Opinion
Why attack on Trump is no watershed moment for America
Nick Bryant
Journalist and author“The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” So said US President Joe Biden in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on his rival Donald Trump, a statement that spoke not so much of the president’s cognitive decline but rather America’s historical amnesia and aversion to confronting its murderous past.
Donald Trump is helped off the stage after the assassination attempt on Saturday.Credit: AP
Political violence is a core strand of the national story. It is as American as apple pie. What we witnessed on Saturday evening, when the shots rang out in Pennsylvania, was not some freak event. Deadly violence has been a recurring feature of presidential politics.
Most high school students know that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated just five days after the end of the Civil War. But 16 years later, James Garfield became the second president to be killed by a gunman after he was shot twice at a railway station in Washington and died 11 weeks later. In 1901, William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York. Then, in Dallas on November 22, 1963, came the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a day of infamy often mistakenly and mythically portrayed as the moment America lost its innocence.
Less well known are the failed assassination attempts. Andrew Jackson, the populist former general whom Trump regards as his presidential soulmate, was targeted by a gunman during a visit to Capitol Hill in 1835. Only the 50 pages of a speech he was due to deliver saved the life of the former president Theodore Roosevelt, when a gunman shot him in the chest as he campaigned in 1912 for a return to the White House. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, shortly before his inauguration in 1933, came close to being gunned down in Miami when an attacker fired five rounds from his handgun. Harry Truman narrowly escaped death in 1950, when two pro-independence Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill him just yards from the White House.
After the Kennedy assassinations, then-president Lyndon Johnson appointed a panel of scholars to explore why America was plagued by so much political violence.Credit: AP
Richard Nixon was the target in 1972, when an army veteran attempted to hijack a plane at Baltimore Airport with the intention of flying it into the White House. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001 terror attacks, US intelligence services were criticised for their lack of imagination in failing to anticipate the weaponisation of commercial aircraft. What they were truly guilty of, however, was a fatal lapse of memory.
Within a 17-day period in 1975, president Gerald Ford survived two separate attempts on his life. In both instances, the would-be assassins were women. In his first year as president, Ronald Reagan skirted death as he exited a hotel in Washington.
Post-mortems into assassination attempts tend to focus on the psychiatric profiles of the assailants, and to lump them together as deranged lone wolves.
Roosevelt’s would-be assassin claimed to be acting on the orders of the ghost of William McKinley. John Hinckley jnr, who tried to kill Reagan, had an unhealthy fixation with the actor Jodie Foster. By focusing on the psychiatric state of the assassins, however, we have not always delved sufficiently deeply into the psyche of the nation.
After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, there was an attempt to do just that. The murders of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had made the ’60s a particularly murderous decade.
President Lyndon Johnson wanted to explore why America was plagued by so much political violence. The panel of scholars he appointed to undertake this quest for understanding concluded racism was a primary cause. So, too, the “frontier experience” of suppressing Native Americans and Mexicans, which created a tradition of vigilante justice.
The manner of America’s founding, through glorious revolution, also made it prone to violence. But memory loss added to the problem. Like all nations, their report concluded, the US suffered from “a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection that masks unpleasant traumas of the past, but Americans have probably magnified this process of selective recollection, owing to a historic vision of ourselves as a latter-day chosen people, a new Jerusalem”.
Put another way, a positive sense of American exceptionalism blinded it to the negative side of American exceptionalism, and specifically a populace of “rather bloody-minded people in both action and reaction”. One upside of the turmoil of the 1960s, the panel reckoned, was “maybe to force a harder and more candid look at our past”. Yet the political violence continued, and so, too, the historical forgetfulness.
This, then, is not a watershed moment for America but a continuum. If you were to select virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find the same poisonous ingredients that produced such a toxic brew on the days that Kennedy and Lincoln were assassinated.
They came violently to the surface on January 6, 2021, with the storming of the US Capitol, and again on Saturday evening, with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
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