The Tribune

By MALCOLM STRACHAN

THE attempted assassination of Donald Trump overtook pretty much all other news this weekend.

The former President got up on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, as he campaigns to return to his former office – and a 20-year-old lying on a roof a few hundred feet away opened fire on him.

It seems Mr Trump was hit on the ear – he later posted on social media about how he “immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin”.

Secret Service agents piled on top of Mr Trump to protect him, while a sharpshooter fired back and killed Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be killer.

One member of the audience also died in the incident, while two others were critically injured.

At the time of writing, very little is publicly known about the shooter. He was a registered Republican – but that doesn’t mean much in the US system – and he’d given a few bucks to a political campaign run by the Democrats to encourage voting. Again, not a lot in that.

The shooting was swiftly condemned across the political spectrum – although a bunch of idiots took a violent attempt to kill a candidate and derail the political process as an opportunity to make jokes on social media.

International leaders were also quick to express their concerns. China President Xi Jinping “expressed condolences/sympathies to former President Trump”, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said that “political violence has no place in our democracies” and so on across the board. Again, at the time of writing, while other Caribbean nations have commented – Gaston Browne in Antigua and Barbuda for example decrying “all forms of violence against political leaders”, although The Bahamas seems to be slow off the mark. Nothing on the Office of the Prime Minister or Foreign Affairs Ministry social media by late Sunday morning.

While there is obviously shock and outrage over the shooting, attempts to assassinate US leaders are not unknown.

As far back as 1835, a man tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson – but both of his pistols misfired. In 2018, a man mailed pipe bombs to various leading Democrats but his attempts failed to harm his would-be victims. A number of Republicans hail Trump as their strongest leader since Ronald Reagan – who was shot in 1981, but survived.

Political violence is also far from exclusive to the US. We need only look towards the south, where Haiti President Jovenel Moise was murdered in his residence in Port-au-Prince in 2021 to see that. Last year, an Ecuador presidential candidate was shot dead at an election rally. Former Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down in 2022 by a killer with a homemade gun.

Each of these is of course unacceptable – and yet they occur with far too much frequency.

There will be much talk of how did we get here – but the regularity of such things shows that we have not just gotten here, we have been here for quite some time.

There is a quote that often circulates in the discussion about gun control, which says that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Well, in this case, a good guy with a gun – a federal agent – did indeed stop the bad guy with the gun – the would-be assassin. But not before the bad guy hit his target – and a slight change in aim or a moment’s difference in movement from his victim could have meant a very different outcome.

The US is the biggest military machine in the world, with more guns per head than any other nation – and the US Secret Service is the best equipped department to face those bad guys with guns. They are the tip of the spear. And even they couldn’t stop the bullets from being fired in the first place.

The good guy with a gun is a reaction, not a prevention.

We feel the effects of such availability of guns on our own streets. There are no factories making guns here in The Bahamas. They come in by plane. They come in by boat. Yet here we are with murder after murder taking place on our streets courtesy of weapons made elsewhere and delivered to the hands of our eager criminals.

There will also be talk about the nature of political rhetoric, and how it has escalated far out of control. There has been much discussion – and court cases too – of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and the rhetoric that fuelled it, but President Joe Biden is being criticised too after this incident over a quote that has circulated following his poor debate performance, in which he told donors that it was time to stop talking about the debate and to “put Trump in a bullseye”. Rhetorical, of course, but then someone went and did that exact thing.

Here in The Bahamas, a man was pulled before the courts after saying something deemed to be a death threat to the Prime Minister, and there are populists among us who say things to rouse the rabble that go too far as well.

For Mr Trump, the image of him with blood on his face, surrounded by Secret Service agents but pumping his fist defiantly and shouting “Fight!” will endure. It will go on posters. It will go on billboards. It will lead campaign flyers. It will be used in solicitations for campaign donations. In trying to shoot Mr Trump, the wannabe assassin has just enhanced his chances of becoming president again.

But for the rest of us, what do we learn from this? Do we learn it is too easy for someone to grab a gun and try to kill someone they hate? We already know that. Do we learn that stoking anger and hate can drive people over the edge? We knew that too.

This is utterly wrong, unconscionable no matter who the politician is and what we think of them.

But this is the consequence of where we are. Of what we have allowed. And of what we will continue to allow.