The Chaser Report - Trump Assassination Attempt: What Happens Next? | David Smith

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

In this uncharacteristically joke-free episode, Dom Knight is joined by Associate Professor David Smith of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney to try and make sense of today's assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennyslvania. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom, without Charles, but with once again Associate Professor Dave Smith of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney on look, a momentous day by anyone's standards. David, welcome back. Good to be back. So it's a quarter to five on Sunday the 14th of July, a day on which Australians woke up to the news,

that former President Donald Trump had narrowly survived an assassination attempt. I saw an email about this and went on social media and, like so many of us, saw the bloody footage of him speaking about Joe Biden being the worst president ever, and then moments later clutching his ear, going to the ground as the Secret Service, swarmed upon him. And then we now know seconds after that, the shooter was himself shot dead, presumably by the Secret Service. David, do you remember the moment you found out this news? Where were you? I was in bed. I got a message saying, seen the news, and I immediately opened up one of my many news apps on the phone. And the first thing I saw was that picture that has become so iconic.

So, yes, I do remember this very well. And I think that, like many people, I found out about it visually at the same time that I found out about what it was. This is going to be an event that is really defined by very clear, images of what was happening. If we think back to the Kennedy assassination, all that they've got of that is 27 seconds of very grainy footage. The people are still arguing over what actually happened during that event. This is quite different.

We've got this really clear video footage, really clear audio footage. You can hear how Trump reacted. You can hear what the secret service people were saying. Yeah, he wanted to go back for his shoes. Yes, yeah. Yeah, and photos from so many different angles of what happened. So hopefully there's not going to be the kind of debate over what's actually happened this time

as you got over the Kennedy assassination, although I'm sure there are people who are going to be claiming that this is not what it seemed and it was all staged. But I won't try to preempt that. But yeah, this is a really remarkable event. Well, let's recap what we know at this point after this. So the FBI's come out and named the would-be assassin as Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was on the rooftop.

And this is the thing, there's so much footage out there. There's footage of the sniper seemingly on the roof. And there are lots of questions, legitimate questions, I'd say, about exactly how someone got on a roof so close with such an obvious line of sight to the former president without it being secured. So there's all these complicated questions. He was from Bethel Park in Pennsylvania, 70 kilometres from Butler, where it happened.

Yes, shot dead by the Secret Service at the time. And certainly I've seen some reports that he was a registered Republican, bizarrely enough. Although then I've seen he's 20, so not old enough to vote necessarily. So, I mean, this is just completely bizarre. He's 120 metres away from the stage at an apparently unsecured location. Yeah, so I'm seeing that he was a registered Republican, but that a few months before he became a registered Republican, he made a $15 donation to Act Blue,

which is a liberal pack. And this is in 2021. So this would have been just after he turned 18. So, okay, there's obviously a lot that we don't know at the moment. But what we do know is that 20-year-old men are some of the people who are the least worried about risk and have some of the worst judgment. And there's a reason why men in this demographic are always very much overrepresented in violent crime. statistics. And it is unfortunately very easy in the state of Pennsylvania for someone to obtain a semi-automatic rifle. So I haven't seen confirmations of the reports yet that he was

carrying an AR-15, but I've seen quite a lot of reports that he was carrying an AR-15, which sadly is the weapon that is used in so many mass shootings. To me, the most surprising thing about this was that someone was able to get that close. to a former president and a presidential candidate with a weapon like that. I mean, in the past, there have been, the last time that a president was actually wounded in an assassination attempt was in 1981. There have been assassination plots since then that have been boiled.

Some of those have been publicised. Probably some of them haven't. But I had always sort of assumed, I think, that security now was just so good and so strong that we wouldn't ever see a president getting or a former president or a presidential candidate getting shot in the head again. But here we are. And certainly there are going to be a lot of questions for the Secret Service. But unfortunately, a lot of the questions that we have have have a fairly obvious answer, which is that the United States is a gun saturated society,

that it is incredibly easy to obtain weapons whose major use is for mass shootings. And that in the kind of political environment that you have in the United States, which is so heated, where people, where so many people see the other side, not as opponents, but as, as enemies that need to be destroyed, that it makes violence like this not only possible, but even inevitable. So Nick Bryant, who's been on the podcast, formerly the BBC, who's written a couple of books about America, the most recent, which is the Forever War, and I interviewed him about that not long ago. We've got to have him on the podcast soon to talk about that book, but Nick Bryant's tweeted this list of people who've been shot at, essentially.

The presidents who've been shot at Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and now Trump. So those are all assassination attempts, some of which were successful, of course. The First House Speaker apparently survived the assassination attempt as well. So it's an incredibly long list of presidents. Apparently with Nixon, someone tried to hijack a plane in Baltimore to potentially fly it into the White House, rather tragically given what happened in two. 2001. But I mean, yeah, this is the whole point in Nick's book, is that this violence,

its political violence, is part of United States history and has been, I mean, we go back to Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Berra as well. Yeah. Unfortunately, it is always there in the background of American politics. And it's something that goes all the way back to the American revolution. There have always been people who feel that they're in the revolutionary tradition when they use violence to accomplish political ends. that things have gotten so bad that they are justified in resisting tyranny with violence. That is often how these assassins see themselves. Now, to be fair, often when you look at these assassination attempts,

it's actually quite hard to attribute conventional politics to the assassins. To give you two examples, the man who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, John Hinkley was apparently trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster after he'd seen her in the movie Taxi Driver. To give an even stranger example, the man who shot Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee in 1912 was a New York shopkeeper by the name of Shrenk, who claimed that he'd been told to do so by President McKinley's ghost.

President McKinley is one of those who died in an assassination attempt. So he shot Theodore Roosevelt in the chest. Theodore Roosevelt didn't die because he had his 50-page copy of his speech. clutch to his chest and that was one of the things that cushioned the impact of the bullet. Wow.

And Roosevelt being an experienced hunter knew that because he wasn't coughing up blood, the bullet hadn't reached any vital organs. So then he actually insisted on doing his speech for the next 90 minutes. And he began it with the line, it takes more than a bullet to kill a bull moose because he was running for the bull moose party

at that time. So there's someone who reacted even more defiantly than Donald Trump to an assassination attempt. And Trump's reaction was really quite extraordinary. There's a look of sort of anger on his face, I think it's fair to say, defiance. But the pumping the fist and knowing where the cameras were, I mean, this is a man who puts on a show and who somehow recalibrated in the moment didn't fall to pieces at all. And I suspect David, particularly given that they'd probably told him that the would-be

assassin had been killed, he wouldn't have minded going on with the event we may find out. I'm sure he wouldn't have mind it going on with the event and I'm sure he's going to be very eager to claim that nomination in Milwaukee next week. I think the RNC has said that the Republican National Convention is

going ahead, although you'd have to worry at this point about security given if someone has been able to get that close to take a shot. So yeah, Trump had a great sense of the drama of the moment and it fits in with stories that he's been telling about himself for the last eight years, that his enemies

will stop at nothing to get him, but they'll never destroy him, that no matter what they throw at him, he will get up and keep fighting. And it seemed like he was absolutely ready for that when the assassination attempts actually happen. I mean, this is the narrative that his son was saying, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted the now iconic photo of him pumping his fist with blood streaming down his face, said, you know, he'll never stop fighting for this country. This is what they all say. Rubios tweeted that God protected him. Many other Republicans just said, yeah, you can't stop him. And Elon Musk unequivocally endorsed him, which he hadn't done before, I think, and said, last time America had a candidate, this tough was Deodore Roosevelt. So pointing back to your

story as well. So as upsetting as I'm sure this is, as traumatic as this may prove to be for for Donald Trump going forward, as you say, this does fit into a narrative of strength, which we have to say is in contrast to a very, very troubled few weeks for Joe Biden. This is as tough as I'm sure it will be in many ways for Donald Trump. Joe Biden somehow looks like, I don't know, how can I put this? The contrast is perhaps even starker, David, of the sort of physical condition than position that they're both in. Yeah, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt.

Joe Biden barely made it through a debate. I think that those kinds of comparisons are going to be unavoidable. It also makes it incredibly difficult for Joe Biden to campaign over the next few weeks because all he's really got at this point is mobilising the anti-Trump vote. It's going to be very difficult to tell people about the kind of threat that Donald Trump poses to democracy over the next few weeks when Republicans are interpreting that as a threat of violence that is responsible for Trump getting. shot. You're already getting this kind of rhetoric coming from people like J.D. Vance.

Democrats are really going to be watching themselves over the next few weeks, really muting their criticism of Trump because they don't want it to be interpreted as a threat or an endorsement of violence against Trump. And given that mobilising the anti-Trump vote is basically all that Biden's got at the moment, it's effectively going to be impossible for him to campaign. So this just makes it even harder for him. It may well increase the calls on him to resign. So I'm sure there'll be some Democrats who are thinking that their only chance at this point to grab control of the narrative is to run someone completely new, which would take headlines away, first of all, from Biden's infirmity and second from Trump's martyrdom. But yeah, this makes things

incredibly difficult for Joe Biden. There's also a tweet of 245 a.m. this morning. morning, Australian time, or Sydney time. Joe Biden tweeting, I want to ban assault weapons and require universal background checks. Trump promised the NRA that he'd do nothing about guns and he means it. Lots of people have replied to that. It's got 10 million views at this point. Alleging a conspiracy. I mean, ironically, banning assault weapons makes plenty of sense in light of what tragically

has happened. Bearing of mind, this was a fatal shooting. Someone in the audience was killed and others may die of their wounds in the time ahead. It's a terrible thing. But the relationship between the Republican Party in guns is now politically off limits, presumably, as is much criticism. The Biden campaign have pulled down their ads, they say. They're not campaigning directly. They're not criticising Donald Trump as he recovers from this.

So, yes, this is another. We don't know what the motives of the shooter were, and it's really hard to know, particularly if he was a Republican supporter, who can say? It may simply be mental illness. It probably shouldn't speculate. But I don't know. This just seems to paint Joe Biden, even. further into a corner when he was already struggling. Yeah, and I mean, this is not a time, especially for taboos on conversations about gun control. Previous assassination attempts led to

significant gun reforms. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and again, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, there was actually quite serious gun control passed at a national level in the United States with the support of the NRA, because Lee Harvey Oswald had used a military-style weapon, which Americans recognized at the time there was no need for anybody to have this in civilian life. After the attempted assassination of Reagan in 1981, well, you remember the Brady Handgun Act of 1994, which implemented universal background checks for guns. That was named after Reagan's security guard, who was rendered paralyzed for the rest of his life by that bullet. So assassinations in the past have actually provided the impetus

for gun control. It's impossible to imagine that happening now. There's just nothing like the consensus that is necessary for gun control, largely because of the party whose candidate has just been shot by a 20-year-old with an AR-15. So yeah, there are going to be all kinds of taboos on criticism of Trump, especially taboos on bringing gun control into the conversation. But now is really the time they should be having the conversation about gun control, because politics is probably going to look more and more like this in the future otherwise. More in a moment. The Chaser Report, news you know you can't trust.

It is a very strange moment, too. On the eve of the RNC, there was talk that potentially Donald Trump wanted to name his vice presidential candidate on the stage in Butler today. There are some rumours that he might have wanted to do that. He may want to wait till the RNC. But America will be tuning in probably in even bigger numbers to see him speak next week, presumably on the final night, unless he decides to go up on the first night, he may well to show his defiance and show his recovery to the nation. I mean, we've said this before, David,

but this has taken us into territory so far from what we've been in before. It's really hard to make sense of how this will play out in the race. And in a way, it sort of seems a bit crass to talk about the electoral politics of it all, but it's there, isn't it? I mean, he was there at a campaign rally. Does he do future campaign rallies after this? This is the Secret Service let him. It's really hard to predict. And this is the first time since Roosevelt that a candidate has been shot during a presidential campaign and has survived. In case you're wondering, Roosevelt didn't then go on to win the presidency, but that was a very unusual three-cornered race. So we don't really have any historical precedence to point to about what happens to a

campaign and what happens to a presidential race from here? On the one hand, you would think that this will really escalate interest. And as you say, more and more people tuned into the RNC than ever. On the other hand, something this horrible and this scary might just turn people off politics altogether. I think that so many Americans, regardless of their political views, will just be thinking tonight, thinking today, the country is in a terrible. terrible place. The country is in a place where we really don't want it to be. And the way that this

race is going to continue is just going to continue that awful trajectory. Yeah. And what Biden does at this point is, I mean, he really has no good options, I would think, at this stage. I had read David that he's moderated his language slightly. So he's not simply saying he'll drop out if the almighty comes down and tells him to, but also if he thinks he can't win. Perhaps he should make that conclusion now. And it's hard to see how, as you say, unless there's some sort of new energy with a new candidate, this plays out any other way. I must, I mean, I know this is a crazy thing to suggest, but is this a sort of experience that could turn Donald Trump into a gun control advocate? Who knows? I just ask you two questions. I, once again, we're in, we're in unprecedented

territory. George Wallace, who was shot, well, actually, George Wallace is a presidential candidate who was shot while campaigning in 1972, albeit he was not. He was not. one who had a serious chance of winning. After that, he actually did become very politically moderate compared to what he had been. So there is a precedent for that in the past. I'm not sure that that is going to happen to Donald Trump, but who knows? Stranger things have happened. Trump does see all politics through the lens of himself. So it's possible. I wouldn't necessarily say it's likely, but it's possible. I mean, he's got it. I know this is a bizarre thought experiment that won't happen, but it'd be quite hard to say no to him,

wouldn't it? If you came up and said, look, this has gone too far, we've got to ban these guns. Yeah, yeah, no, it would be very hard. And even though there's so much that we can't predict, there's so much we don't know, I think one thing we could safely say at this point is, at this moment, Donald Trump has never been more powerful in the Republican Party than he is now. It would be very difficult for anyone on that side of politics to say no to him now. So maybe if he did decide that this actually warranted gun control, maybe it could bring it about. I still don't think it's very likely, though, because he's just so attuned to the desires of his base. I wonder if any of the people at the rally today would have actually changed their mind about gun control as a result.

Really don't know. And I've seen a lot of tweets from Trump supporters doubling down on the notion that the right simply cannot be abrogated or whatever the term is. Yeah, I think that that is the more likely outcome, yes. Okay. So if you were advising Joe Biden at this point, what would you say he should do? I mean, he's already scaling back campaigning, as one might expect. It took him quite a while to get a statement out. That was being pointed out of Barack Obama and George W. Bush were there quite a long while before he was.

Is this really the moment where he just goes, look, I just don't want to be in this campaign anymore? Or is it, is, is there any event? I don't know. He's been so defiant as far. It's hard to imagine any state of affairs could twist Joe Biden's arm. But your point about someone new coming in and resting back attention seems a pretty compelling one to me. Yeah. And going back to your point about how he changed the language a bit to saying, show me that someone else would do a better job or show me that I can't win.

One possibility is that in polls in the next few weeks, this outpouring of sympathy that we'll be seeing for Trump for translate into poll games. And there are a couple of ways that could happen. One is that you could get undecided voters seeing this image of Trump, face covered in blood, fist-raised and thinking, that's the guy I want for the president. The other thing is that in when people respond to polls, Democrats are just not even going to want to answer the phone. to pollsters over the next few weeks whereas Republicans are going to be more

eager than ever to answer the phone. So no matter how much people try to wait for party representation, there could well be a response bias showing up in the polls over the next few weeks. So for a combination of reasons, you could see gains to

serious gains to Trump in the polls over the next few weeks. Maybe that could push Biden out. On the other hand, we saw far less movement in the poll than many of us were expecting after Biden's debate performance. We saw about a three-point shift to Trump, which is, well, as of yesterday,

was back at about a two-point shift to Trump, which is important, but, you know, not necessarily fatal. So who knows how this is going to affect the polls? Once again, we don't have any historical data on how this is going to play out. But maybe if there is some massive surge in the polls to Trump, and I'm talking about something a lot bigger, than what we saw after the debate.

Maybe that dissuade Biden to drop out. I mean, I suppose at this point in the race, who are the undecided voters out there? Who were the people who would switch from Biden to Trump at this late hour, even after an incident like this? But the state of Pennsylvania is quite important, isn't it? In the electoral calculus, that's why Trump was there. This is a state that I think Biden won last time

that Trump would be very happy to have back in his column. Yeah, so it's a very important state. It's the biggest of those three big Midwestern swing states. The others are Michigan and Wisconsin. It's one that Biden won not by a huge margin last time. And of the three Midwestern states, it's the ones where, it's the one where Trump has had the most consistent leads this time around. So both he and Biden have been spending a lot of time there.

It's a very important state. It'll be fascinating to see whether the polling in Pennsylvania itself, where this event took place actually does anything different from polling that we've seen around the rest of the country. But yeah, it's an incredibly important place. No matter what else happens in the campaign, a lot of the campaign is going to be fought there in Pennsylvania. Given that Trump seems to have pretty substantial leads in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina,

it looks at this point like he would only need to win Pennsylvania to actually win the presidency. As I say, he's had consistent leads in Pennsylvania, whereas Michigan and Wisconsin have been much tighter. There were even polls that showed Biden with leads in Michigan and Wisconsin after the debate. So so much of this election is going to take place in Pennsylvania. Hopefully, not under those circumstances again. And finally, David, look, just stepping back from all this, the concept of the culture of violence in America that gets talked about so often that gets analyzed so often, it has seemed for so many years that no atrocity could be shocking enough to change the way Americans thought, to change

their belief in their right to bear arms, and indeed not just, you know, the sort of pistols that the founding fathers might have been talking about, but indeed these assault rifles that are there, no school shooting certainly has been shocking enough to lead to a change in rules. I mean, just stepping back, I know we've talked a little bit about this already, but if not this, then what, changes the American mentality? I mean, strangely enough, the Secret Service had a very, always has a Trump rally. It's a very, very tight protocol for people getting into the space. They had to go through magnetometers.

They had to be scanned and make sure that there were no weapons. And, of course, the shots were fired from outside the event. They've managed to keep the perimeter secure here. Isn't there a weird disconnect with the fact that you can't go anywhere near presidential candidate, at least if the Secret Service is in control of the space, with a gun, despite the concealed carry laws? And yet, there's just so little examination of this problem. of the massive extent of gun violence.

Yeah, and when violence is seen as so inevitable, when it's seen as such an endemic part of society, then people's attitude becomes that, well, now everything is about self-defense. And I need to be armed because everybody else is. I need to be armed because the bad guys are. In Australia, when we have stabbings that result in deaths or in multiple deaths, The discourse has been, we need to do something about knives. And there's a sense that we still can do something about knives in Australia.

In the United States, the discourse that you can do anything about guns has been so politically suppressed and so politically defeated that the response that people have to an event like this is it's all about self-defense now. Violence is going to happen. We've got to make sure that it doesn't happen to us. We've got to make sure that it happens to the other side instead. So, yeah, there isn't going to be any real examination of it. I've just kind of given up on the idea that people are going to be able to see this problem clearly or that enough people are going to see this problem clearly. There are all kinds of factors that cause violence.

But one of the factors that causes the kind of body counts that we see in the United States is the availability of high-powered weaponry. That is just basic common sense. If guns are everywhere, it means that somebody who wants to make a political statement can use a gun to do it. When guns are everywhere, it means that domestic violence is more often going to end in murder. It means that road rage incidents are more often going to end in murder. It means that I was reading a statistic this week,

one toddler a week in the United States is accidentally going to shoot them, or somebody else just because they're having guns around. And so often you see people reach for these explanations about, you know, why are teenagers so alienated? Is it because they're spending too much time on their phones? A generation ago, it was violent video games. A generation before that, it was violent movies. All of these things can be contributing factors.

But the sheer availability of these kinds of weapons to everyone is the reason, reason why the body count in the United States is so high. And I wish that an event like this could make people see it clearly, but I have given up on the idea that it will. Well, that's the counter argument, isn't it? Which we'll probably see in the weeks ahead. If only there'd been more guns at the rally. I mean, it doesn't quite make sense in that it came from outside, but you can imagine, yeah, the argument that the Secret Service should not be removing the guns of patriots attending the rally, that it'd be much safer for all concerned if everyone at the event was heavily armed. That's right. And if everyone was shooting, that would be a much,

if everyone's shooting back in the direction that they thought the bullets were coming from, that would be a much safer scenario. I remember Trump himself said after the Bataklan shooting in Paris in 2015. So this was when he was, his presidential campaign was starting. He said, imagine what it would have looked like if there'd been guns on the other side. There would have been bullets flying back the other way. It would have been beautiful. That's the kind of gunnist fantasy about what should happen, that it's okay if someone opens fire because everybody else can fire back.

The reality of the situation, of course, is that gunfire is usually an incredibly confusing situation for everybody except a person who has initiated the shooting. And it's a good thing here that the Secret Service was able to put a stop to it so quickly, I think within two seconds is what I've heard. The audio would seem to bear that out.

I mean, the recording is, Sam Salick, there's different shots. The secret service are the most, you know, well-trained people in the world when it comes to the use of firearms. Everyone being armed is just a recipe for more mayhem. I suspect. So, well, we certainly saw a lot of mayhem. It is an extraordinary thought experiment just to imagine what would happen if that pull that had been just an inch or two further to the right.

I mean, it's just to have gotten so close is shocking, given the amazing job that's been done really. a violent country of keeping candidates safe for many decades. Well, David, it's too early to make too much sense of what went on. We certainly don't know why the shooter did this. We don't know what twisted fantasy was behind it, presumably, or what he was hoping to achieve. We don't know if anyone else was involved.

There's much that will be speculated on and then eventually answers will come down the pipeline in the weeks ahead. Certainly not a terribly satirical or funny episode of our podcast, but how could it be on a day like today? It's an absolutely shocking moment. And a reminder that as much as we joke about politics and demonised participants and certainly we'll get back to that soon, I'm sure, because these questions of who run the world do tend to matter quite a lot.

This could so easily have been tragic for Donald Trump, and it was tragic for others who turn up to see the road. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Completely agree. Thanks for being with us. My pleasure. David Smith there from the US Study Senate at the University of Sydney. Presumably the comedy will resume tomorrow, but in this world, who knows.

Thank you. My pleasure.