trump’s defiant attitude at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night demonstrated his instinctive understanding that visual displays of power will be a driving force for the rest of his presidential campaign.
“He never wavered for a second. I can’t believe he had the self-awareness and awareness to continue campaigning while he was being taken away,” said Joan Hoff, a history professor at Montana State University and former director of the Center for Presidential Studies in New York.
It’s too early to sum up the political impact of this moment, but it has already energized Trump’s base, and for some voters who don’t trust the former president, it could eclipse uglier images like his Jan. 6 speech inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol, his ambiguous response to the racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, or a number of events during and after his presidency that raised concerns about his fitness to serve.
2024 also set new records as one of the most unusual and unpredictable election seasons in recent history.
Trump won his party’s nomination in a landslide victory despite multiple indictments, an eventual conviction, two impeachments and attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
At 81, Biden is the oldest president ever to serve in the White House, and has resisted calls within his party to drop out of the race after his debate performances raised alarm bells and what some see as his own decline.
Trump is already leading in national polls and key battleground states, so a boost in his approval ratings could be crucial.
The modern convention, usually drama-free and prepackaged, will now take on new meaning. The Republican National Convention, which begins in Milwaukee on Monday, is likely to be dominated by the shooting. Within hours of the assassination attempt on Saturday that wounded Trump in the ear and killed the gunman and another person, his campaign announced that Trump would attend the nomination acceptance ceremony.
“The whole crowd will rise in unison, pump their fists and yell, ‘USA!'” predicted Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian and expert on the presidency. “He will assume the role of something of a folk hero and martyr, having survived a near-death ordeal.”
A different drama will likely play out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, scheduled to begin on August 19. If Biden decides to drop out of the race, Democrats would have to choose a successor, a process that has yet to be determined. If Biden continues to resist such a call, the party will likely try to show unity and convince voters that Biden can win reelection and serve another four years, despite polling figures that are not favorable for him.
While Trump was still on his way to the hospital, his supporters began turning images of him emerging from the scene of the shooting into heroic online memes, an extension of the strongman image he had begun to cultivate during his television appearances.
They also began to criticize Biden and other Democrats, who had warned that Trump was a danger to democracy, even though the shooter’s identity and motive were unknown. On Sunday morning, the FBI identified the gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican.
“Today was not just an isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who is a finalist for Trump’s running mate, wrote on the social media platform X on Saturday night. “The Biden campaign’s central argument is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric directly led to the assassination attempt on President Trump.”
One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, used his X account to promote the evidence-free theory that “Joe Biden gave the order,” one of many spreading unfounded so-called deep state conspiracy theories on social media.
Trump has long encouraged violence at his rallies and mocked former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who has been the victim of political attacks. But Democrats were not in a position to fight back immediately, given the public sympathy Trump was eliciting. Most lawmakers, including Nancy Pelosi, issued statements of prayer and concern.
Current House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, called on everyone to “stay quiet” on the “Today” show Sunday.
“If we are to move forward and maintain the free society that we all enjoy, we need leaders of all parties on both sides of the aisle to call for this and make sure it gets done,” he said.
David Gergen, who worked in the White House when President Reagan was shot in 1981, recalled the “outpouring of support” that transformed him into a “martyr.”
“There was a wave of sympathy for Reagan, and I think we’ll see that again this time,” he said.
Gergen, who served under four presidents from both parties over decades, believes sympathy for Trump could sway undecided voters and that “a significant number of voters will go further after seeing their president almost killed.” But the dramatic turn of events could also prompt Biden to “transform himself and his team.”
But even many of Trump’s harshest political critics worry that Biden, increasingly defined by his age, has little chance of overcoming the tenacity Trump showed in the face of the assassination attempt.
“The split-screen effect contrasts a man stumbling across the public stage with a man of a similar age who remains defiant in the face of gunfire,” said Steve Schmidt, a former political adviser to the late Republican Sen. John McCain and a fierce opponent of Trump. “For a presidential candidate, that contrast is intolerable.”