Gunfire on Trump's campaign

The bomber, who was killed immediately by security agents, was named Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was 20 years old, class of 2024, little more than a boy, and from Bethel Park, 10 miles south of Pittsburgh. He was registered to vote for Republicans, but had donated to Democrats in 2017. Difficult at the moment to understand his real motivations, whether it was the isolated act of a lone wolf or whether there was something else behind it. Time will perhaps help to tell.

What is certain is that Butler's fair firing is bound to weigh heavily in this contentious race for the White House, with an elderly and clearly struggling president remaining in the race despite the disastrous outcome of the first televised confrontation and all the calls for him to step back.

The image of Trump with his fist raised will become iconic, historic. The strongest perhaps of his entire political career. And it will probably help him win the election. According to many observers, Trump in the coming months will increase his lead in the polls by playing the victim, the martyr or the American hero, which so appeals to a certain type of America that appreciates the strength and courage of the Commander-in-chief.

After the assassination attempt, the former president immediately issued a statement thanking the secret service and law enforcement agencies, expressing his condolences to the other victims and offering a dramatic account of the moment.

"I was shot with a bullet that pierced the top of my right ear," he wrote in Truth. "I immediately knew something was wrong because I heard a hissing sound, gunshots, and immediately felt the bullet rip through my skin. There was a lot of bleeding, so I knew what was going on. GOD BLESS AMERICA!"

"There is something in the American spirit that likes to see fortitude and courage under pressure, and the fact that Trump raised his fist will become a new symbol," Brinkley said. "By surviving an assassination attempt, you become a martyr, because you get a wave of public sympathy," Douglas Brinkley, historian of the American presidency at Rice University in Houston, Texas, told the Washington Post.

Trump's campaign team has confirmed its participation in the Republican Convention that starts tomorrow, Monday 15 July, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and will end on Thursday 19 July, with the former president's official nomination for the 5 November election. Convention in which Trump will unveil the name of his vice presidential candidate and try to unite the Grand Old Party behind his vision for the country.

Immediately after the attack, President Biden, speaking from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, condemned the shooting. Biden's campaign team meanwhile suspended his communications and cancelled all anti-Trump TV spots. "There's no place in America for this kind of violence," Biden said in a statement from the Rehoboth Beach Police Department. "It can't be this way. We cannot tolerate this."

Violence took over from the previously dominant narrative of the campaign: the Democratic turmoil following Biden's debate performance and the desire of many Democrats for him to step aside for a younger candidate.

"The political consequences of this assassination attempt will be immense and will benefit Donald Trump, who reacted to the shooting in exactly the same way Teddy Roosevelt did," former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt wrote on social media.

Butler's assassination attempt outraged, electrified and emboldened Republicans, who cheered Trump's clenched fist in the wake of the shooting. In polarised America, Trump's attempted assassination will become the leitmotif of the Republican campaign, and he the surviving hero for America. Trump's sons immediately reacted to their father's assassination attempt with a sense of triumph. 'He will never stop fighting to save America,' Donald Trump Jr. wrote on x, with a photo of his father's raised fist.

On social media there are those who in these hours evoke the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, which many Democrats immediately attributed to the right-wing hostilities faced by the then president in Dallas. Roles reversed.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan had a 22-point jump in the polls after the assassination attempt. Trump, according to more than one analyst, already ahead in the polls, will increase the support around him after the bombing. And in all likelihood he is setting himself up for a landslide victory in the next election.