Last Saturday, an attempted assassination of Republican candidate Donald Trump took place at one of his electoral rallies in Butler, Pennsylvania. Donald Trump was injured in an ear, but survived. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a Republican-registered voter, was shot dead. This event is likely to impact the future of this already very tense electoral campaign, for the following reasons.
In the Democratic camp, there are already numerous party grandees, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as key donors, who are reportedly asking US President Joe Biden to step aside. Former President Barack Obama, who’s been silent in recent days, is reportedly considering to ask Biden to leave the race. Biden’s mishaps in public speeches are not helping. At a recent NATO summit, he called Volodymir Zelensky “President Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice-President Trump.”
No-one in his camp doubts the extraordinary merits of his presidency, epitomised by the creation of 15 million jobs and the return of inflation to near target levels (helped by the Fed’s restrictive stance). But it is precisely to preserve that legacy that they would prefer Biden not to run against Trump. Potential replacements are Vice-President Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, a key swing state. (Despite Whitmer having ruled out running even if Biden stepped aside). Though polls don’t show that these candidates would do any better than Biden against Trump, and they would of course lose the advantage of being an incumbent.
The attempted assassination could do to Trump what a similar attempted murder did to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil: propel him to the final victory. Trump will certainly use the episode to continue depicting himself as a victim of the system that he wants to so radically change. And his adversaries will have a harder time addressing Trump with equally aggressive terms, because doing so now would likely antagonise an already divided electorate.
The failures of the secret service, and the local police, in preventing the shooting – witnesses said they had alerted the police about the suspicious presence of a potentially harmful person at the campaign event – will raise the question of the reliability of the “deep state”, and the purported hatred it would have against the candidate (Trump) that has repeatedly said he will do a “clean-up” – by being a “dictator” for one day – of the system.
The blueprint for this overhaul of the deep state is contained in the so-called Project 2025. This report has been published by the Heritage Foundation and other smaller organisations, providing a step-by-step guide for how to transform the US into a nationalistic Christian state.
This guide is not just a catalogue of ultra-conservative policies (including a complete ban of abortion and the increase of carbon-emitting energy sources) but provides also a database of tens of thousands individuals that would be ready to replace current staff in the administration. Moreover, thanks to the re-instatement of “Schedule F” envisaged by Project 2025, these newly-appointed bureaucrats would swear allegiance not to the Constitution, but to the President, becoming the operation arm for implementing his policies. Thanks to the recent decision by the Supreme Court, this president would also be immune for all acts conducted in the exercise of presidential functions.
For these reasons, many believe that Project 2025 is the blueprint for how to transform the US into an authoritarian state, potentially a dictatorship. We have discussed several times how we believe the re-election of Trump would represent the end of US liberal democracy. The recent events in Butler may catapult Trump into the position of changing the nature of the US system forever.
