All the benefits of martyrdom

The failed assassination attempt against Donald Trump lets commentators write about a symbol rather than the man who's actually running.

Previously: Weird fantasies about Keir Starmer
Whether delighted about the Labour government or distraught, the British press is responding to the new administration with reliable oddness.

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The defining image of Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign might have been his mugshot from a Georgia jail taken last year as he was indicted on a range of charges including racketeering. Now, it’s likely to be of him raising his fist in defiance with a bloody face in the moments after this weekend’s failed assassination attempt. Motivated observers have granted the photo instant iconic status, a perfect artefact to enable all kinds of projection.

With tedious inevitability, one of the best examples of that tendency comes from Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph, who concludes his column (Trump has now become an unstoppable force) with breathless hyperbole:

The photographs are astonishing: the bullet zipping through the air; Trump on the floor, as if in prayer; then elevated by security, crowned by the Stars and Stripes fluttering over their heads. The latter image looks, in composition, similar to the famous shot of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima in 1945. America revives, Trump survives. And lashed to the great whale are his opponents, drowned by the very beast they have tried to harpoon. 

Luck and circumstance for Trump are turned divine in the corporate Christianity-soaked world of American politics. The former president — a man who said his favourite bible verse was “all of them” — has already claimed “God alone saved me”. Texas governor, Greg Abbott, declared that Trump is “truly blessed”. Stanley’s column is another formulation of that idea — turning Trump more into a symbol than a man.

Stanley isn’t the only British newspaper columnist to evoke Joe Rosenthal’s image of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima. For The Daily Mail, Andrew Neil writes:

For Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement this will now become the totemic image of his candidacy. It will remind his true believers of the iconic image of US Marines planting a huge flag on a hilltop after the brutal battle to take the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese in early 1945.

His conclusion is more blunt than the one Stanley offers. It avoids clumsy attempts at poetry to state:

So far, in the aftermath of the shooting, [Trump’s] remained remarkably restrained. He needs to stay that way even in front of his adoring faithful in Milwaukee, for whom he is now a living MAGA martyr.

The Donald Trump who cheered on physical assaults of protestors at his rallies, who boasted that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote, whose inaugural address lingered on visions of “American carnage”, who dreamt of a border moat filled with alligators and snakes, who mocked the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and who encouraged the January 6 attack on the Capitol is now being painted as the uncomplicated victim of violent rhetoric.

In The New York Times, the critic Jason Farago draws a sharp distinction between the reality of the events at that Pennsylvania rally and the snapshot caught by the photos:

 If we had seen the attack on former President Donald J. Trump only through television footage, it would have appeared shocking, but also chaotic and muddled. The candidate dives to the rostrum after an assassin’s bullet grazes his ear. Secret Service agents jump in. He gets back on his feet, gestures to the crowd and is rushed out to cheers.

The still images of the assassination attempt — by Doug Mills of The New York Times, and by photographers from The Associated Press and Reuters — tell another story. Blood running from Mr. Trump’s ear to his lips testifies to how close the former president had come to death. His raised fist offers a highly legible refusal to capitulate. To the television cameras, everything was pandemonium. In the lens of the still camera, the horror of the attack was translated into embodiments of authority, defiance and near martyrdom.

There’s that m-word again. One person was killed and two were critically injured in the attack but the image in focus is the one of Trump with his fist in the air. It’s the anchor for columns predicting an ‘inevitable’ Trump win and a symbol that allows British commentators to bring out their familiar material on ‘political violence’ on this side of the Atlantic.

In The Times, Trevor Phillips turns the success of some independents in the recent general election into a warning that “the politics of rationality are being crushed by the politics of recognition”, while Edward Lucas, who failed in his attempt to become a Lib Dem MP, wraps his own experience of rudeness on the doorsteps up with the murders of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. Over in The Daily Telegraph, Nick Timothy, who recently became an MP, plays the same familiar tune arguing that “political violence is normal here too”.

Jackboots at the despatch box and in the comment section

The violent rhetoric of the right-wing newspapers themselves, from dehumanising entire groups to howling headlines like ‘Crush the saboteurs’ and ‘Enemies of the people’, is exempt from this kind of criticism. The stochastic terrorism of columnists whose output contributed to the world view of the man who killed Cox or the individual who firebombed an immigration centre in Dover in December 2022 before taking his own life is diminished.

The way violence in the British political system is framed by commentators as more frequently bottom-up rather than top-down is a more parochial version of the way Trump’s contribution to even bloodier rhetoric in the US is being swept away by this new image. The shocking nature of the events at that Pennsylvania rally allows the conversation to be simplified to the obvious and necessary denunciations.

Thousands of Trump’s words and deeds are outweighed by the power of that photo. The glee of those who would love to see him back in the Oval Office is summed up in a line from the Daily Mail’s leader column on the shooting:

The would-be assassin may, ironically, have handed Mr Trump the rhetorical ammunition he needs to once again become the world’s most powerful man.

The editorial exploitation of the shooter’s violent act will continue right through to the election in November. In The New York Times, Charles Blow wonders whether voters’ empathy for Trump after the attack will “allow some of [them] to set aside legitimate worries about the destructive potential of a second Trump term”. Talk of Trump’s resilience and defiance — which Blow echoes in his column — will do that work for him.

That the character captured in the photograph is not the person Trump actually is will not matter when it’s shown over and over again. In modern politics and media, the meme transcends the man.

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