Another assassination attempt against Donald Trump was foiled by the Secret Service on Sunday, September 15, while the former president was playing golf in West Palm Beach, Florida, not far from his Mar-a-Lago residence. Le Monde's former Washington correspondent, Gilles Paris, answered readers' questions following the event.
Thank you for your question. There is no chance in the long term that access to semi-automatic weapons will be called into question. That would require an agreement between the two major parties in Congress, and the Republican Party's stiffening stance on the firearms issue makes that unthinkable.
Nothing had happened after the mass killing in Las Vegas in October 2017, in which a man killed 59 concert-goers from his hotel room before committing suicide.
And it's not just about Congress. In June, the Supreme Court overturned a ban on an inexpensive device [bump stocks] that turns a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic, ruling that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), a federal agency, had exceeded its powers. The stalemate is, therefore, complete.
Gun violence is high in the US, that's a fact, exacerbated by the number of guns in circulation, a real epidemic that is spreading even to countries close to the US. Nevertheless, for years now, we have been witnessing a worrying rise in the acceptance of violence in politics – a violence that Donald Trump has constantly fueled.
It's worth remembering that, back in 2016, he could say of his presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton: "If she gets to pick her judges, there's nothing you guys can do. Although, with the Second Amendment [which sanctuaries access to guns] – maybe there's a solution, I don't know." By playing on the unspoken, on what is suggested, on what is implied, Donald Trump has fueled incendiary rhetoric that notably led to the assault on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.
Polls continue to show that a growing minority of Republicans consider violence to be an acceptable response to the situation facing the United States; they are now joined by a much smaller but real minority of Democrats who are viscerally hostile to the former businessman, as demonstrated by the foiled attempted attack on him on September 15.
Donald Trump has taken control of the Republican Party by relying on a very loyal and mobilized minority that always votes in the primaries. Republican executives have accepted the total rewriting of their party's policy platform and the deterioration of its values in order to retain their positions.
We saw this just a few weeks after January 6, 2021, when, after condemning the ex-president's behavior during these dramatic events, the Republican head of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, went to Canossa at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Florida residence, to beg for his support, even as rioters erected a gallows for Vice President Mike Pence, a perfect example of conservatism since thrown to the winds. The latter subsequently broke with his former mentor at the cost of his political marginalization.
We have to guard against our own cognitive dissonance when it comes to Donald Trump, who, from this side of the Atlantic, can seem like a complete anomaly. On the contrary, he has taken the measure of a profound American anxiety.
And it is the total sum of the wanders of the "war on terror" after September 11, which resulted in the loss of thousands of lives and of colossal sums of money; and the financial crisis of 2008, which both reinforced distrust toward the elites, whatever their political color, and the demographic prospect of the end of the White majority. This explains Donald Trump's protectionist stance, his obsession with immigration and the nostalgia expressed in his slogan "Make America Great Again."
In a country as deeply divided as the United States, and given the repulsive effect Donald Trump has on a large number of voters, this impact is difficult to measure. Fortunately, this was only an assassination attempt, foiled by the vigilance of a member of the Secret Service. Unlike the attack in Pennsylvania in July, which led to an extraordinary reaction from the former president, immortalized by the press photographers accompanying him, Trump was not shot on Sunday.
However, he can be expected to use this new attempt to boost his troops, as he did during the September 10 debate, blaming the Democrats for the July attack when no one has been able to shed light on the motives of the shooter killed by the Secret Service. Donald Trump's detractors will note that in the morning he had published a message on his social network stating his "hatred" for singer Taylor Swift in retaliation to her support for Democrat Kamala Harris. A message that sums up the Trump paradox: both victim and arsonist.
I invite you to rely on the facts that allow us to rule out, at this time, any convoluted explanation: the course of the attempted attack, the intervention of the Secret Service, the arrest of the presumed shooter as well as his rather particular and well-documented profile.
Thank you for your testimony. I would be careful not to claim a single, exclusive, explanation for the Trump phenomenon, and I readily admit to looking at it with a European eye, even though the seven years I spent in the United States have enriched it. It's a fact that the level of education is a powerful factor, in this case the absence of diplomas, in explaining the vote in favor of Donald Trump. But it's one criterion among others, including those I mentioned above, which are more psychological than sociological.
We can only hope that this scenario never arises! The US Constitution is silent on the subject since it only envisages cases arising after the presidential election (the office then falls to the vice president elected on that occasion).
In any case, now that the nominating convention has been held and there is no time to restart a primary process, it would be up to the Republican National Committee, the highest Republican body, to nominate a candidate; a process in which the other name on the "ticket" validated during the nominating convention, in this case JD Vance, would obviously start from a position of strength.
In the case of the Democrats, after Joe Biden's withdrawal, we saw that the party was able to avoid a new primary, which would have been impossible to hold before the Democratic "ticket" had to be registered in the states for the presidential election.