Trump assassination attempt: Toxic polarisation of American politics is a threat to democracies everywhere

A legacy that outgoing US president Joe Biden would like to bequeath is his championing of democracy as a superior theoretical and political framework amid global challenges and his efforts to lead democracy’s struggle against increasing autocratic assertiveness around the world.

Biden, who has led multiple editions of Summit for Democracy “to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad” made supporting democracies worldwide a cornerstone of his foreign policy as part of an epic, overarching battle against the rise of autocratic geopolitical rivals such as China and Russia, coinciding with
democracy’s steady, global decay.

Sadly, incompetence has been a recurrent theme in Biden’s presidency. He has given an impression all through of being weak, ineffectual and lacking the strength and conviction to see through his plans due to a debilitating senility that was hidden during his campaigning for the job, defined his tenure and ultimately spelt his end.

Far from the legacy of leading a global democratic revival, Biden may go down in history as a president who oversaw a stunning decline in America’s status as a well-functioning democracy, and a leader who presided over a viscerally divided, volatile, polarized nation that believes in violent retribution against political rivals and presents a terrible advertisement for democracy.

It is not a mystery why America is touted as the normative example for democracy when India, the world’s largest, has a more robust framework and an unstinted record in a tough neighbourhood. India is not a superpower. As democratic norms erode in the US, there is a global fallout.

In fact, the decline of democracy and the rising appeal of autocratic systems could be traced at least partly to the chaotic and acrimonious example that America, the world’s sole superpower, sets before the world.

Aside from the fact that it presents China, the aspiring superpower, with a chance to magnify the travails of liberal democracy and hawk its communist authoritarian model as a superior system, what adds to the global concern over health of democracies is the possibility that American dysfunction may not remain restricted within its shores.

The very soft power that enables America to export its culture worldwide and allows its media to dominate global discourse, has made apparent to the world the virulent affliction that has spread through America’s body politic, raising fears of an impending civil war.

At the centre of it all is Donald Trump, the former president and a deeply polarising figure who has just survived yet another assassination attempt, the second in two months. America has a long history of presidential assassinations, and violence against presidents and candidates, in part due to a pervasive gun culture. Yet the two quick attempts on Trump’s life ahead of the presidential polls in November presents a theatre of the absurd.

In Pennsylvania last month, Trump cheated death by the proverbial skin of the teeth, or as it turned out, the skin of his right ear that was grazed by the sniper’s projectile as the former president unexpectedly turned his head to look at a chart during his rally. The randomness with which Trump dodged the bullet was about the same arbitrariness with which American dodged another civil war.

In Florida, we have been told suspect Ryan Routh hid behind bushes and shrubs at West Palm Beach for 12 hours, lying in wait with a semi-automatic rifle, magnifying scope and food, for a chance to get a shot at Trump when he enters the golf course. Even though the US Secret Service, charged with protecting the former president, claimed that Routh never had Trump in line of sight and never took a shot, yet the fact that an AK-47 toting 58-year-old gunman came so close to the Republican presidential candidate within two months of him being targeted by an assassin raises a number of intriguing questions.

The July 13 incident, when 20-year-old Trump rally shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim at Trump and killed a rallygoer instead before getting killed by sniper fire, was called the US Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades. The director was forced to step down.

Yet grave though it was, the circumstances behind the second attempt are more inexplicable and speaks of an even bigger failure since the agency was supposed to be on high alert. The acting chief of US Secret Service told the media that Trump’s visit to his golf course in West Palm Beach was not on his public schedule.

BBC quoted Ronald Rowe, as saying that “the former president was ‘not even really supposed to go there’, so agents had to put together a security plan at the last minute.” The question therefore arises that if even the Secret Service was unaware of Trump’s plan to play golf until the last minute, how did the gunman get wind of it? And if Routh was taking a chance, it sounds implausible that he lay in wait for 12 hours without any concrete information, and even more far-fetched that he went undetected for so long.

Since the suspect has been arrested, fair to say we haven’t heard the last of this intriguing story, but according to at least
one former FBI director, there can only be three possible answers. Chris Swecker, who retired from the Bureau in 2006, said “The biggest question to answer is: How did the would-be assassin know to be at that location at that time? There are only three possible answers: He guessed and got very lucky; he conducted surveillance on Trump and followed him to the golf course or he had inside information about Trump’s schedule… The last answer is scary and has implications that another person was involved.”

Interesting to note that the state of Florida, run by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, has announced its own criminal investigation into the incident that will run parallel to the federal probe. It speaks of a complete lack of trust in the federal structure of the American system and a barely concealed animosity across the ideological spectrum.

Even if we set aside the disturbing possibility that the Florida assassination attempt was an inside job, the state of American democracy looks dire. The 58-year-old Routh was a radicalised Trump hater who had a Harris-Biden sticker on his truck and donated exclusively to Democratic causes and candidates since 2019, reports New York Post.

Routh had voted for Trump in 2016 but since then developed a bilious hatred for the former president and seemed to have swallowed wholly the Democratic narrative that “democracy is on the ballot and we cannot lose,” which he posted in an tweet to Biden in April. Routh, who also developed a staunch activism for the Ukrainian cause, had a predilection for violence and in a self-published book in 2023 urged Iran to “assassinate Trump”, and described the former president as a “fool” and “buffoon” for both the January 6, 2021, riot and the “tremendous blunder” of leaving the Iran nuclear deal, reports Associated Press.

It paints the picture of a man who took as gospel the campaign rhetoric of Democrats, bought hook, line and sinker into the dehumanising political idiom and took Trump for an existential threat who must be eliminated. When political rivalry becomes indistinguishable from a call for violence or purging, it sets the stage for actual violence.

A recent survey by a group at the University of California – Davis, in the wake of the Pennsylvania shooting at Trump rally, finds that 25% of Americans who were part of the
survey believe violence is usually or always justified to advance a political objective. Scarily, this trend is
solidifying more among the younger generation of Americans.

A Carnegie paper on the polarization and political violence in in the US suggests that “American public feels affectively polarized largely because of misunderstandings about the other side (though the misunderstandings seem sensitive to actual ideological differences)… And the United States is polarizing much more rapidly than other Western democracies; partisans even more so.”

The paper, written by Rachel Kleinfield for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and published in September 2023, blames American media for driving the toxic divisiveness.

“America’s entire media system—not just social media—may be playing a role in both ideological and affective polarization. Highly polarizing cable news and talk radio shows are probably more to blame than social media, and all of their polarizing effects are likely
exacerbated because the United States lacks a single trusted media source or trusted local media organizations.” Not without reason. Violence
in rhetoric has not only been normalised in
cable news, liberal outlets that lean heavily towards the Democratic party, in a stunning inversion of reality have blamed Trump for being the target of assassination attempts.

Washington Post, for instance,
expressed fear right after the discovery of the Florida assassination attempt that it presents Trump with another opportunity of vilifying the Democrats. When the first impulse of a major publication following an attempted assassination on a former president is that the diabolical Trump will now get another shot at political exploitation, then it indicates a fearsome level of paranoia that has permeated every democratic institution.

In a similar vein, other major liberal publications such as New York Times or Foreign Affairs have sought to double down on incendiary characterisation of Trump, showcase him as a charlatan and his followers as opportunistic sub-humans unworthy of concern.

The fact that Trump blamed Kamala Harris or Biden’s rhetoric for the assassination attempt on him caused the Times
considerable consternation. Foreign Affairs, in a column evocatively titled, How to Prevent a Spiral of Political Violence in America, ends up justifying the assassination attempt of the 20-year-old sniper, Crooks, who took a shot at Trump. In the
magazine’s version of events, “Nothing in his (Crooks’) record suggests that he was driven by a hatred for Trump or for conservatives. In fact, his motive remains unclear. The only thing that is certain is that he came of age in a country in which prominent right-wing leaders increasingly call for violence. He inhabited a national culture that is becoming more accepting of political attacks. The party in which he was registered has become especially open to violent acts and threats.”

Simply unbelievable!

The fact that prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, instead of curbing their rhetoric have doubled down on
inflammatory remarks points to an unbridgeable gulf across the ideological spectrum.

In Unherd, Mary Harington calls this phenomenon ‘stochastic terrorism’, “when hostile rhetoric against an outgroup, originating with some leader or charismatic figure, is amplified by supporters in a way that dehumanises the target and — ultimately — legitimises spontaneous-seeming real-life violence against it.”

When a political opponent is painted as the very incarnation of evil, it is a tacit encouragement to legitimize violence to ensure elimination of the threat. This toxicity is becoming mainstream in American politics, and soon we may see democracies around the world following the American model. China won’t even have to light a matchstick. It can watch and enjoy from the sidelines the bonfire of democracy.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.