We know that the 21-year-old sniper Thomas Crooks, a zitty and cerebral loner from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, brought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the roof of a warehouse 180 yards away and fired eight shots at Trump, hitting three bystanders and killing the 50-year-old fireman Corey Comperatore. But there is still no consensus about the larger meaning of what happened at Butler.

Certainly, the attack shaped the election. It changed the moral climate. In the spring of 2024, four criminal prosecutions dating to Trump’s first term approached resolution almost simultaneously. They had been strung along by Democratic-party prosecutors to fall just then, in election season, for maximum dissuasive effect. Oddly, the New York case in which Trump’s opponents prevailed was the weakest and most convoluted of them. Trump was now a “convicted felon”. But an argument persisted on the campaign trail that summer over whether Trump was being righteously held to account for his own corruption, or persecuted by adversaries who were corrupt themselves. The bullet fired at Trump settled that controversy. Not in any logical way, of course. But in an emotional way it validated the notion that “they” — meaning something in society and the spirit of the times — were out to destroy Trump.

It thus reinforced a shift that has been evident in American politics for quite some time. Voters used to respond to rational appeals based on policy differences. Now they prefer emotional appeals based on group allegiances. Pundits usually point out this change only to deplore the new system’s superficiality. But it’s not that simple. The “policy debates” in the old system were often phoney. Having conducted them, the political parties went off and did what they wanted anyway. Voting publics prefer the new populist style because it actually gives them more information. Conservative policy wonks used statistics to deplore mass immigration, but then did nothing. Trump blustered and burbled — but then acted.

The striking thing about Trump’s behaviour on 13 July 2024 was that it was excellent, and it was excellent in a way that was unreflective and spontaneous. Everything about it was at odds with the American postwar conception of leadership. In a culture where equality of opportunity is everything, the public came to believe there was something reprehensible about the idea that anyone has any special aptitude for anything. We’re not living in a democracy, they felt, unless anyone can go out and become a leader, through hard work or a degree-granting course. Nothing could be more repugnant than the notion that leadership is something you either have or you don’t. And yet here was Trump, in a moment of disruption, behaving like a born leader.

The effect was electric. Within minutes of Trump’s being rushed offstage, Elon Musk stunned the country by endorsing him. “We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs,” Musk would later say, recalling the long decline of Joe Biden. “And another president who was fist-pumping after getting shot.” It is often forgotten that Biden’s rambling, mumbling, senescent performance in a June debate did not immediately end his candidacy. It was the shooting that did it. Biden was still hanging on at this point. It was only after Trump’s demonstration of relative vitality that Biden’s withdrawal became inevitable. He ended his candidacy the following weekend.

But the event was about more than vitality. “On a personal note,” Mark Zuckerberg said that week, “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air, with the American flag, is one of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life. At some level, as an American, it’s hard not to get emotional about that spirit.” Trump was doing something archetypal: the pose in which many photographers caught him that day was almost exactly the one you will see in Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, the great symbol of revolutionary republican patriotism that hangs in the Louvre: the raised right hand. The flag. The rallying of wounded followers. Trump was not just being brave or strong. He was, without meaning to, summoning Americans to feelings buried so deep that they had forgotten they had them. It was a powerful irruption into politics of reality, and even of religion.

Trump himself, though not conspicuously conversant in the language of faith, could see this. Seconds before the shooting, he had been excoriating Joe Biden as “the worst president in the history of our country”, and had planned to continue in that vein when he spoke at the Republican National Convention, due to convene two days later. That changed. “It went from the world’s most vicious speech,” Trump informed Senator Lindsey Graham the following day, “to ‘Let’s bring the country together’. May not be as exciting, but there it is.”

More from this author

Donald Trump's second coming

By Christopher Caldwell

When he returned to Butler for a campaign rally three months later, on the eve of the election, Trump credited “the Hand of Providence and the Grace of God” for having brought him through the ordeal. Increasingly, he discussed the incident as a homespun and prayerful old lady might, dwelling on fateful coincidences: What made him turn his head to look at a graph behind him on the stage? What made him decide to ask that the graph be shown earlier in the speech rather than later, as he usually did? Whether we think of this as sincere religious reflection or electoral pandering, Trump was reacting as most reasonable people would after such a trauma — groping towards a language through which to understand how contingent, how out of human control everything that happens to us is, a quest that, even if it doesn’t lead one to belief in God, can teach one humility. In theory, at least.

Politicians of both parties sensed that something special had happened, that the voting public had come to feel a new kind of connection with their leaders. American officeholders have, in the past year, striven to place themselves in similar filmable situations in which the politician appears to be battling for the people, not metaphorically but physically, thwarted by evildoers while pushing indomitably against them. Fight, fight, fight. It is probably to the Butler assassination attempt that we owe a new sort of campaign stunt, the ideological tableau vivant. At a Los Angeles press conference held by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem in early June, California Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, moved along an aisle towards the podium and, when he got too close, was stopped, expelled from the room by security agents and handcuffed, as any American would have been. His office then circulated the video. A few days later, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander staged a similar disruption, clinging to a migrant being removed by customs officials and demanding that they “show me the judicial warrant”, even though, as The New York Times noted, warrants are not needed for arrests made inside courtrooms.

If Republicans, for now, appear to be better than Democrats at this kind of myth-making, half a century of government by experts is probably responsible. Republicans have a fair claim to represent the uncredentialed masses who were not at the table when the rules were drafted. Democrats are inclined to work the regulations and technicalities, never the most mythopoeic part of any constitutional order.

Suggested reading

The shot that created a martyr

By Lionel Shriver

What the Trump shooting has not yet yielded up, one year on, is a consensus interpretation. Feelings about the event have tended to skew according to feelings about Trump himself. In testimony almost two weeks after the incident, FBI director Christopher Wray, a longtime Trump nemesis, cast doubt on the idea that Trump had been hit with a bullet at all. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray said. He resigned in January as Trump took office. At Butler, Sean Curran was one of the Secret Service agents who rushed to Trump’s aid. He can be seen in sunglasses protecting the candidate’s left side while Trump pumps his free (right) hand. In January, Trump named Curran head of the Secret Service.

A similar division besets the public at large. For Trump supporters, certain details have given rise to suspicions of conspiracy: the grounding of the Secret Service’s drones that day in Butler, the speed with which the suspect Crooks was cremated (“faster than most household pets”, in the opinion of Trump’s son Eric), the paucity of information about Crooks’s internet browsing habits (although we do know that he queried before the rally: “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?”). But the cloudier the circumstances surrounding the shooting, the more miraculous Trump’s emergence from them. Trump’s detractors are only beginning to assimilate the unquestionable virtues Trump showed at Butler into the unquestionable vices that mark his presidential style. A typical verdict is that of Peggy Noonan, the literary speechwriter in the administration of President George H.W. Bush back in the Eighties, who calls Trump “a fearless man with bad judgment”.

That is the state of Donald Trump’s reputation one year on from what is probably the most extraordinary thing he ever did. The shooting at Butler is hardening into legend — but only a partisan one. Becoming a national legend takes longer, and may not ever happen. When Delacroix painted his depiction of the July 1830 Revolution, half a century had passed since the French Revolution, half a century during which much of the country viewed it as an ordeal of destruction, gore and institutional collapse. He was painting for the first generation of Frenchmen to understand the Revolution, and revolutions more generally, as their common inheritance. Whether Trump gets that treatment from future generations will depend on how his own revolution fares. A year ago this weekend, he inspired his followers through his rage to endure, fight, and lift himself off a speaker’s platform in Butler, Pennsylvania. Future generations may be similarly moved, particularly if he can summon other virtues than these.

This is hardly the last time incendiary language has, however indirectly, prompted violence in the real world. Nine centuries on from Henry II, Donald Trump’s characteristically florid turn of phrase has been repeatedly linked to real-world threats to public safety. Then just last week, his repetition of a rumour about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating local pets sparked a media furore — and reported bomb threats in Springfield itself.

But what if the real heirs to Henry II are actually Trump’s enemies? Hot on the heels of a week’s pet-food discourse, Trump himself was reportedly the target of a second assassination attempt in as many months and FBI agents apprehended a gunman at his golf course in Florida.

The conspiracists are already poring over details of the two attacks, and drawing inferences from them about the perpetrators. They have, for instance, noted that this weekend’s alleged would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, and the previous attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had both appeared in campaign videos produced by well-known players in the conspiracy-theory pantheon: Crooks appeared briefly in a 2022 BlackRock advert filmed at his then high school, while Routh, a pro-Ukraine activist, appeared in a 2022 campaign video reportedly produced by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Little is known about the political views of Crooks, but the fact that he seems not to have had any political opinions or social media presence whatsoever has, for conspiracy-lovers, itself been interpreted as some kind of institutional cover-up.

Inevitably, then, the internet has donned its tinfoil hat and set out to uncover what this all means. Trump had, after all, pledged to bring a swift end to the conflict in Ukraine, likely by ceding some territory to Putin. Figures such as the former NSA intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden have hinted that Routh’s Ukraine links mean he must have been in contact with “White House agencies”. Other partisans speculate that the instigator is some element of the neoconservative establishment desperate to sustain the war with Russia.

Are these people mere disposable foot-soldiers for some shadowy institutional player who fears a Trump win above all else? Who knows. Just as plausible, however, not to mention less paranoia-inducing, is the possibility that no such coordinated conspiracy exists — but rather that “stochastic terrorism” is becoming a mainstay of politics, across the ideological spectrum, as a byproduct of the new, post-truth politics of attention and weaponised “truthiness”.

More from this author

Why the Right loves a Great Man

By Mary Harrington

The term “stochastic terrorism” is used to describe real-life political action or violence inspired by (usually online) public rhetoric. Its theorists argue that this dynamic operates when hostile rhetoric against an outgroup, originating with some leader or charismatic figure, is amplified by supporters in a way that dehumanises the target and — ultimately — legitimises spontaneous-seeming real-life violence against it.

Such rhetoric in turn relies on claims that may be of dubious factual truth, but which feel emotionally or perhaps allegorically true. This quality of “truthiness” was satirised back in 2005 by the commentator Stephen Colbert, who characterised it as a preference for statements that feel as though they ought to be true, over things that verifiably are. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” he asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.”

Amid today’s digital competition for eyeballs and clicks, the aggregate result is a competitive discursive war of weaponised emotional logic, whose downstream consequences can sometimes include real-life attacks on reviled individuals or outgroups: so-called stochastic terrorism. Not without reason, progressive critics of this dynamic cite Trump’s repetition of the cat-eating rumour as a case in point. This story has already inspired a backlash in Springfield itself; and while a great many allegations and rumours have circulated, no proof of pet consumption has emerged that’s so incontrovertible as to force even Trump’s haters to accept that barbecued feline is really a thing in Ohio. Instead, all sides have embraced whichever interpretation of events feels the most truthy from their standpoint.

In other words: almost two decades on from Colbert’s coinage of “truthiness”, the news cycle no longer feels as though it’s “all fact, no heart”. Quite the contrary. And no amount of lamenting is likely to reverse this shift. For such emotive rumour-mongering is effective as a political strategy — an efficacy that rests precisely on its ambiguous relation to the truth. Taking, again, the cat-eating discourse as an example: from an attention-politics perspective whether or not the rumour is factually true is largely beside the point. Trump’s declaration was so incendiary it transcended truth altogether for the otherworld of pure meme. When your claim goes so viral that even your haters set it to music, its truth is irrelevant.

Instead, what matters is that your chosen topic dominates the public conversation. Then, once this is achieved, your team can hammer home your preferred narrative. Thus, over the past week, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance has been doing the rounds on TV, cashing in on the outrage generated by Trump’s “truthiness” missile. In this CNN segment, for example, he repeatedly dismisses accusations of misinformation, while repeating a phrase clearly intended to stick in the viewer’s mind: “Kamala Harris’ open border”.

Lest anyone be tempted to imagine that this is a uniquely cynical and calculated Right-wing strategy: it’s hardly as though Trump’s haters never do a Henry II, or use factually dubious but emotionally resonant assertions as a vector for activism. Consider the high proportion of Americans who believe Donald Trump would sign a nationwide abortion ban, despite his repeated insistence that the matter should be left to states to decide — an impression doubtless reinforced by Harris’s own habit of misrepresenting Trump’s stated position.

Is it true that Trump wants to ban abortion? Who cares? The point is the truthiness. It’s probably directionally accurate that Trump cares less about women’s right to choose than Harris, even if Harris’s assertions exaggerate the divide. And the more time Trump spends disputing the details, the more it reinforces an association between him and the (broadly unpopular) policy of banning abortion.

And this also applies, in spades, to perhaps the most truthy of all the progressive attack lines against Trump: the Hitler thing. This is a long-standing theme for his opponents, who have consistently linked Trump to Hitler. And again, what matters is less its factual accuracy than its emotional resonance. To those who recoil from Trump’s nationalistic themes, machismo and rumoured desire to gut the administration and replace it with his partisans, it has more than enough truthiness; meanwhile, for Trump himself, disputing it is only likely to strengthen the association.

And here, once again, lies the rub: the shadow of weaponised truthiness is stochastic terrorism. My meme-driven narrative takeover is someone else’s grounds for real-world violence. And in the case of the Hitler parallel, this is likely to prompt more than just bomb threats: threats which in any case turned out, according to Springfield’s mayor, to be hoax calls from overseas. By contrast, the Hitler association conflates Trump with a figure who, above all others, represents the ne plus ultra of absolute evil. And, logically, once someone has been framed as absolute evil, it follows that even extraordinary measures are justified.

Perhaps we’ll never know whether there’s any truth to the conspiracy theories out there, or whether they’re just truthy. But either way, you don’t need a shadowy cabal of nameless, deniable foreign-policy-establishment proxies to needle someone into having a pop at Trump. You just need a few nutjobs of the kind that Ryan Routh reportedly was: that is, unusually susceptible to taking literally the torrent of partisan emotional reasoning that now passes for political debate. Then, all you need to do is make a few remarks to no one in particular — and before long, someone is bound to try and rid you of this turbulent Trump.

The contrasting modus operandi in each case reveals a deeper struggle over how public life itself should be ordered. Should government comprise a named leader, clear hierarchies and acceptance that the final recourse for power is physical force? Or should it be softer and more collegiate, with a focus on consensus-formation rather than chains of command, and a more indirect means of dealing with enemies? If you believe the former, so the theory goes, you’re probably more Right-wing; if you believe the latter, likely more Left-wing. Both sides, meanwhile, increasingly map these sensibilities onto an emergent sex disparity in political affiliation, in which the Right is increasingly masculine-coded, and the Left feminine-coded.

The attacks on Trump and Biden correspond to this divide, too. What Trump faced on Saturday was a straightforward attempt at assassination in the masculine key, which is to say direct, violent and focused on a prominent individual. By contrast, the attacks on Biden since his poor performance in that debate two weeks ago constitute female-coded aggression at its most refined: whisper campaigns, anonymous character attacks, efforts at draining away social support and rendering someone a pariah.

But lapsing into this well-worn “gender-war” groove would mean missing the deeper disagreement, between individual agency and collective forms — and, also, the ways the two poles are more complementary than they think.

There really are well-documented differences between the way men and women approach social organisation that map crudely onto Republican and Democratic sensibilities. Though there are of course plenty of outliers, men are more likely to prioritise in-group cohesion, clear hierarchy and competition with out-groups; women, by contrast, are less violent, more cooperative and less committed to a defined in-group. The sexes also manage conflict differently: where female-typical disagreement often happens obliquely, for example via whisper campaigns or social ostracism, male-typical conflict is much more likely to be direct, confrontational and sometimes violent.

Trumpian Republicanism places more emphasis on hierarchy, open confrontation and prioritising the interests of the in-group — America — against competing out-groups, while setting great stock in a charismatic leader. The Left, by contrast, treats overt hierarchy with suspicion, often conflating it with “systems of oppression”, and prefers to emphasise “inclusivity”. The Democrats also evidently place considerably less stock in individual leadership. Otherwise they would not have devoted so much effort to denying Biden’s increasingly obvious frailty, maintaining an illusion of him being in charge sustained only by tight choreography and well-rehearsed lines plus a conspiracy of silence.

Suggested reading

The shot that created a martyr

By Lionel Shriver

As their ostensible leader became an ever emptier vessel, who did the Democrats imagine was running the show? The question is perhaps more: does anyone have to? This debate, over how much (if at all) individual leadership counts, has emerged as one of today’s core political divides. On the Democratic side, the choreography around Biden suggests many didn’t believe it mattered much: after all, much of the machinery of state is on autopilot most of the time anyway. In this view, presidential decline is less significant than it might appear, not least because the permanent bureaucracy has plenty of ways of thwarting a president who makes poor decisions. So it wouldn’t be such a big deal if Biden had dementia or some other impairment, because the self-driving machine is there: a benign exoskeleton, with the power to sustain even a faltering leader at something like his once-formidable best.

This form of anonymous, procedural power, which I’ve characterised elsewhere as “swarmism”, has emerged as a central feature of post-liberal governance. To supporters, it’s innocuous: just well-designed institutions functioning as they should. Opponents, though, have less complimentary names for it. The Trumpist firebrand Steve Bannon, for example, denounced its structures at the beginning of Trump’s first term, as “the deep state”, while the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin calls its organs of communication “the Cathedral”. But wherever you stand on its merits, perhaps its most salient characteristic is — as one critic put it recently — “power without responsibility”. The swarm is, by definition, a system in which processes, groups, institutions, guidelines, committees and so on proliferate, without the buck ever stopping anywhere or with anyone.

In its wake, many of the bitterest disputes today concern how far one can really extend such unaccountable power. How far should leaders (or indeed anyone at all) have freedom to act, and corresponding responsibility for their decisions? It’s ultimately a metaphysical question, with implications for everything from prison policy to the battle between Great Man Theorists and structuralists in historiography — and one in which the trend, for some decades now, has been away from the individual.

Even Left-wingers who dislike the utopianism and moral stridency that often accompanies this have found themselves increasingly marginalised in progressive circles. Meanwhile, many on the Right have begun to link the idea of the swarm with feminisation of the public sphere. For proponents, the implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument then follows that we need only expunge femininity — or perhaps, quite literally, women — from public office, and all will be right with the world again.

Is this right? Well, there is some correlation between women’s entry into the workforce, and the emergence of swarmist politics. But I don’t think this is as direct as proponents of “repealing the 19th” like to imagine. After all, the reputation “assassination” by gossip, smear and ostracism now being waged against Biden may be feminine-coded in its methods. But are we seriously arguing that such political takedowns were unheard-of until women entered public life? Millennia of court politics would suggest otherwise.

When much of this supposed “feminisation” cashes out as technologies that level the employment playing-field between the sexes, anyone who was really serious about re-masculinising the West would be campaigning for a large-scale return to subsistence farming. Nothing separates the sexes like manual labour. Oddly enough, though, most prefer to blame those features of high-tech society they dislike on women. Accordingly, resistance to the technocratic governance of today’s increasingly networked and functionally gender-neutral society is now coded masculine and Right-wing, with Trump as its figurehead: sworn enemy of the swarmist order. Should he be elected again, analysts report, he will prioritise gutting the “deep state”, which is to say all those self-driving bureaucracies. At a rally last year in Texas, he confirmed this in apocalyptic terms, saying: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.”

This aspiration is denounced, in turn, by swarmists as not just mistaken but evil: tantamount to fascism. From this perspective, anyone trying to reclaim individual leadership from the self-driving machinery of state is by definition a malign would-be dictator. And while the screeching about Literally Hitler is surely overdone, we might ask as well: are the swarmists really as hostile as they make out, to the authoritarianism they condemn?

To my eye, the fixation on incipient totalitarian Trumpism betrays as much desire as fear: a thirst for precisely the kind of power Trump is accused of seeking — just qualified by the caveat that its exercise should be faceless and procedural, rather than indexed to one capricious individual. Meanwhile, among more pragmatic technocrats, the turn against Biden serves as tacit admission that an explicitly self-driving administration remains politically unacceptable — emphatically so to the American electorate, but also to many within the Democrat camp. Some form of leadership figure is still required, even if this is mostly theatre.

On the other side, meanwhile, after the weekend’s events, Trump is being hailed as avatar for all those who still resist the faceless swarm. He has emerged from this attack as a one-man embodiment of Great Man Theory, baptised in his own blood by an assassination attempt not of the figurative, collectivist, indirect sort but the old-fashioned, violent, individualist kind.

And yet we might ask his supporters: be honest, how much of this so-called “feminisation” should be rolled back? I suspect even the most ardent opponents of swarmism would choose an “assassination” attempt in the feminine key now faced by Joe Biden, over the one Donald Trump just survived. The former might threaten your self-esteem, your social circle, or your reputation; the latter is more terminal. I dare say few want sexed polarity enough to swap desk work for manual labour. And this goes, too, for a great many features of 21st-century civilisation that rely for normal functioning on institutions, processes and bureaucracies. Only the most unhinged swarm-hater would seriously seek to gut them all.

It’s doubly fitting, then, that the half-senile avatar of faceless managerialism should himself face a swarmist political attack from his own side. Fitting, too, that his individualist opponent should be attacked the old-fashioned way: as an individual, by an individual. But if history is any guide, we won’t need to choose between these two modes of political assassination: both have always played a role in the cut and thrust of politics.

And by the same token, too, the swarm and the Great Man continue to need one another. The former may seem unstoppable; but without a head it’s blind and chaotic. And even the greatest of Great Men needs a team; needs bureaucrats, even. The struggle now convulsing America may look dramatic, but the two sides are far closer than they imagine.

Not five years later, Kennedy’s father lost his life at the hands of an assassin, just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Andy Warhol took a bullet the day before. More than half a century later, the Smithsonian describes 1968 as “the year that shattered America”.

Anti-war protests rocked campuses. Democrats planned to convene in Chicago. A man named Robert F. Kennedy was on the ballot. It may seem like we’ve been here before, but what if we never actually left?

Donald Trump and Joe Biden were both in their twenties during the year that “shattered” America. On cable news, RFK Jr shared memories of his father’s assassination only hours after yesterday’s attempt on Trump’s life. We’re at the bookend of the Baby Boom generation.

In 1967, the year before America “shattered”, Joan Didion famously opened “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” with a placid description of the national mood. “It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege,” she wrote. “It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.”

That apprehension turned out to be well-placed, and we’d be wise to consider the similarities: superficial comforts and cultural unrest. We’re not okay, regardless of the GNP.

More than half a century of high-tech liberalism, with all its idealism and material comforts, has only masked — and sometimes exacerbated — our age-old struggle against human nature. In an instant, personal grievances can become global ones, not merely confined to one community or another. A single evil person in Sandy Hook or Memphis can immediately make their insanity the whole country’s business, thrusting us into bitter debates about cities we’ll never visit with people we’ll never meet.

It’s shocking to see Biden cling to power in the face of his decline. It’s shocking to see Trump, bloodied by a bullet, walk off his sun-soaked stage with a fist in the air. It shocks us because we expect something different.

The year 1968 forged the two Baby Boomers now vying for the Oval Office, as well as the thousands donating to their candidacies and still controlling the C-Suites. On days like this it feels like the wound of that year was bandaged but never healed.