The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which opens a dark new chapter in America’s cursed story of political violence, shook a nation already deeply estranged during one of the most tense periods of its modern history.

The targeting of a former president at a campaign rally just days before he accepts the Republican nomination is, by definition, an attack on democracy and the right of each American to choose their leaders.

The presumptive GOP nominee was on stage, with supporters as usual behind him in bleachers holding up posters and wearing their MAGA regalia, when shots rang out. He flinched, then grabbed the side of his face and disappeared behind his podium as people started to scream and the surreal nature of what was happening began to dawn.

The ex-president later said that he felt a bullet rip through the skin of his ear, which poured with blood as he was rushed from the scene. The shots fired by a gunman on a roof outside the perimeter of his rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, came a fraction of an inch from being a lot worse.

A photograph by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press of a defiant but alive Trump – with blood on his ear and cheek, being rushed off stage by Secret Service agents, fist raised with an American flag in the background – became instantly iconic. The image will define a fraught political age, whatever the so-far unknowable political aftermath of a sunny afternoon that turned into a nightmare.

Horrific associations
The pop, pop, pop of gunfire and the sight of a political leader tumbling to the ground – with Secret Service agents rushing to throw themselves on top of him to shield him – awoke grave historic traumas.

While Trump is not currently serving as president, his wounding underscores the ever-present threat that always hangs over the office and those who run for it – and especially for those who claim it. President Joe Biden is the 46th president – and four of his predecessors have been killed while in office, most recently John F. Kennedy in 1963. The fact that Trump was attacked ends a 40-year-period in which many have assumed that the Secret Service’s expertise had greatly reduced the potential for such outrages – and will cast a pall that will last for years.

Trump’s targeting during a presidential campaign drew comparisons to the assassination of Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, a blood-soaked year that also saw the killing of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which will host the same event this year.

But political violence hasn’t stopped since then. In 2011, then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, was left with brain damage after she was shot in the head at an event in which six people were killed. In 2017, a gunman opened fire at a Republican congressional baseball practice, shooting then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and three others. The nation is also still processing the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

One Trump supporter at the rally, Joseph Meyn, saw the former president go down and noticed the man who was killed being hit out of the corner of his eye. With eloquence that was remarkable given the shock of what he saw, he told CNN’s Alayna Treene that the attack was a symptom of a country that was consumed by political fury.