Apparently the suspect in the latest assassination attempt against Trump – young Thomas Crooks, killed on the spot, of course, as American suspects tend to be – was a registered Republican, and a poor shot. (That’s what we’re told so far.) So surely one of the tinfoil hat brigade will be coming along soon with a ‘grassy knoll’ theory to ‘prove’ that he was a ‘patsy’, and that the whole event was a put-up job by Trump supporters to engender enough sympathy for him to return him to the White House?
And if ‘images’ are important in American politics, this one, mirroring an iconic one from the Korean war, should be pretty effective:
So: has Trump got it won already? And, to take a broader historical perspective: isn’t this, political violence, a more convincing political narrative, more dominant in US history, than the ‘democratic’ one that most Americans prefer?
Porter’s Pensées 
You are right, Bernard.
All the big ticket items in US history involve the use of organised violence on a greater or lesser scale.
Slavery, the American Revolution, the confiscation of Native American land, the Civil War, the two world wars, Jim Crow, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the invasion and bombing of Iraq.
Striving to establish and maintain democracy has been far from prominent in most of these developments and events.
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Trump, after surviving the shooting, talked about bringing people together and then chose as his running mate… JD Vance? You begin to wonder whether the biggest threat to Western liberal values might not just be the USA itself. Thankfully, the US President can do no wrong. The Supreme Court has said so.
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