His reception matched the fear felt by his supporters two days earlier when he came within inches of death. Arriving with fanfare, a bandage on his ear, at the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Monday night, it was a combative Donald Trump with his fist raised who was greeted with long cheers from the audience. The same gesture as the one he made on Saturday, his face covered in blood, a few seconds after he escaped an assassination attempt at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and whose image, immediately passed into posterity, went around the world.
Despite the shockwave caused by this unspeakable attack, this symbol, too good to be ignored, was quickly used by the billionaire’s supporters to fuel a campaign built for months on the theme of Trump’s victimization and political persecution. “They tried to bankrupt him. They tried to slander him. They tried to imprison him. Now they tried to kill him, but God forbid, they’ll never succeed,” intoned, without specifying further to whom this “they” was referring, his former Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson, on Xless than two hours after the attack.
The storytelling of the martyr
Long accustomed to presenting himself as the victim of political, media and legal “harassment”, Donald Trump has in recent months continued to fuel a storytelling depicting himself in a perpetual struggle against the plots and other dirty tricks of a system seeking to oust him at all costs from the race for the White House. “They have launched one witch hunt after another to try to stop our movement and thwart the will of the American people,” he declared at the start of his campaign, in June 2023, on the sidelines of his legal troubles, before adding for his supporters: “At the end of the day, it’s not me they’re after. They’re after you – and I’m just blocking their path.”
“This assassination attempt is terrible, but we must admit that Trump could take advantage of it,” notes Françoise Coste, author of Reagan (Perrin) and a historian specializing in the Republican Party. It gives him the opportunity to feed the rhetoric he has been defending for years, according to which he is the enemy of the system and the establishment.” Donald Trump wasted no time. Reacting on Monday, July 15, to the cancellation of the entire federal procedure against him for withholding classified documents, the billionaire immediately called for the rejection of “ALL witch hunts”, namely the three other criminal proceedings against him. “The Democratic Justice Department coordinated ALL of these political attacks, which are a conspiracy to interfere in the elections against Joe Biden’s political opponent, ME,” he added.
Messianic posture
Two days earlier, just after the attack, many Republican officials had rushed to accuse Democrats of having prepared the ground for this assassination attempt through their criticism of the former president. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump,” denounced, the same day, Ohio Senator JD Vance, chosen Monday to be his vice president in the event of victory.
Others have not hesitated to fan the flames of conspiracy theories – even though at this stage, the investigation has not demonstrated that Thomas Crooks, the author of the shots, was a fervent supporter of Joe Biden. “I have a lot of questions about how this 20-year-old young man almost managed to assassinate President Trump all by himself. It suggests something much more sinister and bigger,” denounced on X Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accusing Democrats of “fantasizing out loud about assassinating Trump for years.”
Taking advantage of his new aura of miracle worker, the candidate for the White House is in any case already sketching out a quasi-messianic posture, after having declared the day after the attack that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” A rhetoric widely shared in his entourage. The day before, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump had published on X an image of Jesus, his hands on the billionaire’s shoulders. “This fuels his providentialist narrative intended to seduce evangelicals,” points out Lauric Henneton, lecturer at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin, a specialist in American politics. “It’s always good to take, even if they are already largely won over to his cause.” Could he take advantage of this to toughen up his program even more? “He would be better off gaining credibility and playing the appeasement game in order to further seduce the electorate located at the center of the political spectrum. Playing the firebrand will only speak to his base, which is already won over to him,” continues Lauric Henneton.
In either case, the difficulty now for his Democratic opponents is to manage to reconcile the continuation of the campaign and the denunciation of the attack against Trump. “After having condemned the violence and expressed their support for Donald Trump, it will be difficult for them to follow up by saying that he is a future dictator and that we should definitely not vote for him, underlines Françoise Coste. There is a contraction between these two discourses which are, de facto, difficult to reconcile.” During an interview on Monday on NBC, Joe Biden had no choice but to make his mea culpa, acknowledging that he had made a “mistake” when he called for “targeting” his opponent on July 8 during a dinner with donors. By surviving the attack, Donald Trump may have found his best totem of immunity.
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