Former President Donald Trump speaking onstage during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July as a photograph of the aftermath of an assassination attempt was emblazoned on a screen. Photo / Kenny Holston, The New York Times
There is widespread concern that the November election will not end well and that American democracy has frayed to the breaking point.
In the nine years since Donald Trump entered American politics, the global perception of the United States has been shaken by the image of a fractured, unpredictable nation. First one, then a second apparent attempt on the former president’s life have accentuated international concerns, raising fears of violent turmoil spiralling toward civil war.
Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has said he is “very worried” and “deeply troubled” by what the FBI said was an attempt to kill Trump at his Florida golf course, fewer than 50 days before the presidential election and two months after a bullet bloodied the ear of Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
“Violence has no part to play at all in any political process,” Starmer said.
Yet, violence has played a core part in this stormy, lurching American political campaign, and not only in the two apparent assassination attempts. There is now widespread concern across the globe that the November election will not end well and that American democracy, once a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking point.
In Mexico, where elections this year were the most violent in the country’s recent history, with 41 candidates and aspirants for public office assassinated, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a post on the social platform X: “Even though what happened is still unclear, we regret the violence against former President Donald Trump. The path is democracy and peace.”
At a time of wars in Europe and the Middle East and widespread global insecurity as China and Russia assert the superiority of their autocratic models, American precariousness weighs heavily.
Corentin Sellin, a French history professor, said the “brutalisation of American politics” had left France “wondering whether the presidential campaign will finish peacefully”.
France was stunned, he said, by the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters, and “there is this notion that the story that started with that insurrection has not yet ended,” and that the November 5 election will determine how it does.
The threat of violence – at times, even the need for it – has been a core part of Trump’s message.
He has already cast doubt on the credibility of the coming November election results. He has persistently laced his language with calls to “fight” and used incendiary terms to insult immigrants. Just before the January 6 assault on the Capitol, he urged followers to “fight like hell” or they would not “have a country any more”. In general, he has shown an ironclad incapacity to accept many truths, including the result of the 2020 election.
Democrats have responded by depicting Trump as a direct menace to American democracy, a “weird” would-be autocrat of fascist tendencies and a “threat to our freedoms,” in the words of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The left-leaning New Republic magazine portrayed Trump as Adolf Hitler on a recent cover, expressing the view that a second Trump term is likely to lead to some form of American tyranny.
Some Europeans see things in a very different light.
“They tried to do everything,” said Andrea Di Giuseppe, a lawmaker with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party. “They tried to bring Trump down with trials, they tried to bring him down with insinuations, they tried to bring him down by scaring people that ‘if Trump arrives democracy ends.’ Then, since all these attempts did not work, they tried to kill him.”
Authorities have identified a suspect in the Florida episode, Ryan W. Routh, a 58-year-old building contractor with a criminal history and a passionate embrace of the Ukrainian cause. He was charged in federal court with two firearms counts. More charges may follow.
Responding to the apparent assassination attempt, Carsten Luther, an online editor for international affairs, gave voice to deep concerns about the survival of American democracy in the respected German weekly Die Zeit. “The warnings of a civil war can be heard and no longer sound completely unrealistic,” he wrote. “It seems almost banal, as if it was bound to happen at some point.”
Of course, other Western societies, including France and Germany, are also viscerally divided and have seen the rise of xenophobic, far-right parties with many of the same messages as Trump. In May, an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia left him critically injured.
But a far more restrictive European gun culture has curbed the extent of political violence while leaving Europeans alarmed and incredulous at the ease with which Americans are able to obtain weapons.
Félix Maradiaga, a former Nicaraguan presidential candidate and political prisoner who is now a fellow at the University of Virginia, said polarization, intolerance and the widespread availability of high-calibre weapons in the United States had led to a “perfect storm”.
“The world is watching, and the stakes could not be higher,” he added. “Russia and China are undoubtedly taking satisfaction in this deterioration of democracy.”
Lebohang Pheko, a senior research fellow at South Africa’s Trade Collective, an economics research institute, said that she perceived “a militarisation of everyday life in the United States, and this essentially seems to be spilling into these elections”.
Trump has often appeared to seek this very militarisation of which he has narrowly escaped being a victim. The multimillionaire son of a real-estate developer from the New York City borough of Queens, he has positioned himself as the defender of the gun-toting, God-fearing American frontier against what he portrays as the Democrats’ politically correct socialist takeover.
Alluding to his Democratic opponents, he has blamed “the things that they say about me” for the first assassination attempt and the second episode, not the easy access to guns that he defends.
The question now is how violent will this political confrontation in America prove. For many around the world, it seems to contain the seeds of rampant conflict.
“There is a sort of reciprocal delegitimization, where the political opponent is no longer a normal political competitor, but also an existential enemy,” said Mario Del Pero, a professor of United States and International History at Sciences Po University in Paris. He called this process “a degradation of political and public discourse”.
In the United States, this has been a degradation compounded by guns, as much of the world sees it.
“Style over substance. Image over issues. Lies over facts. Distractions over policy. Repeated violence,” said Tomasz Płudowski, the deputy dean of the School of Social Science, AEH, in Warsaw, Poland. “That seems to be the contemporary American reality.”
The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues. It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas.
There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump or a Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right French National Rally, or Meloni in Italy have been able to build.
The perceived vulnerability of American democracy has already provoked many reactions around the world, from Russian gloating and interference to European anxiety about its security. Few countries in the developing world want American lessons in how to run their societies these days.
Yet, a fascination with the United States endures, and the checks and balances of its institutions have proved resilient, including through the first Trump term.
Trump often cites the template of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary: neutralising an independent judiciary, subjugating much of the media, demonising migrants and creating loyal new elites through crony capitalism. But it would not be easy to impose in America.
Still, the world is anxious. The 48 days to the election feel like a long time.
“In the end, the only real final word is for the American people,” said Di Giuseppe, the Italian lawmaker. “And if you want to defeat a person whom you think is not fit to govern the United States of America, you have to defeat him in a democratic system with elections, not with justice or Kalashnikovs.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Written by: Roger Cohen
Photographs by: Saul Martinez, Kenny Holston and Ashley Gilbertson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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