Speaker 1: If you want to really see something that said, take
Speaker 1: a look at what happened.
Speaker 2: From Schwartz Media.
Speaker 3: I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am.
Speaker 1: Former President Trump says he is okay after being hit
Speaker 1: by a bullet just minutes into giving a speech at
Speaker 1: a Pennsylvania rally.
Speaker 3: So we're standing there, you know, we're pointing at the
Speaker 3: guy crowing up the roof.
Speaker 4: And he had a gun, right, he had a rifle.
Speaker 4: We could clearly see him with a rifle.
Speaker 1: The shooter has been killed, and one person attending the
Speaker 1: rally was killed. Two others were injured in the shooting.
Speaker 3: The assassination attempt against Donald Trump was the most serious
Speaker 3: attack on a president or candidate in more than forty years.
Speaker 4: There's no place in America for this kind of violence.
Speaker 4: It's sick. It's sick. It's one of the reason why
Speaker 4: wars unite this country.
Speaker 3: Leaders from both parties have condemned the attack and repeated
Speaker 3: the message that political violence has no place in America.
Speaker 3: But history shows otherwise.
Speaker 2: Today.
Speaker 3: Nick Bryant, veteran foreign correspondent and author of The Forever War,
Speaker 3: America's unending conflict with itself, on the inevitability of this
Speaker 3: moment and how it will shape the final months of
Speaker 3: the US election campaign that's coming up.
Speaker 2: It's Tuesday, July sixteenth.
Speaker 3: Nick, we go to the moment that you heard that
Speaker 3: Donald Trump had been shot at What was your first thought?
Speaker 5: I found myself revisiting a formulation that I used so
Speaker 5: often while I was covering the Trump presidency for the BBC.
Speaker 5: This was shocking, but not surprising. This had been the
Speaker 5: direction of travel of American politics for many years, and
Speaker 5: what happened in Pennsylvania was the coming together of so
Speaker 5: many American problems gun violence, political violence, conspiratorialism, the kind
Speaker 5: of partisan rage that we have seen really not just
Speaker 5: for the last few years, but increasingly for decades now. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it really was shocking to see the blooded face of
Speaker 5: a former US president. It was shocking to think that
Speaker 5: a young gunman could out with the Secret Service. It
Speaker 5: was shocking to see him being bundled off stage, and
Speaker 5: to see that instantly iconographic moment where he punched the
Speaker 5: air and shouted fight fight.
Speaker 4: But it didn't surprise me.
Speaker 3: Can you tell me a bit more about why it
Speaker 3: wasn't surprising and other things that we've seen in recent
Speaker 3: years that give this moment context well.
Speaker 5: To begin with, gun violence has become so depressingly routine
Speaker 5: and fueled by the easy access.
Speaker 4: To high powered weaponry.
Speaker 5: An irony of the shooting in Pennsylvania was that it
Speaker 5: was carried out with an AAR fifteen, and a weapon
Speaker 5: that has become especially popular amongst gun enthusiasts on the
Speaker 5: right because it's the firearm that gun control advocates most
Speaker 5: want to ban. Political violence, we have seen a really
Speaker 5: alarming uptick in that in recent times Barack Obama used
Speaker 5: to get thirty death threats a day. Michelle Obama became
Speaker 5: the first first lady in US history to have assigned
Speaker 5: to her Secret Service detail the kind of combat troops
Speaker 5: that we saw on stage on Saturday in Pennsylvania. These
Speaker 5: Secret Service agents that literally looked like special forces with
Speaker 5: their helmets and their military fatigues.
Speaker 4: We have seen attacks.
Speaker 5: On a Republican congressional baseball team that was practicing in Virginia.
Speaker 6: Today, two American institutions literally under fire, our national pastime
Speaker 6: and our elected officials. A barrage of gunfire and a
Speaker 6: baseball field right outside Washington, d C. As Republican members
Speaker 6: of Congress practiced for their annual game against the Democrats.
Speaker 5: We've seen that kidnap attempt on Governor Gretchen Whitner in Michigan.
Speaker 7: We're going to begin tonight with that alleged terror plot
Speaker 7: and the chilling plan. The FBI says it stopped before
Speaker 7: it could be carried out up and.
Speaker 5: Of course we've seen January the sixth and the attempt
Speaker 5: by Trump's supporters that his urging to overturn the election violently.
Speaker 7: It is hard to put into words what exactly we
Speaker 7: witnessed today because we've not seen this before. Thousand storming
Speaker 7: the capital after a rally with President Trump, during which
Speaker 7: he urged them to march on the Capitol where a
Speaker 7: joint session of Congress was debating and working to certify
Speaker 7: the election as our democracy dictates.
Speaker 5: And so this didn't come as a great surprise because
Speaker 5: gun violence and political violence was been the direction of
Speaker 5: travel for.
Speaker 3: Years, and you've spent a large part of your career
Speaker 3: trying to understand political violence in America. Can you tell
Speaker 3: me about where that fascination, where it begins for you?
Speaker 4: Well, as a kid, I was fascinated with Kennedy.
Speaker 8: Good afternoon, ladies, and John On and you'll excuse the fact
Speaker 8: that I'm out of breath. But about ten or fifteen
Speaker 8: minutes ago, a tragic thing, from all indications at this point,
Speaker 8: has happened in the city of Dallas.
Speaker 5: I was fascinated by his assassination in my early years,
Speaker 5: and I kind of bought into what I call the
Speaker 5: lone gunman theory of post war American history, that America
Speaker 5: lost its innocence the moment that John F. Kennedy was killed.
Speaker 5: On November the twenty second, nineteen sixty.
Speaker 8: Three, President Kennedy and Governor John Colony have been cut
Speaker 8: down by assassin's bullets in downtown Dallas. They were riding
Speaker 8: an open automobile when the shots were fired. The President,
Speaker 8: who lent body carried in the arms of his wife, Jacqueline,
Speaker 8: has rushed to Parkland Hospital, And if you'll excuse me,
Speaker 8: if I give some directions.
Speaker 5: It seemed to my young self that that was when
Speaker 5: things really went wrong for America. After it, of course,
Speaker 5: you had of Vietnam, you had Watergate, you had the
Speaker 5: race ruts of the late nineteen sixties. But you know,
Speaker 5: the more I got to know about Kennedy, the more
Speaker 5: I got to know about America. I realized that America
Speaker 5: on the day after John F. Kennedy's death wasn't that
Speaker 5: much different from America in the days leading up to
Speaker 5: John F. Kennedy's death. This wasn't a shock event. The
Speaker 5: very morning that Kennedy arrived in Dallas, members of the
Speaker 5: extreme right John Birch Society published a wanted poster saying
Speaker 5: Kennedy was wanted for treason. They regarded him as a communist.
Speaker 5: Dallas was called the City of Hate because it was
Speaker 5: a home to so many right wing fanatics.
Speaker 4: All the ingredients that.
Speaker 5: Were evident on November the twenty second, nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 5: which was a day Kennedy was killed, that sort of
Speaker 5: poisonous brew, all of those ingredients have been evident pretty
Speaker 5: much on every single day in American history.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: They came to the four again on January the sixth
Speaker 5: into twenty one with the storming of the Capitol, and
Speaker 5: they came to the four again on July thirteenth, twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four, the day that Donald Trump survived his assassination attempt.
Speaker 3: And after the assassination of John F. Kennedy as well
Speaker 3: as Martin Luther King in the sixties, the president at
Speaker 3: the time, Lyndon B. Johnson, he launched an investigation. He
Speaker 3: tasked this group of experts with finding out why this
Speaker 3: was happening, why this political violence was occurring. Can you
Speaker 3: tell me about what they discovered.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this was a really interesting moment for America. The
Speaker 5: nineteen sixties had been really violent. You know, you had
Speaker 5: the murders of the Kennedy brothers, you had the assassination
Speaker 5: of Martin Linter King, you had the assassination of Malcolm X.
Speaker 5: This was a particularly murderous decade and Linda Johnson wanted
Speaker 5: to explore why America was plagued by so much violence,
Speaker 5: and he appointed this panel of scholars to undertake what
Speaker 5: was really a quest for understanding. And what they came
Speaker 5: back with was a sense that racism had always been
Speaker 5: the cause of a lot of violence and political violence
Speaker 5: in America. So too the frontier experience, as they put it,
Speaker 5: of suppressing Native Americans and Mexicans. There was a tradition
Speaker 5: that they described a vigilante justice.
Speaker 4: The very manner of America's founding.
Speaker 5: Through glorious revolution, through this battle for independence against the British,
Speaker 5: also made it prone to violence, and it also created
Speaker 5: the sense Ruby that political violence was legitimate. It's interesting
Speaker 5: that on January the sixth, many of the insurrectionists were
Speaker 5: chanting seventeen seventy six. They really believed that they weren't seditionists,
Speaker 5: they were patriots acting in the spirit of the American Revolution.
Speaker 5: The report also said that like all nations, America suffered
Speaker 5: from a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection, as
Speaker 5: they put that masked unpleasant traumas of the past. So
Speaker 5: what they're essentially saying was that a positive sense of
Speaker 5: American exceptionalism blinded Americans to the negative side of American
Speaker 5: exceptionalism and what they described as a rather bloody minded
Speaker 5: people in both action and reaction.
Speaker 3: That's interesting because I think we're seeing something similar play
Speaker 3: out now. We're hearing politicians from both sides, not just Democrats,
Speaker 3: saying that this is not who we are. But what
Speaker 3: you're saying is, actually, this is exactly what the US
Speaker 3: is and what it always has been.
Speaker 5: Very quickly after the Trump assassination attempt, Joe Biden came
Speaker 5: out and said, and I quote, the idea that there's
Speaker 5: political violence or violence in America like this is just
Speaker 5: unheard of. But that was a statement that spoke not
Speaker 5: so much of his cognitive decline, but rather America's historical amnesia.
Speaker 5: This aversion to confronting its murderous past. Because political violence
Speaker 5: is a core and continual strand of the national story.
Speaker 4: It is as American as.
Speaker 5: Apple piet if you go back to the founding days
Speaker 5: of the American public has been a regular feature, a
Speaker 5: routine feature of politics and national life in America.
Speaker 3: After the break, how this moment changes the election? Nick
Speaker 3: Donald Trump has just survived an assassination attempt, and he
Speaker 3: is not the first politician in America to have an
Speaker 3: attempt on his life. I'm interested, though, in the things
Speaker 3: that are unique today. If we look, for example, at
Speaker 3: the speed in which news unfolds, I mean, we watched
Speaker 3: this happen live within minutes it had been memed, and
Speaker 3: then these alternate realities are being formed online. So are
Speaker 3: we in uncharted territory here?
Speaker 5: I mean you look back to the Kennedy assassination, and
Speaker 5: you remember that just days afterwards, Lee Harvey Oswald, his
Speaker 5: alleged assassin, was literally killed live on American television. Obviously
Speaker 5: he didn't have social media about them, but you had
Speaker 5: mass media, and in those days it was television.
Speaker 7: Shud Criswald has been a.
Speaker 5: Shrub when we think about the conspiratorialism that emerged so
Speaker 5: quickly after this assassination attempt on Trump, again, that's hardly new.
Speaker 5: Literally the day that John F. Kennedy was killed, he
Speaker 5: was on his way to deliver a speech that very
Speaker 5: afternoon where he was going to warn against distorted realities
Speaker 5: and misinformation. He even was going to use that term misinformation.
Speaker 5: And on the very eve of John F. Kennedy's assassination,
Speaker 5: a very famous American political scientists called Richard Hofstadder delivered
Speaker 5: a very bleique lecture at Oxford University where he spoke
Speaker 5: of a paranoid style in American politics. It's become a
Speaker 5: seminal essay. It's quoted over and over during the Trump years.
Speaker 5: And he spoke of a politics that was dominated by
Speaker 5: uncommonly angry minds. And he spoke again of the kind
Speaker 5: of conspiratorialism that was fueling that kind of politics. So
Speaker 5: once again, the means of kind of communication are different,
Speaker 5: but in many ways the messaging is the same.
Speaker 3: And so given that, what do you think that this
Speaker 3: assassination attempt will become in the narrative of the Trump
Speaker 3: campaign and his attempt to regain the presidency. What kind
Speaker 3: of myth making do you think we're willing to hear
Speaker 3: about this in the coming weeks.
Speaker 5: It's the defining moment for Donald Trump, and that iconic
Speaker 5: image of him punching the air with the American flag
Speaker 5: flying above him will become the defining image. It makes
Speaker 5: the cult of Donald Trump even more cult like.
Speaker 4: And I was also.
Speaker 5: Struck by the religiosity of the moment, this idea that
Speaker 5: God had spared Donald Trump, which reinforces a sense, certainly
Speaker 5: amongst the evangelical Christians who are some of his biggest backers,
Speaker 5: that Donald Trump is the chosen one.
Speaker 4: I mean, it unites the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: It makes it much harder for a deeply divided Democratic
Speaker 5: Party now to demonize Donald Trump in the way that
Speaker 5: they needed to do to turn this into election on
Speaker 5: him rather than Joe Biden. I don't necessarily think that
Speaker 5: the election is over. I mean many of us thought
Speaker 5: the election was over in twenty sixteen when the Access
Speaker 5: Hollywood tape came out and show him sort of boasting
Speaker 5: about sexually molesting women. Many of us just thought Trump
Speaker 5: couldn't come back from there. We just don't know what's
Speaker 5: going to happen between now an election day in November.
Speaker 3: Nick, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 5: Ruby, thanks for having me on. It's been good to
Speaker 5: talk to you.
Speaker 3: Also in the news today, Donald Trump has appeared at
Speaker 3: the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He's called on his
Speaker 3: followers to stand united and show our true character as Americans,
Speaker 3: saying it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.
Speaker 3: As he recovers from the assassination attempt on his life,
Speaker 3: FBI investigators are continuing to look into the background of
Speaker 3: the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks to find a motive, and
Speaker 3: King Charles and Queen Camilla have confirmed they'll be visiting
Speaker 3: Australia and Samoa this October. The pair's visit will include
Speaker 3: engagements in New South Wales and the Act, but they've
Speaker 3: called off a proposed trip to New Zealand following health
Speaker 3: advice as the King recovers from his cancer diagnosis. It
Speaker 3: marks the first visit from a reigning monarch since Queen
Speaker 3: Elizabeth visited Australia in twenty eleven. I'm Ruby Jones.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening, See you tomorrow.