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, their novelty wore off. The script, the staging, the colours, the audience and the phrase on the lectern, all captured in the static frame of a camera for television, became familiar. The rally in Pennsylvania on 13 July appeared set to follow the same course.

The camera records the rattle of bullets and a momentary intake of breath before the realisation. Trump touches his ear and drops to the ground behind the bulletproof lectern as Secret Service agents cover him. Finally, they stand up to take Trump off the stage, and the former president, his face bloodied, raises his fist and mouths ‘fight’ three times.

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

Acts of political violence, from Lincoln to Kennedy to the recent attempt on Trump, are dark spectacles, which blend theatricality, media fascination and the American political psyche into a potent and unsettling drama. In US history, murders, attempted assassinations and violence are a discomforting shadow to the standard course. They come from outside the democratic paradigm as manifestations of violent urges by people unwilling to conform. In the present day, the internet might carry their conspiracies and ambitions, but they are typically repressed, prevented or thwarted.

Within the horror of political assassinations and attempted assassinations is an inherent performance. They are perpetrated as violent, public spectacles and are contended with as such in their aftermath. They hold the public’s attention – both contemporary and historical – like no other event in American politics. Assassinations can become junctures in history and totems of causes and conspiracies and their visual qualities magnify their significance even more. They summon attention and they are bestowed it.

It can be uncomfortable to admit the extent to which we, as observers, grant a focus towards acts to which we feel revulsion. Whether with Julius Caesar’s killing in Rome or Jackie Kennedy’s blood-stained dress as she stood by her husband’s successor, violence as a spectacle is part of political history.

Culturally, the theatricality of politics can be made literal. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar sees the protagonist felled in a theatre built by his old rival; in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Un ballo in maschera, Gustav III of Sweden is murdered at a masked ball. Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins presents, and humanises, the stories of the killers – and would-be killers – of American presidents. In Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a novelisation of the life of Huey Long, a southern populist killed in 1935, the protagonist meets his end in the foyer of the state capitol. ‘We came out into the great lobby, under the dome’, recalls Warren’s narrator, ‘where there was a blaze of light over the statues which stood with statesmanlike dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place, and over the people who moved about in the area.’ After he is shot, the politician falls by a sculpture, like Caesar dropping against the statue of Pompey.

In acts of political violence, theatre and history meld. On 14 April 1865, the actor and supporter of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, John Wilkes Booth, entered the Ford Theatre in Washington DC. Booth’s fame granted him easy access; he even sometimes received his mail there. As Abraham Lincoln watched Our American Cousin alongside his wife and friends, Booth shot the president and climbed down onto the stage. He raised his dagger to the air and cried ‘sic semper tyrannis!’ The Latin phrase – ‘thus always to tyrants’ – was the state motto of Virginia and had allegedly been uttered by the assassins of Julius Caesar.

In killing Lincoln, Booth sought to rescue some performative victory from the reality of military and political defeat. The assassination was an act of public vengeance, limited in tangible impact but acutely symbolic. Where there was a Caesar, there would always be a Brutus.

The dramatic nature of Lincoln’s assassination set a precedent for future acts of political violence in America. As the country moved into a new era of technological progress and media expansion, the spectacle of assassination would evolve alongside it. The growing reach of newspapers and the advent of new technologies, such as photography and film, would transform how the events were perceived and consumed by the public.

President William McKinley was shot in September 1901 in Buffalo, New York at the Pan-American Exposition’s ornate concert hall, the Temple of Music, by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. In October, Thomas Edison’s production company released The Martyred Presidents, a minute-long silent film in which a girl sits at the base of a tomb, her face hidden from the camera. A viewing portal on the altar shows the faces of the then-three assassinated presidents – Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield and William McKinley. In the second shot, an assassin prostrates himself in front of a statue of Justice. Edison followed a month later with a filmed recreation of Czolgosz’s execution by electric chair.

The ambition for notoriety can lurk behind whatever cause or ideal motivates aspiring assassins. In the 20^th century, popular culture fashioned a symbiosis between acts of violence and ephemeral fame. Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, who tried to assassinate Gerald Ford in 1975, had been part of a successful touring dance group in the 1950s and joined Charles Manson’s Californian cult. Manson promised his followers that, with his help, they could be ‘bigger than the Beatles’. For two months in 1972, Arthur Bremer stalked Richard Nixon but he 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 not motivated by opposition to Wallace’s white supremacy, however, but by a wish for 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 screenwriter Paul Schrader’s protagonist in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film classic, Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle, a lonely, depressed Vietnam veteran, becomes obsessed with a woman working for a presidential candidate who he later contemplates assassinating. Taxi Driver displayed the economic and social resentment of 1970s New York and co-opted the idea of assassination as the most profound rebellion against the social order. 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.

Reagan survived Hinckley’s bullet and demonstrated jovial aplomb about the affair – ‘Honey, I forgot to duck,’ he told Nancy Reagan. The moment of levity in the face of mortality exemplified another public aspect of America’s peculiar political style: the act of presidential defiance. President Andrew Jackson personally beat his assailant to the ground in 1835; in 1912, the presidential candidate, and former president, Theodore Roosevelt, continued with a 90-minute speech after being shot in the chest, declaring: ‘It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.’ Such performances transcend mere personal courage, becoming instead a complex interplay between vulnerability and invincibility, man and office. In these razor-edge moments, presidents transmute the visceral threat of assassination into a display of national resilience.

Yet the very spectacle that allows presidents to affirm their strength in the face of violence also feeds a darker undercurrent of public fascination and scepticism. As media technology advanced, capturing assassinations and attempts in ever more vivid detail, it paradoxically obscured as much as it revealed, creating fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root in the gaps between what is seen and what remains hidden.

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. As conspiracy festered in the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, the question of the ‘Umbrella Man’, wrote John Updike, ‘dangles around history’s neck like a fetish’.

A frame of video simultaneously illuminated and obscured the assassination. A conspiracy fed off the opportunities presented by the video and grasped for what it could not show. ‘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,’ pondered Updike.

In 1978, however, it was revealed that the Umbrella Man was nothing; there was no conspiracy to him. Louie Steven Witt had wanted to protest Kennedy 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. The Kennedy assassination had become a spectacle that merged fiction and reality to an extent that could not be untangled. ‘Photography is a system of visual editing’, wrote the photographer 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 conspiracy.

Theatricality and performance are an intrinsic feature of American politics, and global power commands constant attention. Assassinations and assassination attempts are a fortunate rarity, but they occur on the same stage. As the world watches the unfolding drama of the 2024 presidential election, the attempt on Trump’s life signals the opening of a new, potentially volatile act in an already contentious political saga. It underscores the uncomfortable truth that even as we recoil from such violence, its dark spectacle continues to captivate and shape the narrative of American democracy.