The violence that has marked the political history of the United States contrasts with the pride of a people who have been changing heads of government for more than two centuries in peaceful processes, without wars or coups d’état. “Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile men, from Rome and Athens have tried to make this particular transfer of power work effectively; no people have done it more successfully, or for longer, than the Americans,” wrote journalist Theodore White in The making of a presidenta fabulous chronicle of the 1960 elections, won by John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated three years later.
In January 2016, at a primary rally in Iowa, Donald Trump told the crowd that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York, shoot someone, and still not lose votes. That boast, intended to highlight the huge support of his Republican supporters, would be remembered for years. When he said it, in the midst of an already notoriously tense campaign, many journalists commented that the opposite seemed more likely. In a country rife with privately owned guns (about 120 for every 100 citizens), prone to spawning lone wolves, and with a long history of attacks on political leaders, the powder keg of politics generates very specific fears.
The threat of an attack like the one Trump suffered last Saturday in Pennsylvania was always there, and it cannot be said that violence had not appeared until now. On the morning of June 14, 2017, with the New York magnate barely six months in power, a 66-year-old man named James T. Hodgkinson showed up at a baseball field in Alexandria (Virginia) where some Republican congressmen were training and started shooting at them, leaving five wounded before dying shot down. I remember, barely an hour after the events, the atmosphere in that boring and friendly city, with rows of houses with white fences and basketball hoops, 20 minutes from Washington. Nobody seemed too surprised by anything.
The assault on the Capitol in January 2021 was a bloodbath avoided by the cool-headedness of a police force that was widely criticized for its lack of planning but minimized the number of casualties. It had been a bloody campaign. A few months earlier, in October, the FBI had arrested 13 men accused of terrorism, six of whom were accused of trying to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, in protest against her restrictive policies against Covid. The ringleader, Adam Fox, worked in a vacuum cleaner store in Grand Rapids whose basement had served as a base of operations. I was there two days after the arrests. The owner, Brian Titus, was devastated. He had known Fox since he was a child and had let him live in the store for a while, but he began to suspect that something was wrong. “He started buying too many weapons, they were coming here, and I told him that I would prefer that he move. Owning weapons is legal, belonging to a militia is also legal, but I was not sure if he would be able to do it.” “What they wanted to do, that’s not legal,” he told me.
The motives of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspect in the attack, are not yet known. He was 20 years old and was a registered Republican voter, although he had made a donation to a progressive political action committee, and, most crucially, he had access to the rifle most commonly used in mass shootings in the United States: an AR-15.
The attack on Trump comes at a time when the risk of civil war has become the stuff of intellectual debate, when geographic polarization (whereby supporters of a party tend to concentrate in the same areas) has reached its highest levels in more than 150 years and when the population remains armed to the teeth. In the United States, if one speaks of a powder keg in politics, it may not be metaphorical.
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