Assassination Attempt Blessing in Disguise for Trump?

At a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there was an assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump on Sunday. A gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed after hitting the former president in the ear. Tragically, a spectator was also killed in the shooting, and two others were critically injured. 

The incident can be seen as another symptom of the intensification of political violence in the US, which has seen an increasing trend in recent years, especially after the attack on the US Congress by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

It could be said that in fact, at this point in time and during his election campaign, Trump has been exposed to a notorious phenomenon that he himself promoted.

The incident also was followed by reactions among them were the US authorities' reactions; Joe Biden said that there is no place for this kind of violence in America; many of the present and former US authorities as well as foreign officials condemned the shooting incident.

Barak Obama wrote on his X account that there was absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy. Trump's son said on social media that the incident was a "terrorist" action.

A look at US history shows that the country's political leaders and social activists have always been the target of political violence in the country. The most brilliant cases perhaps are the assassination of the incumbent president John F. Kenedy in Dallas in November 1963, the assassination of the democrat presidential candidate Robert Kenedy in Los Angeles in June 1963, and the assassination of the African-American leader of the civil rights movement Martin Luther King in Tennessee in April 1968. So, in a country where the president, presidential candidate, and civil movement leader have been assassinated, the unsuccessful assassination of Donald Trump is not something unprecedented.

Furthermore, American society, especially after the incident of the attack on Congress in January 2021, has experienced an increasing trend of tensions and political violence, where the fire of political-ideological conflicts is fiercely flaming; where the two sides of the US 2024 presidential campaign use scathing words and accuse each other of destroying America. 

In such a condition, it is no surprise that a person with extremist ideology, either left or right, takes a gun and tries to assassinate an election candidate, especially in a society where getting a weapon is like taking candy from a baby.  

Now the Oval Office has Trump's exploitation of the assassination attempt to represent himself as a pitiful figure for winning the Americans' votes, especially at a time the American citizens are to select between either Biden or Trump.     

Democratic strategist David Axelrod says former President Trump will be greeted as a “martyr” by supporters when he attends next week's Republican National Convention (RNC) following Saturday's shooting at a campaign rally.