Showman’s instinct makes Trump unique

Donald Trump is exceptional. Is there any other politician anywhere who would have had their wits about them to reflexively seize the iconic photo opportunity, seconds after a would-be-assassin shot his right ear? 

His stump speech on July 13, at an election campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was cut short by loud cracks of gunfire and bright red blood splattering over his face and hands, as the former president dropped to the floor beside the podium. As his gaggle of Secret Service manhandled him back up and away, Trump seemed to instinctively know where the cameras were, clenching a victory fist to the sky towards his audience, before being quickly shuffled away to safety. With the American flag billowing over his head, he was reenacting Rocky or Rambo for generations who grew up in the certainty of American exceptionalism. More than anything this is what sets him apart from his peers. He innately understands how to garner publicity to his advantage. He always did.

The media juxtaposition of Trump running against the sitting Democratic president could not now be more stark. With a bandage prominently taped to the side of his head, Joe Biden’s opponent accepted the Republican nomination a few days after the shooting by vividly retelling the moments of his attack to a riveted audience at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, only hours earlier, Joe Biden was forced to suspend his campaigning after testing positive for Covid and boarded Air Force One to fly home. His slow, meticulous steps up the stairwell, with hands carefully gripping the guard rail, belied a man who firmly refuses to step aside, even as most Democrats now wish otherwise, including senior members of his party.

With Trump stating that ‘he felt very safe because he had God on his side’, Biden had also invoked God as security for his electoral success, claiming that only the ‘Lord Almighty’ could convince him to quit his re-election campaign. Both old men conjure up images of a deity with a macabre sense of humour, waiting until the last second to push Trump’s head away from an assassin’s bullet (while allowing three rally attendees to be critically shot, one fatally) and visiting Covid onto the frail Biden, just after a bout of flu. 

It took seven plagues for the Egyptian Pharaoh in biblical mythology to let God’s people go, but the Lord may have his work cut out with these two. I can see Trump claim the swarm of frogs and plague of locusts were actually brought into the country by brown-skinned immigrants. Meanwhile Biden — a man who has already tragically lost his first wife, young daughter and first-born adult son — could look God squarely in the eye and say ‘Is there anyone else up there I can speak to?’

As the days inexorably shuffle towards the most important American election of the modern era on November 5, there is a general air of rising confidence among Republicans, with a corresponding sense of doom and angst creeping into liberals’ conversations. While opinion polls are showing a slowly growing gap between Biden and Trump, they are still apparently too varied and sometimes even contradictory to be able to force radical change onto the Democratic ticket. But with the attempted killing of Donald Trump, or rather, his successful overcoming of a would-be assassination, something feels to have shifted in the timeline.

A journalist friend, with particular insight into a local congressional district in his native north-east, believes that Democratic politicians are now pivoting away from Biden and instead focussing on shoring up support (both donors and voters) to protect their own re-election chances. For my friend, an expert veteran in international media and strategic communications, in the face of losing both the House of Representatives and Senate, he can see the growing calamity of no effective opposition to a second Trump term. 

As no one really foresaw Trump’s victory in 2016 - least of all Trump himself - his incoming administration scrambled to stock his government, drawing largely on the reservoir of standard Republican party officials. A red 2025 will be different, with effective, ambitious and organised MAGA loyalists seeking to radically reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power in the hands of the president. A president, whom the Supreme Court has just ruled cannot be prosecuted for any official actions he carries out while in office, effectively granting him the immunity of a king.

These Trump acolytes have already laid out their plans in ‘Project 2025’, an initiative organised by the arch-conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation and according to the New York Times (July 11, 2024) "…lays out plans for criminalizing pornography, disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, rejecting the idea of abortion as health care and shredding climate protections". But the devil is also in the detail, and liberals say it will “destroy the federal government as we know it”. By effectively gutting the civil service of all non-loyalist federal employees, the project would also ensure loyalty to the administration rather than expertise and would be the pervasive character of any federal administration. Vladimir Putin would be proud.

Yet, it’s July and many moons have yet to wax and wane before any vote is cast in the 2024 election. If Biden were to bow out soon, it would give the Democrats an exciting opportunity to showcase his potential replacements at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, during the week of August 19. Such media attention would surely work in their candidate’s favour and could be the turbo-boost necessary to successfully challenge Trump, especially over unpopular abortion restrictions, where even right-leaning states have voted against Republican attempts to limit availability. A young(er) opponent to Trump would also cast his own age into stark relief.

Yet perhaps Trump has been the more wronged in this regard. As a man who wears orange-tinted make-up despite ridicule, he never apologises, never admits he is wrong and uses a brand of stand-up comedic, off-the-cuff populist, political conversation with his followers, which has created a cult-like bond between them. Liberal media claims that the more people saw and heard of Trump, the more they would hate him, failed in a new world of ‘no publicity is bad publicity’. Trump’s grandstanding, confidently lying without limit or consequence, found a home in the ten-second world of online news and social media. 

Lampooning him on late night TV or ‘Saturday Night Live’ in fact helped him make him more sympathetic — a modern-day Basil Fawlty. Both are awful men, racists, misogynists, falling victim to their own petty egos in ridiculous ways (Trump’s keeping of classified documents illegally beside his toilet is worthy of a Fawlty Towers episode). Yet devoted audiences tuned in to watch both men, finding them endearingly interesting and funny. The only difference is that Fawlty never escaped his dysfunctional hotel in Torquay. Trump is on course to again be the next President of the United States. 

Check out Liam's blog at www.hollywoodandheffron.com.