The Memo: Shocking attempt on Trump’s life pitches America into fresh turmoil

A febrile nation was pitched into new turmoil on Saturday.

The cause was an apparent assassination attempt against former President Trump.

The scene, at a rally in Butler, Pa., echoed around the world in an instant. It will be replayed for days, weeks and years to come. 

The images came in chaotic succession. First the sound of shots and Trump bundled to the ground by protective agents. Then, the former president rising with a clenched fist and blood around his right ear. Trump walked — apparently under his own power but with the knot of agents still tight around him — to waiting vehicles and was ferried away. 

The difference of just an inch or two might have protected Trump from a far worse tragedy.

In a social media post, he wrote that he had been “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear” and that he had “immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.”

Trump avoided the darkest fate of all. But one rally-goer, yet to be named, was killed. The presumed shooter, named by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks (20) of Bethel Park, Pa., is also dead. Two people are reported to have been injured.

The attack on Trump was condemned instantly by politicians of all ideological hues. 

President Biden appeared for a short, hastily convened event in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where he had planned to spend the weekend. 

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence,” Biden said. “It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country.”

Biden also said he had tried to contact Trump, only to learn his predecessor was with his doctors. A White House official said the president spoke with Trump later. Soon afterward, Biden returned to Washington.

There were condemnations from other senior Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and former President Obama.

The same was true on the Republican side, where former President Bush, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) were among the many voices condemning the attempt on Trump’s life.

Johnson called it a “horrific act of political violence” which “should be unanimously and forcefully condemned.”

But if there was near-unanimity in the condemnation of the act itself, there were also instant signs of a fraying around the edges.

Some Republicans hit out at Democrats for what they see as an unfair demonization of the former president — a dynamic that, they argue, created fertile ground for violence.

Meanwhile, left-of-center Americans believe, with just as much conviction, that it is Trump himself who has has been the prime mover in injecting a dangerous toxicity into the bloodstream of American public life.

Right now, there is much that remains unknown about the event itself, including the apparent shooter’s precise motivation.

There will, too, clearly be grave issues for the Secret Service to address. The bravery of the agents who flung themselves around Trump will not erase the bigger question of how a would-be assassin came so close to killing a former president at a public event in broad daylight.

The shocking event will of course have political ramifications.

Right now, the plan is for the Republican National Convention to go ahead as scheduled, opening in Milwaukee on Monday. 

But a convention that would have been expected to have glitz but little real news — beyond Trump’s choice of running mate and his own Thursday acceptance speech — will now inevitably be transformed.

Trump will be accorded a heroic status by those in attendance, who will be celebrating his literal survival, not just his political resilience.

The criticism that such an event would otherwise draw, from the media as well as from political opponents, will surely have a muted, and perhaps awkward, quality.

In terms of the raw electoral calculus, even so polarizing a figure as Trump can surely be expected to gain some level of increased support. Any “soft” Trump supporters will be reinforced in their allegiance now.

In a dark and strange irony, Biden could also be a political beneficiary of the shocking events of Saturday.

The president has been pilloried by many within his own party following his dismal debate performance in Atlanta on June 27. His hold on the Democratic nomination had grown exceedingly fragile.

But now, it seems sure that the national conversation will be dominated by calls for civility and unity — and by a measure of pure patriotism.

As a practical matter, it will be harder for Biden’s internal opponents to shove him aside in such an atmosphere.

Whether the attempt to kill Trump really does bring forth a more civil tone in American politics seems highly questionable. The perverse incentives that favor the outrageous and inflammatory did not disappear in the chaos at Butler.

There is more uncertainty ahead.

For now, it may be enough that the nation avoided a deeper, more convulsive trauma, by the tiniest of margins.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

This story was updated as new details became available.