Former President Trump was blanketed by Secret Service agents, blood on his ear, when he raised his fist and appeared to say “fight” three times, creating what is likely to become the most enduring image of a life that has been built on them.
The defiant gesture during his Saturday night rally in Pennsylvania, after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, showed Trump’s instinctual understanding that a visual show of strength is likely to fuel the rest of his presidential campaign.
“He didn’t miss a beat. I can’t believe he had such self-awareness and consciousness to continue to campaign while he’s being hauled off,” said Joan Hoff, a Montana State University history professor and former director of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in New York.
It’s too early to calculate the full political impact of the moment. But it is already energizing Trump’s base and, for some voters not sold on the former president, could overtake uglier images like his Jan. 6 speech that whipped up supporters who stormed the Capitol, his ambivalent response to the race-based violence in Charlottesville, Va., or any number of events during and after his presidency that have prompted concerns about his fitness for office.
It also carved another mark on 2024 as one of the most unusual and unpredictable campaign seasons in recent history.
Trump, despite multiple indictments, an eventual conviction, two impeachments and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, ran away with his party’s nominating contest.
President Biden, the oldest president in history at 81, is pushing back against calls in his party to drop out of the race after a debate performance that set off alarm bells, and which some see as his decline.
Trump is already leading in national polls and in key battleground states. So any boost could be crucial.
Party conventions, usually drama-free and prepackaged in the modern era, will now take on new significance. The Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee, is likely to be dominated by the shooting. The campaign announced within hours of Saturday’s assassination attempt — which wounded Trump’s ear and left the shooter and one other person dead — that Trump would be in attendance to accept the nomination.
“The whole crowd will rise in unity and shout ‘USA!’ with their fists up,” predicted Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian and expert on the presidency. “He will be assuming a role like a folk hero or a martyr because he survived a near-death ordeal.”
The Democratic convention in Chicago, scheduled to begin Aug. 19, promises a different sort of drama. If Biden decides to step out of the race, Democrats will have to pick a replacement in a process that has still not been defined. If Biden continues to resist such calls, the party will try to show unity and convince voters that Biden is capable of winning reelection, despite daunting polls, and performing the job for another four years.
Trump was still en route to the hospital when supporters began turning images of the former president emerging from the shooting into heroic online memes, extensions of the strongman persona that he began cultivating during his television career.
They also began blaming Biden and other Democrats who warned that Trump is a danger to democracy, even when the shooter’s identity and motives were unknown. Sunday morning, the FBI identified him as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who is on the short list to be Trump’s running mate, wrote on the X social media platform on Saturday night. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, was the author of the evidence-free theory that “Joe Biden sent the orders” on his X account, one of many to promote unfounded so-called deep-state conspiracies on social media.
Trump has long encouraged violence at his rallies and mocked Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), when he was the victim of a political attack. But Democrats were not in a position to fight back immediately, given the public sympathy Trump is generating. Most, including Nancy Pelosi, released statements of prayer and concern.
The current House speaker, Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana, called on everyone to “turn the rhetoric down” on the “Today” show Sunday.
“We need leaders of all parties, on both sides, to call that out and make sure that happens so that we can go forward and maintain our free society that we all are blessed to have,” he said.
David Gergen, who served in the Reagan White House when the president was shot in 1981, recalled “the outpouring of support” as he was transformed into “a martyr.”
“There was just a wave of sympathy for Reagan and I think you’re going to see that this time,” he said.
Gergen, who served four presidents in both parties for decades, believes sympathy for Trump could sway undecided voters and that “a significant number will go further — seeing their president nearly murdered.” But the dramatic event could also stir Biden “to transform himself and his team.”
But even many of Trump’s harshest political critics fear Biden, who is now increasingly defined by his age, will have little hope of overcoming Trump’s show of resiliency in the face of an attempt on his life.
“The split-screen effect is of one man tripping on public stages versus another man of approximately the same age who’s defiant in the face of a shooting,” said Steve Schmidt, a former top political aide to the late Republican Sen. John McCain who has campaigned hard against Trump. “That type of contrast is not survivable for a presidential candidate.”