The second attempt on a candidate's life

On 15 September, a man with a rifle spent nearly twelve hours waiting in the shrubbery along the edge of Donald Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, and was discovered, by a Secret Service agent sweeping the course ahead of the former president, at the moment when Trump was a few hundred yards away. The agent fired, the man dropped the rifle, climbed into a car and drove off, and was arrested within the hour on the interstate, where the authorities found the AK-47, the scope, the camera and the handwritten notes that would later frame the charge. Two months after a gunman had come within centimetres of killing Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, a second attempt had been made, and stopped, by the difference of a glance through a scope.

The suspect, Ryan Routh, 58, is a figure whose biography reads like a catalogue of the causes that have converged on this election year. A former construction worker with a history of arrests and a trail of online activity that drifted from support for the candidates of the left to volunteerism in Ukraine to posts about the ‘choice’ facing the American republic, he appears to have been improvising his politics as he improvised his attempt. He was charged on 24 September with the federal offences of attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate and possessing a firearm in a school zone, and the case, like the shooting in July, will test how the legal system treats the political violence of the decade.

The immediate question, the one the campaign is arguing about, is how this was possible. The security arrangements around Trump, who continues to hold public events without the full perimeters of a sitting president, were the subject of a Secret Service review after the July shooting, and the review had produced resignations and reforms; the September incident, on a golf course the agency had declined to secure with the same perimeter as a rally, raised the questions again, and the director of the agency, at a hearing within days, described the level of protection as ‘not where it should be’. The former president responded with his usual mixture of defiance and grievance, declaring himself safe and blaming his opponents’ rhetoric, and the campaign’s reaction, on both sides, followed the script each party has been reading since July.

The deeper story is the one the arguments keep circling without facing: the attempted violence is not an aberration in this election but a symptom of its structure. The country is conducting a campaign in which the two candidates describe each other, to audiences of millions, as existential threats to the republic, in which the platforms are saturated with the same language, and in which a man who believes the election is a last stand can conclude, as two men in two months have concluded, that a rifle is the logical instrument. The authorities stopped both attempts, and the machinery of the state has, so far, contained the violence that the machinery of the campaign has fed; the containment is not the same as prevention, and the season still has seven weeks to run.

What can be said, in the aftermath of the second attempt, is that the country has arrived at a point it has been building toward for years: a presidential campaign in which assassination is no longer unthinkable but a recurring risk to be managed, in which the candidates move through crowds that have been searched and the crowds accept it. The system held on 15 September, and it held in July, and the holding has begun to look less like strength than like routine. The suspect is in custody, the trial will follow, and the campaign will continue, and the question the country keeps postponing, the question of what has made its politics this way, waits for an election that will not answer it.