Audio Excerpt - Donald Trump:

“And if you want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened…”

Audio Excerpt - Trump Rally:

Gun shot sounds

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Audio Excerpt - CNN Anderson Cooper:

“Former President Trump says he is okay after being hit by a bullet just minutes into giving a speech at a Pennsylvania rally.”

Audio Excerpt - Trump Rally:

“USA! USA! USA!”

Audio Excerpt - Rally Eye Witness:

“So we're standing there, you know, we're pointing. We're pointing at the guy crawling up the roof.

Audio Excerpt - Interviewer:

“And he had a gun, right?

Audio Excerpt - Rally Eye Witness:

“He had a rifle. We could clearly see him with a rifle.”

Audio Excerpt - CNN Anderson Cooper:

“The shooter has been killed and one person attending the rally was killed. Two others were injured in the shooting.”

RUBY:

The assassination attempt against Donald Trump was the most serious attack on a President or candidate in more than 40 years.

Audio Excerpt - Joe Biden:

“There's 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.”

RUBY:

Leaders from both parties have condemned the attack and repeated the message that political violence has no place in America, but history shows otherwise.

Today, Nick Bryant, veteran foreign correspondent and author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself, on the inevitability of this moment and how it will shape the final months of the US election campaign.

That’s coming up. It’s Tuesday, July 16.

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RUBY:

Nick, can we go to the moment that you heard that Donald Trump had been shot at. What was your first thought?

NICK:

I find myself revisiting the formulation that I used so often while I was covering the Trump presidency for the BBC. This was shocking, but not surprising. This had been the direction of travel of American politics for many years, and what happened in Pennsylvania was the coming together of so many American problems. Gun violence, political violence, conspiratorialism, the kind of partisan rage that we have seen really, not just for the last few years, but increasingly for decades now. Yeah, it really was shocking to see the bloodied face of a former US President. It was shocking to think that a young gunman could outwit the Secret Service. It was shocking to see him being bundled off stage and to see that instantly iconographic moment where he punched the air and shouted, fight, fight, fight! But it didn't surprise me.

RUBY:

Can you tell me a bit more about why it wasn't surprising, and other things that we've seen in recent years that give this moment context?

NICK:

Well, to begin with, gun violence has become so depressingly routine and fuelled by the easy access to high powered weaponry. An irony of the shooting in Pennsylvania was that it was carried out with an AR15, a weapon that has become especially popular amongst gun enthusiasts on the right because it's the firearm that gun control advocates most want to ban. Political violence, we have seen a really alarming uptick in that in recent times. Barack Obama used to get 30 death threats a day. Michelle Obama became the first First Lady in US history to have assigned to her Secret Service detail the kind of combat troops that we saw on stage on Saturday in Pennsylvania, these Secret Service agents that literally look like special forces with their helmets and their military fatigues. We have seen attacks on a Republican congressional baseball team that was practicing in Virginia.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 1:

“Today, two American institutions literally under fire. Our national pastime and our elected officials. A barrage of gunfire at a baseball field right outside Washington D.C., as Republican members of Congress practiced for their annual game against the Democrats.”

NICK:

We've seen that kidnap attempt on Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 2:

“We're going to begin tonight with that alleged terror plot and the chilling plan the FBI says it stopped before it could be carried out.”

NICK:

And of course we've seen January the 6th and the attempt by Trump supporters, at his urging, to overturn the election violently.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 3:

“It is hard to put into words what exactly we witnessed today because we have not seen this before. Thousands storming the Capitol after a rally with President Trump, during which he urged them to march on the Capitol where a joint session of Congress was debating and working to certify the election, as our democracy dictates.”

NICK:

And so this didn't come as a great surprise because gun violence and political violence has been the direction of travel for years.

RUBY: And you've spent a large part of your career trying to understand political violence in America. Can you tell me about where that fascination, where it begins for you?

NICK:

Well, as a kid, I was fascinated with Kennedy.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 4:

“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. You'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath, but about 10 or 15 minutes ago a tragic thing, from all indications at this point, has happened in the city of Dallas.”

NICK:

I was fascinated by his assassination in my early years and I kind of bought into what I call the lone gunman theory of post-war American history. That America lost its innocence the moment that John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22nd, 1963.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 5:

“President Kennedy and Governor John Connally have been cut down by assassins bullets in downtown Dallas. They were riding an open automobile when the shots were fired. The President, his limp body carried in the arms of his wife Jacqueline, was rushed to Parkland Hospital. And you’ll excuse me if I give directions…”

NICK:

It seemed to my young self that that was when things really went wrong for America. After it, of course, you had Vietnam, you had Watergate, you had the race riots of the late 1960s. But, you know, the more I got to know about Kennedy, the more I got to know about America, I realised that America on the day after John F. Kennedy’s death wasn't that much different from America in the days leading up to John F. Kennedy’s death. This wasn't a shock event. The very morning that Kennedy arrived in Dallas, members of the extreme right John Birch Society published a wanted poster saying Kennedy was wanted for treason. They regarded him as a communist. Dallas was called the city of hate because it was a home to so many right wing fanatics. All the ingredients that were evident on November the 22nd, 1963, which was the day Kennedy was killed, that sort of poisonous brew, all of those ingredients had been evident pretty much on every single day in American history. You know, they came to the fore again on January the 6th in 2021 with the storming of the Capitol, and they came to the fore again on July the 13th, 2024, the day that Donald Trump survived his assassination attempt.

RUBY:

And after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as Martin Luther King in the 60s, the President at the time, Lyndon B Johnson, he launched an investigation. He tasked this group of experts with finding out why this was happening, why this political violence was occurring. Can you tell me about what they discovered?

NICK:

Yeah, this was a really interesting moment for America. The 1960s had been really violent. You know, you had the murders of the Kennedy brothers, you had the assassination of Martin Luther King, you had the assassination of Malcolm X. This was a particularly murderous decade. And Lyndon Johnson wanted to explore why America was plagued by so much violence and he appointed this panel of scholars to undertake what was really a quest for understanding. And what they came back with was a sense that racism had always been the cause of a lot of violence and political violence in America. So too the frontier experience, as they put it, of suppressing Native Americans and Mexicans. There was a tradition that they described of vigilante justice. The very manner of America's founding through glorious revolution, through this battle for independence against the British, also made it prone to violence. And it also created the sense, Ruby, that political violence was legitimate. It's interesting that on January the 6th, many of the insurrectionists were chanting 1776. They really believed that they weren't seditionists, they were patriots acting in the spirit of the American Revolution. The report also said that, like all nations, America suffered from a kind of historical amnesia, or selective recollection, as they put it, that masks unpleasant traumas of the past. So what they're essentially saying was that a positive sense of American exceptionalism blinded Americans to the negative side of American exceptionalism, and what they described as a rather bloody minded people in both action and reaction.

RUBY:

That's interesting, cause I think we're seeing something similar play out now. We're hearing politicians from both sides, not just Democrats, saying that this is not who we are. But what you're saying is actually, this is exactly what the US is and what it always has been.

NICK:

Very quickly after the Trump assassination attempt, Joe Biden came out and said, and I quote, the idea that there's political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of. But that was a statement that spoke not so much of his cognitive decline, but rather America's historical amnesia, this aversion to confronting its murderous past because political violence is a core and continual strand of the national story. It is as American as apple pie. If you go back to the founding days of the American Republic, it has been a regular feature, a routine feature of politics and national life in America.

RUBY:

After the break, how this moment changes the election.

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RUBY:

Nick, Donald Trump has just survived an assassination attempt and he is not the first politician in America to have an attempt on his life. I'm interested, though, in the things that are unique to today. If we look, for example, at the speed in which news unfolds, I mean, we watched this happen live, within minutes it had been meme'd and then these alternate realities are being formed online. So are we in uncharted territory here?

NICK:

I mean, you look back to the Kennedy assassination and you remember that just days afterwards, Lee Harvey Oswald, his alleged assassin, was literally killed live on American television. Obviously didn't have social media back then, but you had mass media and in those days it was television.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 6:

“He’s been shot, he’s been shot. Lee Oswald has been shot.”

NICK:

When we think about the conspiratorialism that emerged so quickly after this assassination attempt on Trump, again, that's hardly new. Literally the day that John F. Kennedy was killed, he was on his way to deliver a speech that very afternoon where he was going to warn against distorted realities and misinformation. He even was going to use that term, misinformation. And on the very eve of John F. Kennedy assassination, a very famous American political scientist called Richard Hofstadter delivered a very bleak lecture at Oxford University, where he spoke of a paranoid style in American politics. It's become a seminal essay. It's quoted over and over during the Trump years, and he spoke of a politics that was dominated by uncommonly angry minds. And he spoke, again, of the kind of conspiratorialism that was fuelling that kind of politics. So once again, the means of, kind of, communication are different but in many ways, the messaging is the same.

RUBY:

And so given that, what do you think that this assassination attempt will become in the narrative of the Trump campaign and his attempt to regain the presidency? What kind of mythmaking do you think we're going to hear about this in the coming weeks?

NICK:

It's the defining moment for Donald Trump and that iconic image of him punching the air, with the American flag flying above him, will become the defining image. It makes the cult of Donald Trump even more cult-like. And I was also struck by the religiosity of the moment, this idea that God had spared Donald Trump, which reinforces a sense, certainly amongst the evangelical Christians, who are some of his biggest backers, that Donald Trump is the chosen one. I mean, it unites the Republican Party. It makes it much harder for a deeply divided Democratic party now to demonise Donald Trump in the way that they needed to do to turn this into an election on him, rather than Joe Biden.

I don't necessarily think that the election is over. I mean, many of us thought the election was over in 2016 when the Access Hollywood tape came out and showed him, sort of, boasting about sexually molesting women. Many of us just thought Trump couldn't come back from that. We just don't know what's going to happen between now and Election Day in November.

RUBY:

Nick, thank you so much for your time.

NICK:

Ruby, thanks for having me on. It's been good to talk to you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

Donald Trump has appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He has called on his followers to "stand united" and "show our true character as Americans", saying, “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening" as he recovers from the assassination attempt on his life.

FBI investigators are continuing to look into the background of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, to find a motive.

And,

King Charles and Queen Camilla have confirmed they will be visiting Australia and Samoa this October. The pair’s visit will include engagements in NSW and the ACT, but they have called off a proposed trip to New Zealand following health advice as the King recovers from his cancer diagnosis.

It marks the first visit from a reigning monarch since Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia in 2011.

I’m Ruby Jones, thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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