Before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, during a rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, the last president to be shot was Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor and former governor of California. The attack, which took place in Washington on March 30, 1981, left three people injured, including Ronald Reagan himself. Shot in the chest, the 70-year-old president recovered quickly: he left the hospital after two weeks for the White House. In the process, his popularity rating, which had dropped significantly during the first two months of his term, rebounded very strongly. So much so that the journalist Ullmann wrote in L’Express, a few days after the tragedy: “What force or what insolent luck is supporting Ronald Reagan?”
Donald Trump is not president, but he was, and above all, he aspires to become one again on November 5. Biden’s rival is now a miracle. The killer, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a young American aged 20, was just a few millimeters away from fatally hitting the former New York real estate tycoon. If Donald Trump has never been a professional actor, he showed, once again to Butler, in the seconds following the tragedy, how much of a stage beast he was. Less than a minute after being hit, the former president gets up, his face bloodied, surrounded by Secret Service agents, dark glasses, black suits and white shirts, and, under the star-spangled banner of the United States, he raises his fist: his face does not reflect fear, but determination: “Fight”, he told his supporters, who responded by chanting “USA, USA” while he was quickly evacuated in an armored car.
Having escaped the courts, Donald Trump was already leading in the polls before the tragedy in Pennsylvania, ahead of Joe Biden by almost three points. He is now a miracle survivor of the stands, and there is no doubt that he will resume the political fight, with his legendary anger, but benefiting from a surge of national solidarity beyond the circle of his supporters. This same compassion that Ronald Reagan had known at the time after the attack, and which had made the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States, Democrat Tip O’Neill, say: “The president has become a hero. We cannot argue with a man as popular as he is.”
The path to a new presidency was already strewn with pitfalls for Joe Biden, even before Butler’s attack. Overtaken by his advanced age (81 years old), his gaffes, his memory loss, the President of the United States did not want to give up. In recent days, he and his camp had locked themselves in denial, refusing to listen to the growing number of voices around him demanding that he withdraw his candidacy. While the Republican convention, which opens this Monday for four days in Wisconsin, should offer Donald Trump a triumph, Joe Biden now finds himself cornered. Staying in office means offering the keys to the White House on a platter to the new hero of the Republican camp. Withdrawing means giving the Democrats a chance, however small, to win a new presidential term.