JULY 17,2024
DW
Assassination attempts or attacks often boost a politician's popularity, as in the case of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro. Observers wonder whether the same will be true for Donald Trump.
https://p.dw.com/p/4iO4D
Following Saturday's assassination attempt, Donald Trump has officially been selected as the Republican presidential nominee at the party's national convention. Some say the shooting may have made him more likely to triumph in the US general election in November.
"It's certainly the case that the attack will garner him additional sympathy," political scientist and Latin America expert Günther Maihold told DW. "As a consequence, the individual moves into a different realm. The population sees them as both particularly vulnerable, and, at the same time, as a savior. This also applies to Trump."
Maihold compared the situation with the attack on Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was critically injured at an election campaign event in Rio de Janeiro on September 6, 2018. The following month, Bolsonaro won the presidential election with 55% of the vote.
Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach during a presidential campaign rally in 2018; he subsequently won the electionImage: Eraldo Peres/AP Photo/picture alliance
'Combination of victimhood and catharsis'
"I do believe there is a kind of Bolsonaro effect," Maihold said. "The candidate becomes a symptom of the disintegration of their society, and, at the same time, a sympathetic figure. It's a combination of victimhood and catharsis. This combination endows them with an additional element of charisma."
Brazilian columnist Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca went one step further.
"Bolsonaro is not the only one to win an election following an assassination attempt," he wrote in the daily newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. "[US President Ronald] Reagan was reelected by a landslide in 1984 after the attempt on his life [in March 1981.]"
In Pinheiro's analysis, "Both were already the favorite; the attempt on their life only sealed their victory. The same is likely to happen with Trump."
Modi survived an attack
This was also true for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On October 27, 2013, he survived a bomb attack in Patna, the regional capital of the Indian state of Bihar, carried out by the Islamist organizations Indian Mujahideen and Students Islamic Movement of India.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently won re-election; he first came to power in 2013 after surviving a bomb attackImage: -/AFP/Getty Images
The attack occurred in the middle of the election campaign. Voting took place between April 7 and May 12, 2014, and Modi and his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) won a majority in the Indian parliament for the first time. He has now been in power for ten years.
Like all heads of state and government around the world, Modi condemned the attack on Trump and called for peace. However, beyond the official condemnation of political violence, social media platforms are full of people apportioning blame.
'Global Left networks'
Indian government spokesperson Amit Malviya, for example, blamed the so-called "global Left" for the attack. Shortly after it happened, he posted on X, formerly Twitter: "Shinzo Abe, then Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and now Donald Trump. […] The threat is real. Vile global Left networks are at work."
Bolsonaro's son Flavio is spreading the same narrative. "The far left demonizes and dehumanizes its opponents with lies — with the support of the mainstream media," he wrote, also on X. "And then a 'lone wolf' appears, who has to save the world from the 'enemy of democracy,' the 'genocidal murderer,' or the 'militias.' This is the formula of hate, which has real and almost deadly consequences."
Both commentators are convinced that "assassination attempts always target right-wing and conservative political leaders." But history shows us that this is not the case.
Political murder in Quito
In 1968, the Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was murdered during the US primary campaign. He was the brother of President John F. Kennedy, also a Democrat, who was assassinated in 1963.
A particularly shocking example was the murder of the Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year. An investigative journalist who had reported on corruption and violence in his homeland, Villavicencio was shot dead following a campaign rally in Quito on August 9, 2023.
The attack occurred in the middle of the election campaign. Voting took place between April 7 and May 12, 2014, and Modi and his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) won a majority in the Indian parliament for the first time. He has now been in power for ten years.
Like all heads of state and government around the world, Modi condemned the attack on Trump and called for peace. However, beyond the official condemnation of political violence, social media platforms are full of people apportioning blame.
'Global Left networks'
Indian government spokesperson Amit Malviya, for example, blamed the so-called "global Left" for the attack. Shortly after it happened, he posted on X, formerly Twitter: "Shinzo Abe, then Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and now Donald Trump. […] The threat is real. Vile global Left networks are at work."
Bolsonaro's son Flavio is spreading the same narrative. "The far left demonizes and dehumanizes its opponents with lies — with the support of the mainstream media," he wrote, also on X. "And then a 'lone wolf' appears, who has to save the world from the 'enemy of democracy,' the 'genocidal murderer,' or the 'militias.' This is the formula of hate, which has real and almost deadly consequences."
Both commentators are convinced that "assassination attempts always target right-wing and conservative political leaders." But history shows us that this is not the case.
Political murder in Quito
In 1968, the Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was murdered during the US primary campaign. He was the brother of President John F. Kennedy, also a Democrat, who was assassinated in 1963.
A particularly shocking example was the murder of the Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year. An investigative journalist who had reported on corruption and violence in his homeland, Villavicencio was shot dead following a campaign rally in Quito on August 9, 2023.
The Ecuadorian anti-corruption journalist and presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead in 2023Image: Boris Romoleroux/Agencia Prensa-Independiente/IMAGO
Political violence on the right and left
Worldwide, the list of attacks on presidential candidates is long. Victims include former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who survived being poisoned with dioxin in 2004, as well as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest and former president of Haiti, who was fired on when traveling in a motorcade on March 20, 2017. He escaped uninjured.
"It's irrelevant whether the attack is perpetrated by the left or the right," said political scientist Maihold. In any case, he points out, the attack on Trump doesn't fit the pattern: The shooter was a member of the Republican Party.
"It's more about us reaching a point where polarization is entering a new phase," Maihold said.
He warns that the use of violence is becoming increasingly acceptable.
"This new level of escalation is particularly dramatic in a country like the US, where there is such a high density of weapons," he said.
This article was originally published in German.
Astrid Prange de Oliveira DW editor with expertise in Brazil, globalization and religion
‘Fight, fight, fight!’ or ‘UNITE’? At historic moment, Trump faces rhetorical choice
(Photo illustration by Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; Photo via Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
By Kevin Rector
President Biden said it’s time to “cool it down.” Trump said he’s writing a new message of unity into his planned speech for the Republican National Convention on Thursday. “UNITE AMERICA!” he posted to Truth Social, a social media platform largely built on the divisiveness of Trump’s past political barbs.
Under such a spotlight, and in the wake of what some consider an iconic political moment in modern American history, how are voters and political observers the world over to listen to Trump moving forward? If he calls for unity, should they take him seriously?
Neither Trump’s campaign nor the Republican National Committee, which is working closely with the campaign, responded to a request for comment on Trump’s plans.
But Mercieca and other experts who’ve studied Trump, his image and the way he speaks to his base said they are skeptical that Trump will somehow change his tune now. They said they’ll be listening closely for a message of unity Thursday, but don’t expect it to be his only message — or for it to stick around very long.
“When I reflect back on the nine years that he’s been in public [political] life, he’s been very consistent about how he communicates, and it’s always been a message of projecting strength, of using rhetorical strategies that belittle the opposition,” said Mercieca, a political historian and communications professor at Texas A&M.
“He loves the idea of people uniting if that means uniting behind Trump,” she said. “But as soon as any criticism is lodged at him, he will revert back to his normal, aggressive rhetoric.”
Several experts predicted that Trump will indeed use the attempt on his life to call for unity, but in the short term. In the long term, they say, he is more likely to use it to bolster more divisive political narratives he has long relied on, including the idea that ordinary Americans are under imminent threat from an array of foreign and domestic forces, and that he is the only one who can protect them.
Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy,” said he would be shocked if Trump took up any real notion of unity — like “how Democrats love America, too.”
Instead, Rowland predicted Trump will quickly fall back on “the themes he always falls back on — the nationalist theme, the populist theme that the elites don’t care about you and look down on you, and then the theme that he’s the strongman protector of people.”
Many on the conservative right have reinforced their claim — especially since Saturday’s shooting — that Trump is a religious figure, a man sent by God to defend America and restore Christian values to government.
That idea also could become part of Trump’s message, namely if others around him urge him to incorporate it into his speech Thursday or his stump speech on the campaign trail, Rowland said. But “that kind of rhetoric does not come naturally” to Trump, he said — citing the time that Trump as president walked across Lafayette Park in Washington amid street protests and awkwardly held a Bible outside a local church.
More likely, Rowland said, is that Trump will use the assassination attempt to ratchet up the sort of us-against-them rhetoric.
“Part of his appeal is that he’s the straight talker who will be the defender of these groups who feel put upon by the elites,” Rowland said. After Saturday’s shooting, “the harshness of his rhetoric and what he is going to do to protect them has to leverage up — it can’t become more moderate.”
Ian Haney López, a Berkeley law professor, is the author of two books on political rhetoric in the modern era, including “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.”
Haney López said American voters listening to Trump in the coming days and months will almost certainly hear the same sort of fear- and race-based messaging that he said have defined Trump’s political career from the start.
“The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?” Haney López said.
ADVERTISEMENT
“He’s telling a story of constant and immediate threat that is coming from other people around you — and it can be immigrants, it can be African Americans, Black Lives Matter, it can be transgender people, it can be people insisting on gender equality,” Haney López said.
“He’s saying look at your neighbors, look around you, look at the people near you, but whatever you do, don’t look up. Don’t look up at the billionaire class, don’t look at large shareholders, don’t look at Wall Street, don’t look at the petrochemical industry.”
Haney López said the assassination attempt on Trump will bolster the idea already adopted wholly by Trump and his campaign that white America is “locked into racial conflict,” and that “others” — such as immigrants — “need to be restrained or caged or expelled” to ensure white Americans come out on top.
Mercieca agreed.
“He’s constantly telling his audience that they are the real Americans, they are the good Americans, they are the only ones who count, they have been left behind and humiliated, but he sees them as the good people they are and he will fight for them,” she said. “It’s a politics that is fascist, frankly. It is authoritarian.”
These tactics can be effective politically, she said, but they have consequences. Such rhetoric, she and others warned, spurs the kind of political violence that people on all sides of the political spectrum are denouncing.
Mercieca said data show Trump’s attacks on groups of people have spurred “stochastic terrorism” — or political violence against groups of people targeted with hostile political rhetoric.
Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said such data are everywhere — and undeniable.
SHARDS FROM TELEPROMTER HIT TRUMP'S EAR, NOT A BULLET
Hate crimes against Black people, Levin said, rose when Trump used harsh language to condemn Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. They rose against Asian people when Trump used anti-Chinese rhetoric in speaking about COVID-19. They rose against Latinos when Trump stoked fears about “caravans” of migrants arriving on the southern border.
Levin said “hate rhetoric” is always high during election years, and that everyone — voters, candidates and Trump especially — would be wise to “tone it down.”
Levin said Trump’s next move — and his Thursday speech — matter, but how he and others continue to discuss the stakes of the race from now until November will matter more.
“People are much more likely to embrace bigoted stereotypes when there is a narrative behind it that is repeated and repeated in a way that is entertaining and comforting,” Levin warned. “And you can hear it in the lilt of Trump’s voice.”
More to Read
Abcarian: Don’t let political rhetoric distract you from this truth about the Trump shooting
July 17, 2024
Opinion: This is a turning point for Trump. What will he make of it?
July 17, 2024
Column: Trump betrays call for unity by embracing J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene
July 16, 2024
Kevin Rector
Kevin Rector is a legal affairs reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering the California Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and other legal trends and issues, and chipping in on coverage of the 2024 election. He started with The Times in 2020 and previously covered the Los Angeles Police Department for the paper. Before that, Rector worked at the Baltimore Sun for eight years, where he was a police and investigative reporter and part of a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. More recently, he was part of a Times team awarded the 2023 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress for coverage of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. He is from Maryland.
(Photo illustration by Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; Photo via Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
By Kevin Rector
Staff Writer
July 17, 2024
When Jennifer Mercieca published a book four years ago titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” some of her friends immediately questioned the title. “‘Genius’?” they asked. “Really?”
Mercieca stood by it. She told her friends that, over her many years studying the former president, Trump’s ability to use words and images to promote himself and his agenda stood out again and again as exceptional.
That same skill set was the first thing that came to mind for Mercieca on Saturday, she said, when she watched Trump rise from a bloodied rally stage after being shot, pump his fist in the air and utter an instant political slogan: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“To me, that was a perfectly Trumpian moment,” Mercieca said. “He knows what the scene is. He’s a demagogue of the spectacle. He’s an authoritarian P.T. Barnum.”
In the days since the shooting, elected officials, pundits and other political observers have been focused intensely on political rhetoric and its power to incite violence.
When Jennifer Mercieca published a book four years ago titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” some of her friends immediately questioned the title. “‘Genius’?” they asked. “Really?”
Mercieca stood by it. She told her friends that, over her many years studying the former president, Trump’s ability to use words and images to promote himself and his agenda stood out again and again as exceptional.
That same skill set was the first thing that came to mind for Mercieca on Saturday, she said, when she watched Trump rise from a bloodied rally stage after being shot, pump his fist in the air and utter an instant political slogan: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“To me, that was a perfectly Trumpian moment,” Mercieca said. “He knows what the scene is. He’s a demagogue of the spectacle. He’s an authoritarian P.T. Barnum.”
In the days since the shooting, elected officials, pundits and other political observers have been focused intensely on political rhetoric and its power to incite violence.
He’s an authoritarian P.T. Barnum— Jennifer Mercieca, author, on Donald Trump
President Biden said it’s time to “cool it down.” Trump said he’s writing a new message of unity into his planned speech for the Republican National Convention on Thursday. “UNITE AMERICA!” he posted to Truth Social, a social media platform largely built on the divisiveness of Trump’s past political barbs.
Under such a spotlight, and in the wake of what some consider an iconic political moment in modern American history, how are voters and political observers the world over to listen to Trump moving forward? If he calls for unity, should they take him seriously?
Neither Trump’s campaign nor the Republican National Committee, which is working closely with the campaign, responded to a request for comment on Trump’s plans.
But Mercieca and other experts who’ve studied Trump, his image and the way he speaks to his base said they are skeptical that Trump will somehow change his tune now. They said they’ll be listening closely for a message of unity Thursday, but don’t expect it to be his only message — or for it to stick around very long.
“When I reflect back on the nine years that he’s been in public [political] life, he’s been very consistent about how he communicates, and it’s always been a message of projecting strength, of using rhetorical strategies that belittle the opposition,” said Mercieca, a political historian and communications professor at Texas A&M.
“He loves the idea of people uniting if that means uniting behind Trump,” she said. “But as soon as any criticism is lodged at him, he will revert back to his normal, aggressive rhetoric.”
Several experts predicted that Trump will indeed use the attempt on his life to call for unity, but in the short term. In the long term, they say, he is more likely to use it to bolster more divisive political narratives he has long relied on, including the idea that ordinary Americans are under imminent threat from an array of foreign and domestic forces, and that he is the only one who can protect them.
Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy,” said he would be shocked if Trump took up any real notion of unity — like “how Democrats love America, too.”
Instead, Rowland predicted Trump will quickly fall back on “the themes he always falls back on — the nationalist theme, the populist theme that the elites don’t care about you and look down on you, and then the theme that he’s the strongman protector of people.”
Many on the conservative right have reinforced their claim — especially since Saturday’s shooting — that Trump is a religious figure, a man sent by God to defend America and restore Christian values to government.
That idea also could become part of Trump’s message, namely if others around him urge him to incorporate it into his speech Thursday or his stump speech on the campaign trail, Rowland said. But “that kind of rhetoric does not come naturally” to Trump, he said — citing the time that Trump as president walked across Lafayette Park in Washington amid street protests and awkwardly held a Bible outside a local church.
More likely, Rowland said, is that Trump will use the assassination attempt to ratchet up the sort of us-against-them rhetoric.
“Part of his appeal is that he’s the straight talker who will be the defender of these groups who feel put upon by the elites,” Rowland said. After Saturday’s shooting, “the harshness of his rhetoric and what he is going to do to protect them has to leverage up — it can’t become more moderate.”
Ian Haney López, a Berkeley law professor, is the author of two books on political rhetoric in the modern era, including “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.”
The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?— Ian Haney López, law professor
Haney López said American voters listening to Trump in the coming days and months will almost certainly hear the same sort of fear- and race-based messaging that he said have defined Trump’s political career from the start.
“The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?” Haney López said.
ADVERTISEMENT
“He’s telling a story of constant and immediate threat that is coming from other people around you — and it can be immigrants, it can be African Americans, Black Lives Matter, it can be transgender people, it can be people insisting on gender equality,” Haney López said.
“He’s saying look at your neighbors, look around you, look at the people near you, but whatever you do, don’t look up. Don’t look up at the billionaire class, don’t look at large shareholders, don’t look at Wall Street, don’t look at the petrochemical industry.”
Haney López said the assassination attempt on Trump will bolster the idea already adopted wholly by Trump and his campaign that white America is “locked into racial conflict,” and that “others” — such as immigrants — “need to be restrained or caged or expelled” to ensure white Americans come out on top.
Mercieca agreed.
“He’s constantly telling his audience that they are the real Americans, they are the good Americans, they are the only ones who count, they have been left behind and humiliated, but he sees them as the good people they are and he will fight for them,” she said. “It’s a politics that is fascist, frankly. It is authoritarian.”
These tactics can be effective politically, she said, but they have consequences. Such rhetoric, she and others warned, spurs the kind of political violence that people on all sides of the political spectrum are denouncing.
Mercieca said data show Trump’s attacks on groups of people have spurred “stochastic terrorism” — or political violence against groups of people targeted with hostile political rhetoric.
Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said such data are everywhere — and undeniable.
SHARDS FROM TELEPROMTER HIT TRUMP'S EAR, NOT A BULLET
Hate crimes against Black people, Levin said, rose when Trump used harsh language to condemn Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. They rose against Asian people when Trump used anti-Chinese rhetoric in speaking about COVID-19. They rose against Latinos when Trump stoked fears about “caravans” of migrants arriving on the southern border.
Levin said “hate rhetoric” is always high during election years, and that everyone — voters, candidates and Trump especially — would be wise to “tone it down.”
Levin said Trump’s next move — and his Thursday speech — matter, but how he and others continue to discuss the stakes of the race from now until November will matter more.
“People are much more likely to embrace bigoted stereotypes when there is a narrative behind it that is repeated and repeated in a way that is entertaining and comforting,” Levin warned. “And you can hear it in the lilt of Trump’s voice.”
More to Read
Abcarian: Don’t let political rhetoric distract you from this truth about the Trump shooting
July 17, 2024
Opinion: This is a turning point for Trump. What will he make of it?
July 17, 2024
Column: Trump betrays call for unity by embracing J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene
July 16, 2024
Kevin Rector
Kevin Rector is a legal affairs reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering the California Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and other legal trends and issues, and chipping in on coverage of the 2024 election. He started with The Times in 2020 and previously covered the Los Angeles Police Department for the paper. Before that, Rector worked at the Baltimore Sun for eight years, where he was a police and investigative reporter and part of a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. More recently, he was part of a Times team awarded the 2023 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress for coverage of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. He is from Maryland.
No comments:
Post a Comment