EDITORIAL: Just the fact that Americans flooded social media with ‘civil war’ hashtags and conspiracy theories following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump goes to show how close the superpower came to imploding over the weekend. American politics has always been volatile, with four presidents killed, along with numerous candidates and lower office holders, not to mention the many that have been targeted and injured.
But given the way the wider political environment has been poisoned since the rise of Trump in 2016, some are wondering – despite the shock that a former and possibly future US president was almost gunned down in open daylight – if it is really surprising to see political violence creep up in American society.
The details only make the whole thing more bizarre. The shooter, a registered Republican, was only 20 years old, which would have made him around 12 when Trump became president. Surely, he could not have had the experience, knowledge and/or ability to properly understand or analyse the complexity of local and global politics that surrounds the US presidential election. Yet he took the extreme step of taking a shot at the man representing his own party, even though he must have known it was a suicide mission.
Also, that he was able to find a convenient spot, climb onto it, set himself up, get Trump in his crosshairs and fire off a few rounds before the secret service could notice him and respond is stoking those online conspiracy theories for good reason. Because, even when the service sprang into action, it didn’t exactly rush Trump to safety, rather it left him widely exposed, which would have been disastrous if there were more snipers.
There are also reports that a bunch of people noticed the would-be assassin, even alerted security, yet nothing was done till the shots were fired. A lot of this will no doubt be properly and thoroughly investigated, so it’s only a matter of time before we know all the necessary details.
Meantime, it is important for the American political elite to quickly sanitise this toxic election campaign. Trump has largely himself to blame for the degree of unprecedented polarisation in American society today, yet the Democrats, too, have not shied away from replying to his rhetoric in kind at any point on the way. And the result, quite naturally, is a sharp rise in social and political intolerance; to the point that misdirected people can easily exploit America’s ridiculously loose gun control laws to try and kill other people they do not like.
It’s now up to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to make sure that this make-or-break moment moves in the right direction for America and Americans. There’s no doubt that no other society encourages free speech and debate to the point that the US does. It’s natural for disagreements to emerge and tempers to flare in politics. But perhaps this moment will make America’s leading politicians realise that blindly targeting and brutally hammering on those differences and divisions might not be the best way to move forward in these fragile times.
The US presidential race is almost in its last lap. The two candidates must take the lead in reminding everybody that only the ballot, and never the bullet, defines this process.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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