If Trump loses, will this American carnage end? Don’t count on it

This week America’s unending conflict with itself unfolded on a leafy new battlefield, the fairways of Donald Trump’s golf course in Florida’s West Palm Beach. There, for the second time in little more than two months, a gunman sought to alter the course of this election, and of history, with bullets rather than the ballot. The former president has become both a victim of attacks on democracy and their promulgator. The injured party and the perp. The two-word tagline from his 2017 inaugural address seems perfectly to capture the zeitgeist: American carnage.

As so often in these manic moments, various American storylines collide. Gun violence is not just an everyday but an everywhere occurrence. Political violence is a through line reaching back to the country’s revolutionary origins. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, a statement which has been used to legitimise acts of political violence and been adopted as a far-right meme.

Down the centuries, this injunction has been taken seriously and literally. When in 1995 the domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh exploded a truck bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 fellow Americans, he wore a T-shirt with Jefferson’s words printed on the back.

In this latest assassination attempt, America’s role in the world was also in the mix. Evidently, Ryan Routh, the alleged would-be assassin, held a grievance against Trump because of the former president’s lack of support for Ukraine. Routh, a Trump voter in 2016, spent time in Ukraine after Russia’s most recent invasion, and tried to recruit foreign volunteers to fight on Kyiv’s behalf.

As ever, conspiratorialism reared up like that multi-headed hydra from Greek mythology which grew more heads after each attempt at decapitation. Did the Trump campaign choreograph it to stir sympathy for its candidate? Was this a deep state inside job to silence Trump?

The far-right activist Laura Loomer – who seems to have displaced congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as the prom queen of Trumplandia – posted a picture of Time magazine’s pre-assassination attempt cover. It depicted the former president in a golf cart stranded in a bunker, alongside the headline, “In Trouble?” On X, she asked: “Coincidence? Or co-ordination?”

Elon Musk, the demagogic tech bro who owns that platform, could not resist the urge to insert himself into this miasma. In between labelling the Albanese government “far-left fascists” for proposing legislation aimed at curbing misinformation spread by social media, he posted (and later deleted): “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”.

After the slaying of Martin Luther King in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy famously quoted the Greek poet, Aeschylus, as he sought to calm a combustible nation: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Musk acts more like an arsonist, Hephaestus, the God of fire.

In considering the larger meaning, you could even throw in the decline of trust in American institutions and government. Time was when the Secret Service was a symbol of US power, the length of presidential motorcades a measure of America’s might. Now, though, as in the Obama years – which saw a string of security breaches and boozy scandals – its reputation is tarnished. Though Routh did not have Trump in his line of sight, and never fired his weapon, he had been camped out in a wooded area near the course with his rifle for 12 hours.

West Palm Beach, of course, was not the only combat zone. To Springfield, Ohio, where this week the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, had to dispatch state troopers after a wave of at least 33 bomb threats against City Hall, schools and three hospitals. All this after Trump spread the false rumour, popularised by his running mate J.D. Vance, that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. This is how transmittable the Trump-fuelled infodemic has become. Virally, a political moment in the debate became a cultural moment online and a potentially murderous situation in real life.

Even the country’s most sacred military graveyard, Arlington National Cemetery, is no longer a demilitarised zone in this partisan fight. Last month, Trump staffers had an altercation with a cemetery official enforcing a federal law prohibiting its white marble headstones being used as a backdrop for election-related activities.

Nor should we forget this month’s school shooting in Winder, Georgia, where a 14-year-old wielding an AR15-style rifle killed two fellow pupils and two teachers. In any other stable country, the mass shooting at Apalachee High School would arouse weeks, if not months, of soul-searching. In modern-day America its nationwide impact barely lasts a couple of news cycles. Vance, with trademark hamfistedness, called the school shootings “a fact of life”.

My worry is that political violence will become like mass shootings: something to which America becomes inured. Ghastliness that becomes a fact of life. Even a shooting as horrific as the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, where 20 of the victims were aged six or seven, did not change the gun laws. Likewise, even an insurrection as horrifying as January 6 did not change the political culture. Instead, it made a Republican Party – already reshaped by the Tea Party movement and Trump’s rabble-rousing – even more radical and militant.

There’s another analogy with mass shootings. Polls regularly show there is almost two-thirds support for stricter gun controls, which is exactly the same proportion of Americans who told Pew Research last year they always or often feel exhausted by politics. That points to the existence of a sensible majority in America, which wants the mass shootings and hyper-partisanship to end. Yet amid all the fury, gunfire and police sirens, voices of moderation get drowned out. It’s not so much a silent majority, then, as an unheard majority.

The unrepresentative nature of America’s political institutions has always empowered a shrill minority. For the first half of the 20th century, segregationists in the malapportioned Senate – southern Democrats in the vanguard – repeatedly blocked civil-rights legislation. The Electoral College helped Trump win in 2016, despite his losing the popular vote. The Supreme Court, by overturning Roe v Wade, has allowed states to drastically limit reproductive rights despite polls showing near two-thirds support for abortion in all or most cases.

And yet those same counter-majoritarian mechanisms – the Senate, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court – act also as a safety valve. If the Democrats, the party of the cities, dominated them all, the country would become even more of a tinderbox. A broken system is preventing the United States from breaking apart. What better illustration is there for how America is presently stuck? The country struggles with its Constitution as presently framed, but can’t live without it.

With guns so closely enmeshed with politics, the fear is that a close election will become a disputed election. Polling stations, counting centres and the courts which might end up litigating the results could become violent flashpoints. This week the Associated Press reported that election officials in Georgia and California are installing panic buttons and bullet-proof glass at their premises. Threats of violence had already contributed to what AP called “an exodus of election officials across the country”. Pre-emptively, the Department of Homeland Security has designated January 6, 2025, the day Congress will certify the presidential election, as a “national security special event”.

Many voters, of course, will simply make a choice based primarily on economic self-interest, an emotionless decision. But what makes this election so dangerously climactic is that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump personify so many of America’s fundamental divides. The Black female daughter of immigrants who grew up in California’s Bay Area, territory associated with “woke” ’60s counter-culturalism, is pitted against an elderly white man who made his political name spouting racism, targeted at Barack Obama, and nativism, aimed at Mexicans. Harris’ pitch is “we’re not going back”, whereas Trump’s appeal is based on nostalgic nationalism. A Democrat is fighting a defamer of democracy.

These fundamental divides will remain whoever wins in November, a cycle so hard to break because so much history is unresolved – on race, immigration, guns and even the retelling of history itself. None of this means America is headed inexorably for civil war. Political violence, I suspect, will remain sporadic and containable. But nor should Australia and the world expect an outbreak of civil peace.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

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