Everyone’s been talking about what the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the “legendary American photograph” that AP photographer Evan Vucci took seconds later. What does the famous photo say about today’s political culture? Nobody seems to quite get it. So let’s consider the semiotics of The Picture, and the two words uttered and chanted immediately after the shooting.
The Atlantic jumped the gun when, the next day, it hailed this “instantly legendary” image. Even today, legends take a little longer to gel; such pronouncements have a way of echoing the, er, legendary “kiss of death” conferred in print days by Time and Newsweek covers. But that defiant Trump image seems bound to haunt an already tumultuous campaign season, tilting prospects even further in Trump’s favor.
Part of its impact lies in its unnoted but unmistakable evocation of a truly legendary photo, one of the most revered images in American history: Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photo of six Marines raising the U.S. flag atop Mt. Suribachi during the bloody battle for Iwo Jima. Vucci’s image of Trump and agents reprises the pyramidal shape of Rosenthal’s photo, and of Eugene Delacroix’s equally iconic 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. In each, the national flag flutters behind a group of five or six figures closely joined in heroic struggle. That struggle is reinforced by each image’s triangular form — a shape also used to dramatic effect in Renaissance Pietàs and Depositions from the Cross.
In the new photo, the flag behind Trump also tilts partly upside-down, which, as non-MAGA Americans recently learned (courtesy of Justice Samuel Alito), is code decrying the “stolen” 2020 election. All this should reinforce its value as campaign fodder for Team Trump, complete with bootleg T-shirts and screensavers. Ah, for the halcyon days when Shepard Fairey skirted AP’s copyright to create the ubiquitous “Hope” poster.
But not only MAGAites were moved by the shooting and awed at Trump’s performance: “Trump wins the election here,” Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet proclaimed, giving a full-throated voice to what many American commentators were suggesting more cautiously. Getting shot is a political godsend, as long as it doesn’t kill you.
Sympathy helped Teddy Roosevelt, another ex-president shot while attempting a comeback, surpass the incumbent, Roosevelt’s former protégé William Howard Taft. (They split the Republican vote and ceded the election to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.) Ronald Reagan’s shooting, two months into his first term, boosted the passage of his signature tax-cut bill, which had been mired in Congress. The outpouring of sympathy following John F. Kennedy’s assassination propelled his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to a landslide a year later and helped Johnson pass the civil rights bill Kennedy had championed.
Atlantic contributor Tyler Austin Harper got into the spirit: “The first time I saw the photo, I felt an emotion that I later recognized, with considerable discomfort, as a fluttering of unbidden nationalist zeal. What encapsulates our American ideal more than bloody defiance and stubborn pride that teeters just on the edge of foolishness? No hunkering and no hiding. It was a moment when Trump supporters’ idea of him – strong, resilient, proud – collided with reality.” (I suspect Harper meant to say, “intersected with reality.”)
Journalists and pundits of every stripe equated Trump’s (in Harper’s words) “undaunted and undeterred” response to getting shot with those of Roosevelt and Reagan, the two most revered Republican presidents since Lincoln. (To be sure, Teddy and Honest Abe would have no place in today’s Republican Party, and even Dutch would be suspect with his pro-immigration, conciliatory ways.)
Roosevelt and Reagan were much more seriously wounded than Trump. Roosevelt, shot point-blank in the chest on the way to give a speech in, of all places, Milwaukee, survived only because the eyeglass case and folded speech in his pocket slowed the bullet. It still went inoperably deep, and he carried it for the rest of his relatively short life. Reagan suffered a broken rib, punctured lung, and severe internal bleeding, eventually losing half his blood. He spent nearly two hours on the operating table and 12 days in the hospital.
Both, however, showed a gallantry that seems quaint in this whining, snarling age. With no Secret Service to stop him, Roosevelt insisted on giving his speech. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” he declared. Quelling calls from the audience to “Kill him!” the ex-president turned to the addled shooter, whom his stenographer had collared, and asked, Why did you do it? Receiving no answer, Roosevelt ordered him turned over to police and proceeded, “shortening” his speech to just 90 minutes. One witness pronounced him “the coolest and least excited of anyone in the frenzied mob.”
Whisked to the hospital, Reagan insisted on walking in on his own, smiling and waving to onlookers. Once inside, he collapsed to one knee, but his grace and humor held up. Reaching into his bag of lines from old movies and sports, he reprised the clobbered Jack Dempsey when wife Nancy arrived: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” While intubated, he scribbled a note: “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”
Trump’s wound was trivial by contrast but photogenically alarming, with blood spattering his face and the bullet passing an inch from his brain. Contrary to The Atlantic’s panegyric, he did “hunker and hide” behind the podium. When Secret Service agents pulled him up to hustle him to safety, he pumped his fist and shouted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as the crowd chanted back “USA! USA!” At the stage’s edge he balked for one last round of frantic air-punching that resembled nothing so much as a toddler tantrum. It was as un-Reaganesque a moment as one could possibly imagine.
In response to the violence done to him, Trump behaved in kind: He whipped his audience into a mood for combat. This is the candidate who, during the 2016 campaign, urged supporters to “punch back” and “knock the crap out of” protestors, pining for “the old days” “when they’d be carried out on a stretcher.”
That same year he hinted that gun owners should lock and load to stop Democratic judicial appointments: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno….” Nudge nudge, wink wink. Four months ago, while promising a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars, Trump warned that “if I don’t get elected… it’s going to be a bloodbath for this country.” He seems to have used “bloodbath” figuratively, to mean economic disaster. But hyperbole has consequences.
Since Saturday, Team Trump and his congressional supporters have been mirroring away, blaming Democrats for whipping up political violence. J.D. Vance, the former never-Trumper who was still auditioning then for the role of running mate, put it most shamelessly: “Today is not just some isolated incident. 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.”
On Sunday, Melania Trump, who doesn’t weigh in as often or as eloquently as Vance, tweet/Xed a statement that at a couple points seems head-scratching: “This morning, ascend above the hate, the vitriol, and the simple-minded ideas that ignite violence,” she urged. Does “ascend above” mean overcome the sort of hate, vitriol and simple-minded ideas promoted by her husband, or merely overlook them?
“A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion,” Lady Trump also declared. Parse that statement, and consider its grammatical equivalent: “Barcelona recognized the young Messi as a rare football talent.” Is Melania confirming what her husband’s fiercest critics claim”?
Not really. That malaprop use of “recognize” — not unusual for a non-native speaker — more likely indicates that she wrote the statement herself. But the term “monster” is more telling, and very Trumpian. It’s standard-issue language for dehumanizing and scapegoating, just like other terms employed by her husband — “vermin,” “poisoning our blood,” “rapists and murderers” pouring across the border. How do we know the 20-year-old, registered-Republican loner who tried to shoot Trump is a “monster” and not a sad, sick puppy?
Reagan, TR, and other presidents who survived assassination attempts never called their would-be killers “monsters.” The only other person I’ve lately heard use the term is a staunchly conservative ex-Republican who reserves most of his ire for the Democrats. “Trump is a monster,” he told me, “and Biden is going to make me vote for him.”
But the rest of Melania’s statement is standard stuff — compassionate, conciliatory, perhaps heartfelt, at worst mawkish and predictable, just as statements from first ladies are supposed to be at times like this: “Let us remember that when the time comes to look beyond the left and the right, beyond the red and the blue, we all come from families with the passion to fight for a better life together, while we are here, in this earthly realm. Dawn is here again. Let us reunite. Now.”
This is the language of a winner, distillable to a simple paraphrase of a Beatles refrain: “Come together… under me.” It’s also a possible template for the post-convention campaign. Now that he’s stirred up the base to “fight, fight, fight” and enlisted Vance to perform campaign pit bull duties, Trump can offer himself as a post-partisan uniter, and seek a landslide.
But that’s not a role an overgrown playground bully is cut out for. How long can he stick to it? Fasten your seat belt and grab your barf bag. It’s going to be a long four months.
No question Trump is leading now, but with modern communications, for better or worse, is it possible that popular opinion can turn on a dime?
One of the problems, of course is the Democrats keep shooting themselves in the foot. Newsom, obviously one of the leading contenders, just signed a bill (concerning parents right to be informed in schools) which can be (and will be) described as undermining parental responsibility.
Plus, I don’t think there’s any Democratic politician who doesn’t sound like a Democratic politician. And that’s not meant as a compliment. I like Biden. I would vote for Biden again. He’s a decent man with good values. I agree with him on most issues except where he goes Woke. And he really doesn’t know how to communicate.
And that I think is the heart of the Democrats problem. They bought in without thinking much less thoughtful discussion about a host of issues involving identity politics. So they never got practice in real public discussion about DEI, gender, identity, affirmative action, critical race theory, and so forth. Rather than dealing with those issues, or denying that they even exist, they simply went with the progressive dogma, and the Republicans are making hay with it.
I’m pretty depressed about the near future and I don’t even see the germ of an intelligent Democratic Party.