Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s immediate reaction to the assassination attempt on US presidential candidate Donald Trump was that there was ‘no place for violence in the democratic process’, but this is the latest in a very long line of incidents which prove otherwise.
The disenfranchised, disaffected and mentally ill have frequently used violence as a political weapon, particularly in the US, and the gun (violence) lobby itself is a powerful political player, not to mention its big brother the military industrial complex. Violence is never far below the surface of politics, whatever outward form it takes.
In America four presidents have been shot to death; Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. In most cases the assassins were clearly politically motivated.
It’s not a new thing for presidential candidates to be targeted by shooters either. in 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt was out on the campaign trail, trying to get his old job back, when a saloon keeper took a shot at him in Milwaukee. His life was saved by his 50 page folded speech, which slowed the bullet.
in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was running for president when he was shot dead at a hotel in Los Angeles, by Sirhan Sirhan.
Gerald Ford faced two assassination attempts in 1975; someone took a pot shot at the White House when Barack Obama was president, a shooter missed Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 in Miami, and Harry Truman was shot at by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1950.
A man hijacked a plane in 1974 with the intention of killing President Richard Nixon, but ended up killing other innocents instead.
Killing in the name of
Generally these events do nothing to advance the assassin’s cause, improve things for ordinary citizens, or change the direction of government. Instead the resulting instability tends to entrench existing power structures.
There are some interesting exceptions: Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace was shot and paralysed while running for president in 1972. As a result, he rethought his racist politics and reached across the divide to his African-American opponent, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, helping her to secure legislation to raise the minimum wage for domestic workers.
After President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady were shot and injured in 1981, Brady became an activist for gun control, taking on the powerful National Rifle Association. His death in 2014 was ruled a homicide, the long-term result of his 1981 gunshot wound.
Of course, political assassination is not just an American phenomenon. Multiple Egyptian pharoahs, Ancient Roman leaders, Chinese rulers, caliphs and Japanese political figures met their end in this way. Hitler’s underlings attempted to kill him, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited World War One, and India’s recent history has also been shaped by multiple assassinations.
Australia is not immune. One recent example is NSW Labor MLC John Newman, who was shot and killed outside his home in Cabramatta in 1994.
At a federal level though, the closest we’ve come to anything like this so far is Peter Kocan’s attempted assassination of opposition leader Arthur Calwell in 1966, which merely injured his chin. The only lasting result of that event was a successful literary career, but as political extremes are ratcheted up, and we follow the USA into a world divorced from truth, and swimming in emotion, there’s no guarantee we will remain an island of sanity in an unstable world.
Don’t take your guns to town
Donald Trump’s campaign has had an undercurrent of violence since the beginning, with people having been beaten at rallies, the violent actions of supporters being condoned, and the candidate publicly supporting the NRA even after a series of high profile scandals affecting that organisation, declaring that mass shootings ‘are not a gun problem’.
The NRA spent more than $30 million to help elect Trump in 2016, and no doubt this latest event will also be spun in the organisation’s favour, despite the would-be assassin using the same type of military assault rifle commonly used in school shootings.
The billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have publicly swung behind Donald Trump in the wake of the attempted assassination, and Trump’s supporters are already blaming the left for ‘demonising’ their candidate as a threat to American democracy, and legitimising a violent response, as if Trump needed any help in that department.
He will now be able to play the people’s martyr role with added dramatic intensity, and will continue to dominate the world’s attention as the US election approaches in November, and Joe Biden struggles to remain a viable candidate in the view of his own party and the general population.
Peter Dutton, who was in the USA when the shooting happened, sent his best wishes to Donald Trump for his recovery, echoing PM Albanese when he said, ‘violence has no place in society.’
Alas, violence has a central place, even if it often remains hidden. That’s what humans are like.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning film-maker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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