Front Burner - Trump assassination attempt: What’s next for U.S democracy?

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

In the wake of the apparent assassination attempt on former U.S. president Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, we look at the potential for an event like this to ratchet up further political violence, and how pivotal this moment could be for a democracy already in crisis.Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp is our guest. His forthcoming book, The Reactionary Spirit, looks at global challenges to democracy.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So just after 6 p.m. on Saturday night, shots rang out at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. If you want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened. According to the former U.S. president, one of the bullets hit his right ear. Here is some of what we know right now as of Sunday evening.

One rally attendee was killed and at least two were critically injured. The shooter, who made his way onto a nearby rooftop before he started firing with an AR-15, was shot and killed by a sniper. Multiple reports quote law enforcement officials saying he had explosive materials inside his car. We do not currently know his motivations. We do know that he was a registered Republican, but that at one point he also made a $15 donation to a Democratic super PAC. The FBI is investigating the shooting as an assassination attempt. The FBI has received 2,600 tips already. This is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism. Today on the show, we're going to talk to Zach Beecham. Zach is a senior correspondent at Vox,

where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy. He also has a book coming out on Tuesday called The Reactionary Spirit. And the reason that we wanted to have Zach on today is to talk about how pivotal this moment could be for a democracy that many people believe is already in crisis and what could happen next. All right, let's get into it. crisis and what could happen next. All right, let's get into it. Zach, thank you so much for coming on to the show today. Thank you, Jamie. I wish it was under better circumstances, but it is always great to talk to you. Yeah, me too. Me too. I want to start with the image that I imagine will come to not just

define this campaign, but will probably be one of the most indelible images in American history, which is Trump with a bloody ear, two lines of blood across his face. He's being pulled off stage by a whole bunch of Secret Service agents, and he is pumping his fist in the air. And tell me what you think that image represents or will come to represent to Americans. I mean, for Trump supporters, a large portion of what they like about him is bound up in the word defiance, right? Or rebellion, maybe. They believe that the current system is failing them, and we can debate the specific reasons they think that.

But that's really – that's what they believe, right? And when they see Trump standing up and saying, fight, fight, fight. For his supporters, this is everything they wanted out of him, an avatar of their willingness to stand up and say, no more is this going to happen to us. From their point of view, that's really – that's what this means. this going to happen to us? From their point of view, that's really, that's what this means. Right. Because we're talking about the photo, but the video shows him pumping his fist and he is saying, fight, fight, fight. Right. We're talking at around 2.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday. And beyond the fight, fight, fight, how else has Trump responded so far? fight. How else has Trump responded so far? He has been much more measured than I frankly expected. Trump has issued statements saying that he's fine, issuing condolences for the family of at least one person who was killed by the shooter at the rally pretty normally by the benchmark that

one uses to assess how a politician acts after just having been attempted to be assassinated. What do you think he meant when he said fight, fight, fight? I mean, with the caveat that I'm sure there was a lot of adrenaline happening at the moment. You see this a lot in the way that other Republicans, not Trump currently, are talking about it, the events of the shooting. They present it as something that they did to him as part of a long series of actions that they are responsible for, including attempting to get Trump kicked off the ballot, including indicting him, including convicting him in New York. And while these were actually the actions of a series of discrete different actors, it wasn't like a big conspiracy against Donald Trump. And we have no evidence whatsoever that the shooter in Pennsylvania had any affiliations to any kind of cause yet. Maybe he will.

Maybe he won't. Right now, the evidence fits much more with the kind of John Hinckley Jr. model of a kind of deranged individual man doing something for inscrutable reasons. This was the attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, right? Right. And in 1981, Hinckley was a kind of deranged person who wanted to impress Jodie Foster, who at that point was about an 18-year-old actor. And so he shot Reagan to try to get Foster's attention. The evidence doesn't show that that's true

conclusively right now, but my read based on, so there's a recent interview with one of his classmates, the current shooter who said he was a constantly bullied loner. He was bullied almost every day. I mean, he would sit alone at lunch. I mean, he was just a outcast and you know how kids are nowadays. So they're going to see someone like that and they going to target him because they think it's funny or whatever. So it's honestly kind of sad. Like you said, it was a loner. Yeah. Um, I want to say he was a loner more because he was just, he was quiet, but like he was just bullied. Like he was bullied so much, so much. Uh, all of that points in the direction of not the kind of political assassination that many of us feared that it was going to be going into the shooting. Now, evidence might emerge that it does fit that model more.

We don't know yet. Yeah. But I emphasize right now that it's not consistent with the evidence to show how Republicans are going to read Trump's exhortation to fight. Right? He's saying that in direct response to what happened to him, and I don't think he really thought it through at the moment that someone almost killed him, but the way that it's going to be read, whatever the motivation, is that it was an exhortation to do battle against the liberals, right?

That this is part of the fight against Trump and they need to fight back. Right, that this is part of part of the fight against Trump and they need to fight back. assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse. Vance had a similar post. And just flesh that out a little bit more for me. Yeah, yeah. Vance's is actually worse. I want to read it because it's really quite astonishing. He wrote, and this was at 8.20 p.m. the night of the assassination attempt, the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. Zero evidence for those claims, right? None, none whatsoever, directly saying that Joe Biden is the person who inspired the shooting, right?

That's a really big claim to make, one that would require pretty detailed evidence, right? None of it exists, at least as far as we know right now. And it's certainly, as far as Vance knew then, it's the most irresponsible way of responding to something as serious as an attempted attack on the former president's life that I could possibly imagine. And there are many others like it from Republicans. So for example, Georgia Republican Congressman Mike Collins posted, quote, Joe Biden sent the orders. And Trump campaign surrogate Nick Adams posted on social media, quote, Joe Biden's rhetoric is directly responsible. There can be no discussion. This is a fact. What have you been seeing from, you know, average Americans on both the left and right so far? How have people been talking about this attempted assassination online?

And, you know, and what do you, how are you reacting to that? So it's a difficult question, right? Because what's happening online isn't representative of the ordinary American. I was thinking that when I was asking the question, it might not actually be in the average American. Yeah. And so it's kind of hard to say, right? But one thing that you're seeing that's notable on both sides,

really, is a proliferation of conspiratorial thinking about what just happened. So the night of the attack on Twitter, two terms phrased. One of them was staged, and the other one was inside job, right? And the staged one is a bunch of people on the left saying that Trump must have done the set it up to get a perfect photo op because they couldn't believe how striking that photo that you referenced at the beginning was, right? And then on the other side, you have Republicans, some people, conservatives saying this was an inside job by the Secret Service that they were in on it. That's why they managed to let this guy get so close. And clearly, it's more evidence that someone is out to get Donald Trump.

There's no evidence for either of these claims, right? But it is a sign of a polity that is in serious trouble that people leap to that so quickly. And honestly, maybe people always would have. Maybe it's not just a unique United States at this point in time, but now that we have social media, they can broadcast it and spread it really easily. Yeah. And it's so rife. Yeah. It's just everywhere. It's just everywhere. And I saw these accounts circulating from witnesses at the rally who are saying that they were trying to warn police about this guy on the roof. We're pointing at him. The police are down there running around on the ground. We're like, hey, man, there's a guy on the roof with a rifle. And the police are like, huh, what? You know, like they didn't know what was going on. You know, we're like, hey, right here on the roof,

we can see him from right here. We see him. You know, he's crawling. And next thing you know, five shots ring out. So now those interviews are being used by both sides to kind of fuel their respective positions, right? Like their respective accounts that, you know, certainly are very conspiratorial at this juncture. How about the Democrats? You know, what have we heard from President Joe Biden and other Democrats here? seen from a major elected Democrat has been political violence is unacceptable in this country. We are praying for the health of Donald Trump or something to that effect. So we're thankful he's doing well. Good afternoon. Last night, I spoke with Donald Trump. I'm sincerely grateful that he's doing well and recovering. And we had a short but good conversation. Phil and I are keeping him and his family in our prayers. We also extend our... That's like basic.

It's like expectation at the floor for a political party in a democracy making the case that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy because he remains to be, right? Nothing about the shooting has changed the underlying reality of American politics, which is that Trump is proposing a lot of stuff for a second term that would be quite dangerous to the health of the system itself. To make that argument in a world where Republicans are currently saying that that precise rhetoric has produced violence. But as the party running against Trump in the election that's still happening, you can't just roll over and say, okay, the most important issue in the election is off limits because Republicans say it needs to be. So the higher bar for the Democrats and the thing that they'll need to do going forward is show that they can continue to prosecute the campaign, given what happened yesterday. And I think their efficacy in doing so will depend to some real degree on the motives of the shooter,, again, we still don't know.

Let's talk a little bit more about how you think this event is likely to affect the election. We're talking less than 24 hours after the shooting, and already there are websites selling souvenir t-shirts with that image of a bloody Trump that we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation. And how do you think this event is likely to affect the election, or at least how motivating might it be for potential Republican voters? I don't know how it's going to affect the polls exactly. What I can tell you with some confidence is it will motivate his base, right? For them, it will really matter.

Now, my best guess is that when that base is more motivated, especially if Republicans continue these really kind of obscene attacks on Democrats that they're engaging in, that'll motivate the Democratic base in response. And you'll end up getting an election that has felt so far at least characterized by people who don't really like either side trying to make up their minds in a year where nobody except for a handful of people are really thrilled about the proceedings into a very, very, very high profile election. The sleepiness that some of us in the political press felt earlier this year surrounding the campaign is gone. That is done. And what about the Democrats who have been in, just coming back to them for a moment,

who have been in disarray over whether or not Biden will step down? Does this event change things for them? I think for Democrats, the issue is less that the events change their strategic calculation and more that it affects their capacity to do anything on the Biden front. They're scrambling right now to try to figure out how to handle this, right? How to updating their plans for the RNC and how to respond to it. There's a whole host of things that you need to do as a political party when you've got a massive and unpredictable event changing the way that people think and talk

about the election. That work is going to take up energy that otherwise might have been devoted to efforts to get Biden off of the ticket. Because the truth is that the default state of affairs is Joe Biden stays. To get him out, you need pretty extraordinary efforts. And I don't know if the Democratic Party was capable of that before this happened. It's definitely less capable of it now. So while my own personal view is that Biden needs to get out if the Democrats want to win, I don't know if they're going to be able to make that happen at this point. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I want to move on from the kind of machinations of the horse race here and talk about the bigger picture, which is what is at stake for American society?

Let's get into that a bit more. What this might set in motion or what it might accelerate. A couple of years ago, you wrote this piece for Vox looking at the broader crisis in American democracy, and you wrote that the most likely flashpoint for a major escalation of political violence was a presidential election. And just tell me a little bit about why. So one thing that we know from the political science research about attempted political killings is that they tend to come from a place of emotion more than anything else. The people that engage in them, they aren't like this sort of Hollywood stereotype of a cold assassin who's used to killing people and is getting paid a lot to take out a world leader. Now, the more likely scenario is somebody who's really, really angry

about something. Either they're mentally disturbed and they're angry or impassioned for some inscrutable cause that's really only comprehensible to them, or they're angry about politics and they have poor impulse control and they feel a need to lash out. And when are people most emotionally invested in politics, most likely either to latch on to a political figure as part of some kind of mental fixation or to really be upset by what's going on in the world around them? It's at times when people are really paying attention and when the stakes of politics feel really high. That's during elections. And that's what I was worried about when I worked on that two years ago, right? Then the next election cycle, when things got really heated, maybe even closer to the election, I had feared, or in the days after it, we'd see more violence.

And sadly, that came to pass. Yeah. The fact that this is happening at a time where people are already so divided and so polarized, these divisions and these polarizations have been going on for some time now, right? What does that mean for it to happen now? I mean, American politics has been in a bad way for quite some time now. I mean, we can disagree on when to date it, but I think that the era of hyperpolarization that we're currently in, it's been coming on for a while, but it really began in the Obama presidency. And since then, the divisions between the two parties and their hardcore supporters

have become more and more calcified. People's opinions of people in the out party have grown more and more negative. And it creates a situation that political scientists, when they try to measure polarization, see few parallels to in the modern history of democracy. Very few other countries like the United States, a wealthy industrialized place with a long history of democracy have seen anything like this level of rancor between its major political parties. And that's just getting worse. And everything that feeds into it, it sort of gets submerged in the maelstrom of anger and fear that defines the basic terms of engagement in American politics. It's what makes me so worried about the comments by people like Vance,

because that's just pouring fuel on the fire. It's saying, oh, you already hate and fear the other side? Let me tell you, this new event, the shocking event, the attempt on the life of the guy you want to vote for for president, this means you should hate and fear them more. Yeah. And, you know, of course, the worry is that then there will be more people that think that the violence is justified, right? And just it strikes me that not only has this period of political division

been going on for a while now, so has this period of political violence. I don't know if you would agree with this, but, you know, Charlottesville, January 6th. It seems that this isn't the beginning of something, that America is very much already in it. No, I think people also have too narrow a vision of what political violence is like. There are more examples, right? For instance, the 2017 shooting at the Republican Congressional Baseball Games team practice, where now current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise was very seriously injured by a left-wing gunman. That's a classic example of partisan violence. But there are other kinds of political violence. And here I think of the many mass shootings in the United States that have been linked back to some kind of far-right racist worldview, be it the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,

the attack on a Buffalo supermarket that was in a predominantly Black area, the shooting at an El Paso Walmart that was frequented by a Latino population, all of these were linked back very explicitly by the killers themselves to far-right extremism and extremist views that are often very similar to those spouted by some people well inside the Republican mainstream. So that's a form of political violence, right? It's indicative of deepening social faults and identity lines becoming a really sharp divider between different kinds of Americans. And ones that are linked kind of indirectly to partisan politics, like it's not the same thing as trying to kill the leader of an opposing political party,

but it also is reflective of the way in which partisan politics and the divisions that fuel it, which are very much set up along race, religion, and other identity-based lines, cause people to fear for their very sense of place in the country. And so there are a lot of people in the United States, especially a certain kind of white person who thinks that they're losing the country that they grew up with and radical steps are justified in order to preserve that. It's very consistent with the Republican message. You can't always draw a straight line there, but it is a form of political violence in the sense that it is violence motivated by an effort to do something about what they see

as political corruption inside the United States and political rot inside the United States. And more specifically, it's anti-system political violence. And that has been a pretty recurrent feature of American politics for the past few years. This is less deadly than some of those shootings were, but it's also an escalation in another sense because of the profile of the target and what it might mean in terms of provoking future escalation down the line. In an article that you published in the wake of the assassination attempt this weekend, you published for Vox, you made a comparison to a period in Italian history called the Years of Lead. And just briefly, what were the Years of Lead? And why are you making that historical parallel? Yeah.

So starting around 1969, for a period about 15 years long, Italian politics was shaped profoundly by a kind of – you could call it a low-level war. You could call it persistent terrorism, heightened violence, but really extreme actions by far left and far right militias, including bombings and high profile assassinations. The reason I bring that up as a parallel is that people often talk about, and you can see even trending on Twitter, the phrase civil war in the United States. There was a movie this year by Alex Garland called Civil War, which was actually better than people gave it credit for. But there are a lot of ambient fears about political violence and civil war in the United States. And I really don't think an actual civil war is very plausible in the sense of there being something like either the 1861-style states dividing against each other or even an insurgency against the federal government

that's organized and, I don't know, attacking National Guard troop convoys in rural Georgia or whatever. I don't think either of those scenarios are especially likely. But what is plausible in a kind of worst-case scenario in the United States is that an act of violence that's perceived as coming from one side, whether genuinely or not, provokes some kind of violent escalation from the extreme French on the other. Most Americans, the vast majority, do not condone political violence in polling data. But there is a minority that does, and those people can be activated. And nothing activates violence like more violence. And I'm not saying this is likely now. What I am saying is that if there were a situation that would push us towards something like the years of lead, of tit-for-tat violence between extremist groups, it would start like this. It would start like this. I just hope it doesn't end that way. Okay. That seems like a dark, but a good place for us to end this conversation.

Zach, thank you so much as always for coming on. Thank you, Jamie. I really appreciate it. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.