The Attack on Trump and Two Lasting Images

Former President Donald Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents at a campaign rally July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. | Evan Vucci/AP

A prediction: two images will survive from July 2024. The first, an image of proper pride, was captured by photographer Evan Vucci. It manages to capture dignity, guts, that fighting spirit the ancient Greeks called thumos, and the particular pluck that belongs to Americans. It depicts Donald Trump, bloodied from an assassin’s bullet that grazed, but did not split, his head while he spoke in Butler, Pennsylvania. Having been pushed down by Secret Service agents, he stands again, raising a fist with Old Glory flying defiantly behind him. We know from the video that he is shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” before being whisked off to the medical authorities (as seen above).

The other image represents everything that has gone wrong with leftist Democratic politics in the last decade—at least. It is the cover of the once venerable, but now despicable, New Republic. It depicts Donald Trump as Adolf Hitler, with “American Fascism” written in a Germanic script below the picture. History doesn’t have an arc, as the so-called progressives like to say, but if there is any just rendering of our times, this second image will be seen in the way that vile depictions of black Americans or Jews are now—as an instantly recognizable image of a political culture that has gone desperately wrong.   

The full facts behind the assassination attempt on Donald Trump are far from in, but this much can be said: the attempt on Trump’s life took place in a climate of political hatred of which that New Republic cover will remain an enduring symbol. The claim that Donald Trump is a fascist, a Nazi, or a would-be Hitler might seem ridiculous and even funny if it were not for the events that precipitated our first picture. After all, given Mr. Trump’s Jewish grandchildren and his record of wholehearted support for Israel—including the fulfillment of the long-desired moving of the U. S. Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—if he were the man of the tiny mustache, he would be the worst Hitler ever!

Indeed, it’s all a bunch of hooey. There is nothing even remotely tyrannical about Donald Trump. We know that from his first term. When media, large portions of the medical community, and our vast bureaucracy were whipping the populace into fear about Covid-19, there were a great many political figures who used the pandemic to seize a form of tyrannical power over American businesses and private lives. They were almost all Democratic office holders or bureaucrats: California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s J. B. Pritzker, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and Minnesota’s Tim Walz were some of the provincial governors who made their historical predecessors seem less invasive and more honest.

Indeed, if there remains a criticism of Donald Trump from his first term, it is that maybe he should have done more to override these petty dictators and their courts full of social workers and neurotic doctors aching to command the movements of ordinary Americans. But he leaned on the federal understanding of our country and allowed red and blue state governments to exercise authority.

Trump was and is no Hitler or Mussolini. He wasn’t a Nero, a Caligula, or a Genghis Khan. He was and is no tyrant at all. 

Nor are any of the other Republicans serving in any office anywhere.

But that has not stopped the Left and Democrats from labeling them so. Given the lack of historical grounding, they haven’t gone for Roman, Mongol, or even Italian labels. It’s Germany all the way down. They have been labeling Republican presidential candidates since the distinctly non-threatening Wendell Wilkie as would-be Hitlers until they lose or move out of the White House. And over eighty years, they have spoken to enough ignoramuses and ideologues to have convinced some of them to take seriously such ridiculous claims.

Over the last decade, actual attacks on Republicans have become almost a regular event as the left has boasted about their willingness to “punch Nazis.” A Bernie Bro shot up a field full of Republican Congressmen and managed to nearly kill Representative Steve Scalise. There was an assassination attempt on New York Congressman Lee Zeldin. An enraged neighbor attacked Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, breaking several of his ribs. An attempt to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was foiled. This is not even to mention the widespread riots of 2016 (after Trump’s election) and, most significantly, 2020.

Not only have Democrats failed to denounce this violence strongly enough, but they have also been reckless in creating a climate in which the unbalanced or criminals will find a kind of license to act. They did nothing about the left-wing protests held at Supreme Court justices’ homes, despite the fact that such intimidation of our independent judiciary is illegal and that that plot to kill Brett Kavanaugh happened two years ago.

These days, almost every Democratic politician and media surrogate tells the American people regularly that Donald Trump and the Republicans are “an existential threat” or a “threat to our democracy.” Perhaps even that a victory by them would mean “an end to elections.” Joe Biden’s communications team regularly has Joe tweeting that Trump is a “tyrant” and calling for him to be put in a “bullseye.” Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman declared to talk show host Jen Psaki that Trump was such a threat that he must be “eliminated.”

Of course, from the perspective of a ruling class whose puppet president seems to have broken most of his strings, there is an existential threat to their own ability to stay on top. A Trump Administration II would be much more capable of facing the onslaught of the deep state, about which current defenders of Joe Biden are busy insisting both that it doesn’t exist and is also really taking care of things. So, no worry if the Big Guy thinks Zelensky is Putin, Trump is Kamala, and he himself is the first black woman vice president.

After nearly nine years of demonization, Donald Trump is holding steady in the polls, Joe Biden is barely sentient, and there are no solid replacements for him readily available. Existential threat indeed. Thus, there must be enough demonization to justify the pseudo-legal and extra-legal maneuvers involved in the lawfare and the attempts to “fortify” the election in various battleground states. (More on this next week.)

But even this is considerably different from what some people will hear when Trump is called an “existential threat” to be “eliminated.” They might think that our own country or their own lives are at stake. And people who believe their lives are at stake do desperate things. Democrats in power are responsible for what these people might do, especially if proposing, as they did a mere two months ago, to strip President Trump’s Secret Service protection. Especially not when the Secret Service director has recently refused a request for a beefed-up security detail.

Given that the Democrats have been involved in massive lawfare to stop Donald Trump, such patterns of political and administrative behavior, when combined with their rhetoric, will make many people start to wonder just how grave the consequences of their conduct have been and will be in the future.

President Trump survived his own assassination attempt. But an innocent man died, and two were critically injured. This violence must be laid at the foot of those who did it, whatever their direct motivation was. But what must also be discussed is the conduct of the Left and the Democrats and their media adjuncts, who have used words and actions that dangerous people will take as a signal to do violence on their behalf. This must be challenged over and over again.

 We should indeed hear that warning in every speech. As we hear it, we should see that New Republic cover held in the hand as if it were a piece of filth, a symbol of the rhetorical violence that helps produce real political violence. The kind of violence that leaves ordinary Americans out to support their candidate dead and wounded.

But we should see too that picture of Donald Trump, standing beneath the flag, fists in the air, ready to fight against the forces that are tearing our country apart. Whatever some want to say of Donald Trump, he is no tyrant nor dictator. He is an American patriot who served his country faithfully in the office of the presidency. God willing, he will serve it again. Not on behalf of that class who believe they are born to rule. On behalf of ordinary Americans who are tired of being classified as extremists, tired of being told they are the dangerous ones, even as the violence breaks out against them and those who represent them.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.