Imagine if the would-be murderer succeeded in taking out the Republican candidate. What sort of chaos would that have triggered?
If you say “Fort Sumter,” most Americans would recognize the place where their Civil War began in 1861. When that war was over four years later, between 752,000 and 851,000 soldiers were dead (not counting civilians), the equivalent of 2% of the US population on the eve of the war. If not for the Civil War and its role in it, Fort Sumter would be one quaint historical monument among many others, but it would hardly have the name recognition it now has.
The small town of Butler, a rural county seat in the state of Pennsylvania with less than 14,000 inhabitants, may just have missed its chance to acquire a similar dark fame. Because it was during a campaign rally on the grounds of the Butler Farm Show – basically, an agriculture-themed amusement park – that former and most likely future American president Donald Trump escaped death by, quite literally, a hair’s breadth: One of several bullets fired by would-be presidential assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks tore through Trump’s right ear. Others, tragically, severely injured and, in one case, killed members of the audience.
Crooks, who was killed by security forces, used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a powerful and, in the US, easily available weapon that in more reasonably administered countries would be off-limits to private individuals. He also got astonishingly close, shooting from the roof of a building a mere 120 to 150 meters away from where Trump was speaking on a raised stage.
A member of the audience has claimed that, minutes before the shooting, he alerted police about a man climbing on a roof with a rifle and that, nonetheless, they failed to take action quickly enough. Such statements, especially if they turn out to be true (there seems no reason to doubt them), will fuel so-called “conspiracy theories,” that is conjectures about some sort of official collusion in the attack. Full disclosure: My personal guess as to how Crooks could get so close? Sheer cack-handed incompetence, as mainstream US media are admitting. But quite a few Americans, in particular among Trump supporters but not only, are bound to consider that explanation naïve.
That brings us to the fact that it was not only Trump who had a very lucky escape in Butler. It is the whole of the US that has also gotten away much more lightly than might have been the case. Imagine, for a moment, a plausible counter-factual: Given by how little – literally just millimeters – Crooks failed to land a lethal shot to the head, what would America look like today if Trump had not survived?
Initially, it is fair to assume, there would be a state of deep, nationwide shock. Yet, while many Americans would be genuinely stunned and sincerely aggrieved, others – let’s be honest – would quietly and even not so quietly rejoice, namely those who have consistently demonized Trump as well as his supporters and voters, including, under the media hysteria known as “Russiagate,” as “traitors” selling out to big bad Russia. Put simply, if Trump were dead today, the victim of an assassination, America’s massive political, cultural, and moral polarization would not magically vanish in a great national moment of grief-driven kumbaya.
Instead, the intense tensions in US society would only get worse. At the core of that intensifying stand-off would be one simple and therefore powerful narrative: that Trump was killed because he was bound to win another term and that his killing was not the work of a lone shooter but the deep state and establishment, especially its liberal or – in party terms – Democratic wing. In that situation, it would not matter if such a narrative was true or not. What would matter, to disastrous effect, is that many Americans would believe it. And any mainstream media attempts to disprove, ridicule, or, in effect, criminalize that belief would not diminish but confirm it.
Where would such an escalation of polarization lead? Consider some recent, well-established findings. A major survey and study by a group of political scientists – pre-published in 2022 under the title “Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence” – has found that half of Americans agree to some extent, including 13.7% ”strongly or very strongly,” with the statement that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.”
The study also detected substantial minorities who openly admitted (the real numbers are bound to be higher) that they were ready to engage in political violence themselves to ”threaten or intimidate,” ”injure,” or even ”kill a person.” 18.5% of respondents believed it was ”at least somewhat likely that within the next few years” there would be ”a situation where they believed political violence was justified” and they would ”be armed with a gun.”
36% of respondents to the ”Views” study – 56% of Republicans and 22% of Democrats – agreed that ”the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”; and 18% found that ”because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
If a belief in a coming civil war – and a readiness to fight in it – are disturbingly popular, so is deep skepticism about the realities of the current political system. Almost 70%, ”with very similar results for Democrats and Republicans,” agreed that ”American democracy only serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful.” Frankly, who can blame them for being realistic?
Yet that is not all. The 2022 study also explored how far Americans endorse views associated with the anything-but-realistic ”QAnon” ideology, which is, of course, radically antithetical to the current political order: 22.7% agreed – 9% strongly or very strongly – that ”a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” are in control. 29.7% agreed – 10.1% strongly or very strongly – that ”a storm coming soon” will ”sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” 43.4% agreed – 19.3% strongly or very strongly – that the US is ”living in what the Bible calls ‘the end times.’” It is of particular importance regarding reactions to an attack on Trump that 32.1% believed that ”the 2020 election was stolen from” him and that ”Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.”
As a result, the 2022 study authors extrapolated that more than 50 million American adults ”consider violence to be at least sometimes justified in general to achieve political objectives” while ”more than 60 million could at least sometimes justify violence ‘to preserve an American way of life based on Western European traditions’ and nearly 20 million could justify violence to stop people who do not share their beliefs from voting.”
Six million Americans would be ”willing to damage property and between 4 and 5 million to threaten or intimidate someone, injure them, or kill them.” Between three and five million are ready ”to commit violence against others because they are representatives of social institutions: government officials, election officials, health officials, members of the military or police”; Three million to engage in ”politically motivated violence against others because of differences in race/ethnicity or religion.” Keep in mind, all the while, that these figures are based only on those uninhibited enough to let a pollster know about their readiness to commit what are after all crimes; these are undercounts by definition.
The View study authors concluded that there is a ”high level of support for violence, including lethal violence, to achieve political objectives” and ”the prospect of large-scale political violence in the near future is entirely plausible.” They also, it is true, pointed out that there are still large majorities who oppose political violence. But for a modern society, there can be no doubt that their findings point to an alarmingly big trend.
No counter-factual can replace reality as it actually unfolds. We will never know what exactly would have happened if Donald Trump had been murdered. But it would be complacent to discount the very real possibility that such an assassination, in a country as polarized, embittered, and awash in arms as the US, could have led to massive, armed riots, to secessionist tendencies gaining the upper hand in various regions, and even to a loss of control by a central government profoundly distrusted and even hated by many Americans.
Ultimately, such a murder could have played a trigger role even in a slide into civil war. Think that’s far-fetched? Just recall: In Europe in 1914, it was one prominent assassination as well that detonated a situation of tension and distrust into all-out and devastating war. When enough combustible material has been amassed by irresponsible elites and dysfunctional policies, the final spark initiating the conflagration can turn out to be surprisingly small. That rule holds inside countries as much as between them.
