Donald Trump was minutes into his stump speech under the blue skies and blazing sun of Butler, Pennsylvania, when a volley of gunshots was fired at the former president from a nearby rooftop, nearly killing him.
Within seconds, he was crouched on the ground behind his podium. But soon enough, bloodied and shaken, he was standing again, pumping his fist in defiance as he was rushed from the outdoor venue to a local hospital by the US Secret Service.
Saturday’s shooting, which killed one person attending the rally as well as the gunmen and left two others critically injured, marked a new moment in America’s dark history of political violence. It also brings another twist in this year’s White House race between Trump and Joe Biden.
It came just two days before the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin that begins on Monday, when Trump will be confirmed as his party’s presidential candidate, and after three weeks of turmoil on the Democratic side over Biden’s capacity to run for a second term.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, the political impact was not immediately clear — but Trump’s allies were casting him as the ultimate survivor. In their eyes, he was already a political martyr, having battled through dozens of criminal charges over the past two years.
But overcoming an assassination attempt triggered new expressions of devotion, admiration, and glorification of the former president among Republicans and others in the Maga orbit.
Trump is “unstoppable”, said Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, as he posted a montage of the former president to social media.
“The event has the potential to increase former president Trump’s support by highlighting his vigour, motivating his base, and eliciting sympathy,” Rob Casey, an analyst at Signum Global Advisors, a policy analysis group, wrote in a note on Saturday night.
Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican senator and contender to be Trump’s running mate pick, said “God protected” him. Bernie Moreno, a Republican US Senate candidate in Ohio, dubbed Trump an “American legend”. General Keith Kellogg, an outside aide on national security, said he had been “under fire many times” and it “revealed your character”.
“When the President stood up with blood streaming and fist pumped and said “fight”, it revealed his,” Kellogg wrote on X.
Shortly after news of the shooting circulated, Trump also gained the endorsement of the world’s richest man, and owner of X, Elon Musk. “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt,” he wrote in one of several posts about Trump.
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman also said he was now “formally” endorsing Trump. Betting markets on who will win the election have swung sharply in his favour, too. Ronald Reagan enjoyed a brief polling surge after he survived an assassination attempt in 1981.
But the shooting also broke a news cycle that had been very difficult for Biden, who has struggled to overcome a disastrous performance in last month’s debate against Trump, with around 20 Democratic lawmakers calling for him to quit the race in the past week.
“The incident is also likely to benefit President Biden by shifting some of the focus away from concerns around his age and acuity, removing pressure on him to leave the race, and potentially further entrenching him in his desire to see the campaign through,” Casey wrote.
Biden reacted to the shooting by condemning the violence in remarks from his home state of Delaware, where he was spending the weekend, as he tried to lower the political temperature.
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country,” he said in televised remarks. The US president later called Trump, and hurried back to the White House.
But Biden is trailing Trump in most national and battleground state polls, and his plans to ratchet up his attacks on his Republican rival during the convention were suddenly on ice. The president’s campaign said it was “working to pull down our television ads as quickly as possible”.
While Biden will be pausing or toning down his attacks on Trump, some Trump allies were not holding back as they blamed “the left”, the media, the Democratic party, and even Biden himself for the shooting in Pennsylvania, even before the identity or motive of the shooter had been established.
Several pointed to remarks the incumbent president made on a call with donors earlier in the week, when Biden reportedly said: “We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.”
JD Vance, the Ohio senator and another top contender to be Trump’s running mate, said in a statement on X: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Others tied what happened in Pennsylvania to Trump’s legal woes. The former president was convicted in New York earlier this year on 34 criminal charges, and is facing three other criminal trials, despite the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that he had partial immunity for prosecution for actions he took as president.
“First they sued him. Then they prosecuted him. Then they tried to take him off the ballot. The only thing more tragic than what just happened is that, if we’re being honest, it wasn’t totally a shock,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor and top Trump ally.
Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Ohio, called on Biden to “immediately order that all federal criminal charges against President Trump be dropped”.
“Such a gesture would help heal wounds and allow all Americans to take a deep breath and reflect on how we got here,” Lee added, in a joint statement with Robert O’Brien, who was Trump’s national security adviser.
Others struck a more measured tone. Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who is also seen to be a possible vice-presidential pick, simply called on supporters to pray for Trump and those attending the rally, adding in a post on X: “We all know President Trump is stronger than his enemies. Today he showed it.”
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