Trump-Biden dynamic fundamentally altered in the aftermath of the assassination attempt - indica News

Trump-Biden dynamic fundamentally altered in the aftermath of the assassination attempt

By Mayank Chhaya-
Evan Vucci, the chief photographer of the Associated Press (AP), captured what could well be the picture that will emblematize for posterity the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania yesterday.
Trump, with streaks of blood across his face and a bloodied right ear, defiantly pumping his fist against the backdrop of the crisp blue sky and the taut American flag, could well earn Vucci another Pulitzer Prize.
It is extraordinary what a brilliant news photographer can do to distill a near-fatal gunshot wound to an enduringly lively image even while freezing history into a singular moment.
However, beyond the optics of a historic day what the assassination attempt grotesquely underscores is America’s ceaseless lust for guns. That a 20-year-old, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, PA could access an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle is in itself a damning indictment of the country’s gun fetish and all-round cultural complicity in tolerating it. Media reports said the rifle was possibly bought by his father.
Federal investigators have given no indication as to Crooks’s motive. It is disturbing that someone as young as him was able to reach within striking distance of the former president and that too atop a roof with an AR-15 rifle without drawing attention from Secret Service snipers on top of adjacent buildings.
Twenty is not necessarily a callow age to form a measure of political opinions and ideology. According to The Guardian newspaper, “He was a junior at the school, and it was the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency when Crooks donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee aligned with the president’s Democratic party.”
The newspaper said, “Yet eight months later, early in his senior year, Crooks registered to vote as a Republican. And he had left his affiliation unchanged when he voted in the November 2022 midterm elections, which took place months after he graduated from Bethel Park high.”
To contextualize the alleged would-be assassin, he was barely 12 when Trump first entered the presidential race in 2016. No one would have thought that eight years later he would rudely put the country on an even more dangerous path than it embarked on January 6, 2021, when the same former president helmed a veritable insurrection.
Among many questions, the one that lends itself the most to conspiracy theory is how it was that Crooks was able to get close enough to the president to bring him within his rifle’s lethal range even though he was still outside the immediate security perimeter.
Mike Johnson, the speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, said the house would conduct a “full investigation”.
Johnson posted on X, “The American people deserve to know the truth. We will have Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other appropriate officials from DHS and the FBI appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP.”
Even during normal times, such an assassination attempt would have merited a full Congressional investigation. It is doubly so given that it occurred so close to the presidential election at a time fraught with profound sociocultural and political fissures in American society.
Traditional wisdom would suggest that the attempt would unquestionably bolster Trump’s electoral prospects. Simultaneously, it is also conceivable that the clamor within the Democratic Party for President Joe Biden to step aside would die down because any prospective aspirants within the party would recognize the political peril of going up against Trump now that he is expected to ride a sympathy wave. Of course, this is in the realm of educated speculation, but circumstances have converged in a way for him where he could leverage the situation in his favor to eventually win.
Subsequently, the Democratic ferment against Biden could subside at least for now since no other rival candidate would like to be saddled with the perilous aftermath of the assassination attempt.
The presidential race has been fundamentally altered by a dead 20-year-old.