Trump assassination drama: Is he unbeatable now?
Democrats have a solid case. But will anyone listen, and what should Joe Biden do?
The last few months of the 2024 presidential campaign were fraught well before a would-be assassin came close to killing Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally.
The former president survived, thank goodness, after a bullet struck the top of his right ear. His first public statement was to thank the Secret Service and other law enforcement “for their rapid response” and to “extend condolences” to others affected. Thank goodness for that as well. And also for his Sunday morning Truth Social post awash in love of country and thanks for everyone’s “thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable.”
These would be pro forma responses from almost any candidate or public official in America, but we are talking about Donald Trump—who mocked Paul Pelosi when he nearly died in a politically motivated hammer attack; who is not known for piety or biblical exhortations like “We will FEAR NOT,” and who raised money off President Joe Biden’s press conference Thursday with the headline “BIDEN IS A VEGETABLE!”
Ronald Reagan was changed by his brush with death by assassin, according to his daughter, Patti Davis. He believed he’d been spared “to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to try to reach some kind of agreement on nuclear weapons,” she wrote Sunday in the New York Times.
Will Trump emerge from this experience as a different person?
“This was the moment Trump became president” became a running joke during Trump’s actual presidency as occasional glimmers of presidential behavior came and went. The culmination, or final proof point, was the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack that Trump inspired, encouraged, watched on TV, and inflamed on social media—even as cops were assaulted and rioters made threats against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his own vice president, Mike Pence.
Trump went on to “stonewall” the transition process for Joe Biden and his team, and broke a 150-year-old tradition by skipping Biden’s inauguration. Instead he left town, taking with him dozens of secret, highly sensitive national security documents that he refused to return to the government, forcing the FBI to get a search warrant to locate and remove them.
So no, it seems unlikely that Trump will suddenly acquire consistent and permanent gravity, dignity, kindness or civility. And we can probably forget about love in his heart for his country—with its “horrible” cities, “rigged” elections, “witch hunt” prosecutions, “crooked” political rivals, and voters by the tens of millions who disagree with him.
There’s nothing else, however, that I’d feel comfortable predicting. History does indeed keep happening, so much of it and so continuously that, in a fantasy I gather is quite common these days, I often wish I were living in “precedented times”—even just for a month or two now and then.
It’s less than three weeks since Biden’s disastrous debate performance. I’ve written two Trump pieces since then, one about the multiple guardrail failures that allowed him to be on the debate stage, and the other an excavation of his reference to “Black jobs.” And I’ve written two about Biden. In one of them, I describe the Biden rollercoaster and why he should pass the baton to Kamala Harris. The other is a tough discussion of age, ageism and realism I wrote after blurting out to my husband, “Why is Joe Biden making us be so mean to him?”
That’s just the first of countless unanswerable questions.
Will the image of Trump, surrounded by Secret Service officers, his face bloody and his fist in the air, win him the presidential race? It will certainly ratchet up devotion among those already in his camp. But it might also increase and cement resolve among people who want to defeat him.
Will that end up increasing pressure on Biden to step aside for a younger candidate? Or give him a reprieve under the theory that he’s safe, familiar, and maybe what people need right now?
Will Trump’s narrow escape from death affect his selection of a running mate, and how much news will his choice make? Will the assassination attempt and investigations dominate the Republican convention starting Monday in Milwaukee? Will it drown out Democratic attempts to highlight the exceedingly unpopular Project 2025 plan to turn America into a Christian nationalist nation? Is this what “Fear Not”—which showed up today as the subject line of a Trump fundraising pitch—is all about?
I don’t know how the FBI investigation will evolve, or how Biden intends to play out his hand. He has been in the public eye as much as possible and is taking charge of communications at a time when, he says, unity is “the most elusive goal of all,” and the most important. He is also taking on the role of temperature-reducer. “We stand for an America, not of extremism and fury, but of decency and grace,” he said from the Oval Office tonight.
Are people perceiving Biden as reassuring? Is unity a realistic goal? Will he repeat the call he made last week in Michigan for a new national ban on assault-style weapons? Will Democrats get any attention at all while the GOP convention unfolds? Will all the drama wipe out any opening to highlight what, exactly, Trump and his party plan to actually do if they’re restored to power? Is the drama so riveting that the rest is noise?
I thought I’d seen everything since 1988, when I started covering presidential campaigns. But all of the above, and how or whether it will ultimately affect public opinion, is a mystery. So is the right course, the winning course, for Democrats.