The dark spectacle of American political violence

Donald Trump’s rallies have been part of American political life for almost a decade. From the beginning of his first presidential run in 2015, the media watched his ringmaster act before adoring crowds until, through his presidency, the novelty wore off. The script, the staging, the colours, the audience, the phrase on the lectern – all captured in the static frame of a television camera – became familiar. The rally in Pennsylvania on 13 July appeared set to follow the same course, until a rattle of bullets and the sight of the former president dropping behind his lectern.

It is not the video of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump that will be indelible, however. It will be the picture, taken from below by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci, of the Secret Service agents looking down, hurrying the former president away as Trump stares ahead with his fist in the air, wounded yet defiant.

Within the horror of political violence lies an inherent performance. We watch not from prurience but as citizens concerned with our polity and humans drawn to the sharpest forms of drama. Political violence summons attention, and we give it.

Assassination has long played as theatre. In the real world, the setting has been grand enough to attract the powerful but accessible enough for the murderer to reach them. The drama has a natural shape, worthy of great writers, that carries the converging story of killer and victim toward a climax of thrill and dread. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar sees the protagonist felled in a theatre built by his old rival; in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, Gustav III of Sweden is murdered at a masked ball. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins humanises the killers and would-be killers of American presidents. Most famously, on 14 April 1865, the actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth entered Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Booth’s fame granted him easy access; he sometimes received his mail there. As Lincoln watched Our American Cousin with his wife and friends, Booth shot the president and jumped down onto the stage. He raised his dagger and cried ‘sic semper tyrannis’ – a phrase long associated with the killing of Caesar.

In killing Lincoln, Booth sought to rescue some performative victory from the reality of the Confederacy’s defeat. The assassination was an act of public vengeance, limited in tangible impact but acutely symbolic for Booth’s lost cause. Booth saw Lincoln as Caesar, and he, an actor with pretensions of fame and legacy, would be the Brutus.

The ambition for notoriety often lurks behind whatever cause or ideal motivates aspiring assassins. For two months in 1972, Arthur Bremer stalked Richard Nixon but could not get close enough to kill the president. He therefore targeted the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bremer was indifferent to Wallace’s white supremacy; he wanted fame. ‘Life has only been an enemy to me,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I will destroy my enemy when I destroy myself. But I want to take part of this country that made me with me.’

Wallace was paralysed from the waist down for the rest of his life, and Bremer never achieved the notoriety he sought. But his attempted assassination of Wallace inspired the protagonist in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle, a lonely, depressed Vietnam veteran, becomes obsessed with a woman working for a presidential candidate whom he later contemplates assassinating. In a third turn of the wheel, in 1981, John Hinckley Jr – in an attempt to gain the attention of the actress Jodie Foster, whose breakout role had been in Taxi Driver – styled his hair and clothes like Travis Bickle and shot Ronald Reagan.

If the assassin seeks an audience, we have long since obliged. Assassinations are consumed in America as news and as entertainment, often at once, and the technology of their consumption has shaped what they mean. In September 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition’s ornate concert hall, the Temple of Music, in Buffalo, New York. The following month, Thomas Edison’s production company released The Martyred Presidents, a minute-long silent film in which a young woman sits at the base of a tomb, her face turned from the camera. A viewing portal on the altar shows the faces of the then-three assassinated presidents – Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley. In the second shot, an assassin prostrates himself before a statue of Justice. Edison followed a month later with a filmed recreation of Czolgosz’s execution by electric chair.

The frame of the camera, however, has always led some to wonder what took place beyond our sight. As media technology advanced, capturing assassinations and attempts in ever more vivid detail, it could obscure as much as it revealed, creating space for conspiracy theories to take root in the gaps between what was seen and what remained hidden.

Decades after McKinley’s murder, Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 captured the moments in slow and silent horror. In the distance of the video is a man with an umbrella. He is a striking figure; that day in Dallas was warm and dry. ‘We wonder whether a real mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses, ’ John Updike wrote of this mysterious ‘Umbrella Man’.

In 1978, however, it was revealed that the Umbrella Man was nothing, merely a phantom conspiracy interpreted from grainy footage. Louie Steven Witt had wanted to protest against the president and his father’s role in the appeasement of the 1930s; the umbrella was a prop to recall Neville Chamberlain. The drama of the moment had superseded mundane reality. ‘Photography is a system of visual editing,’ wrote the photographer and curator John Szarkowski. ‘At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time.’ The Zapruder film conveyed a curated version of the Kennedy assassination that, with its innately attention-grabbing nature, was primed for a conspiracy that has never died.

Assassinations and assassination attempts are mercifully rare, but they occur on the same stage as the rest of the unfolding drama of the 2024 presidential election. The attempt on Trump’s life signals the opening of a new and volatile act in an already contentious political saga. Even as we recoil from such violence, we watch the frame with trepidation and compulsion.