The “extraordinary images of a defiant Donald Trump pumping his fist in the air, with blood on his face, being rushed off the stage by the Secret Service are not just history-making – they may well alter the course of November’s presidential election”.
This was the assessment yesterday by BBC North America Editor Sarah Smith of the impact of the attempted assassination of the Republican presidential candidate at a Pennsylvania rally.
“This shocking act of political violence will inevitably have an effect on the campaign,” she wrote.
Smith noted that Biden’s election campaign “paused all political statements and is working to take down its television ads as quickly as possible, clearly believing that it would be inappropriate to attack Donald Trump at this time and instead concentrating on condemning what’s happened”.
She added that “politicians from across the political spectrum – people who agree on very little else – are coming together to say violence has no place in a democracy”.
The Guardian reported that many UK newspapers had already sent their Sunday pages off to print when the shooting occurred, “but the Sunday Telegraph pushed football aside for a picture of a bloodied Trump with his fist raised defiantly in the air – a now-ubiquitous image that will probably come to define the incident in the days ahead”.
Reporting from the event, the New York Times’s Simon J Levien said that in the chaos of the aftermath, he heard a man shout: “Trump was just elected today, folks … He is a martyr.”
Writing in The Telegraph – under the headline, “The American people will not forget Trump’s defiance” − Poppy Coburn noted that Republican’s campaign, “already trouncing Biden in a number of key swing states, will only benefit from this public act of bravery”.
In The Guardian, George Chidi noted that partisans on the left and the right “are weaponizing the attack and spreading lies faster than journalists can offer facts to counter them”. Chidi quotes disinformation researcher Amanda Rogers as saying of the “polarized, unhinged, conspiracy-driven noise in social media responses to the shooting of Donald Trump as ‘a self-sustaining spiral of shit’.”
In its assessment of how other media have covered the story, The Guardian cites politics website Politico’s senior political columnist Jonathan Martin’s appraisal (headline “Trump’s raised fist will make history – and define his candidacy”) in which he writes: “Republican anger at the shooting turned to admiration at Trump’s instinctive response and then jubilation at his defiance, a reaction that underscored the persecution his supporters feel.”
[Image: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+shot]