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Opinion
If the gunman was ‘right-wing anti-government’, why would he bother shooting Trump?
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editorAt what point does a political campaign become a shooting gallery? Three publicly known attempts to assassinate a single presidential candidate in three months is rather many, even by American standards. In fact, it would be a record, according to an expert on the subject.
“I don’t know of another time when we’ve had three publicly visible assassination attempts in such a short period of time, if this latest one turns out to be legitimate,” Matt Dallek tells me about an hour after the first reports of the arrest of an armed man at a Donald Trump rally in California on Monday, Australian time.
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The next most intense series of attempted assassinations was in 1975, when there were two attempts to shoot then-president Gerald Ford within 17 days of each other, says Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University who’s writing a book on efforts to kill US presidents, former presidents and presidential candidates over the centuries – a distressingly rich subject.
Both attempts to murder Ford were made by women, both in California, and both at close range. The first was by an environmental extremist dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, and the second an anti-Vietnam war radical seeking to trigger a revolution.
Is this latest attempt on Trump “legitimate”? The local police said the 49-year-old suspect from Las Vegas had tried to drive into the rally claiming to be a journalist but with a fake press pass, and also claiming to have a VIP invitation.
After he’d driven through an initial check point, he was stopped at a second. Police said they searched his car when they noticed that its interior was in “disarray” and that the car bore an “obviously fake” number plate.
The fake plate, they said, was characteristic of members of Sovereign Citizen, a group claiming that government is illegitimate and that they are therefore exempt from any law. The police summarised it as a “right-wing, anti-government” group.
They found multiple passports in various names and charged him with illegal possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun and a high-capacity magazine, which he claimed were for his own protection. The suspect swore that he was an avid Trump fan.
The Secret Service, which has been under intense criticism from Republicans after the two earlier would-be assassins had come dangerously close to Trump, emphasised that the former president had not arrived at the California rally at the time of the arrest and had been in no danger.
“While no federal arrest has been made at this time, the investigation is ongoing,” federal authorities said. Remarkably, a court ordered the suspect, tentatively named Vem Miller pending investigation into his multiple passports, be released on $US5000 ($7400) bail with a January court date. This seems casual treatment of a man charged with illegal firearms possession attempting to get close to a former president using fake credentials.
The local sheriff seemed less nonchalant. “We prevented another assassination attempt,” said Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.
Asked whether he might have been too dramatic in describing it as such, Bianco told a press conference: “If we are that politically lost, that we have lost sight of common sense and reality and reason that we can’t say, ‘Holy crap. What did he show up with all of that stuff for?’, we have a serious, serious problem in this country.”
Holy crap indeed. We’ll no doubt learn more about this case in the days to come. Professor Dallek wasn’t surprised at the second, and now apparent third, attempt on Trump’s life. In fact, he’d predicted more violence after the initial shooting, when Trump’s ear was nicked by a bullet in July.
At the time, I asked Dallek whether the shock of that highly visible near-miss might sober America, calm the violence? He replied: “Violence tends to beget violence.”
He doesn’t see any inherent contradiction between Miller’s purported “right-wing, anti-government” status and an apparent intent to kill Trump, who easily could be described as a “right-wing, anti-government” politician. Trump has promised to dismantle the “administrative state” and the so-called “deep state”. But why would you want to shoot your own candidate?
“Left and right are less important than a desire to topple the government, change history, cause a civil war or whatever kind of grandiose plan they may have. These folks often don’t fit into neat ideological boxes.”
And an important reality check: these people usually have difficulty with reality checks. “They are all mentally disturbed,” Dallek says.
He doesn’t blame Trump for any of the assassination attempts, yet he does argue that “Trump courts a certain sort of violence, he revels in violence in his rhetoric. He’s whipped up hate like few other figures in US politics, hate on all sides, among his supporters and his opponents”.
In just the past few weeks, Trump said the police should be allowed “one really violent day” to deal with shoplifters. And during the same rally that Miller had tried to enter with his firearms, Trump said of a female heckler that she might “get the hell knocked out of her” by her parents.
Surely, Trump is vindicated in his calls for more protection, at least? Dallek isn’t convinced. Trump was allocated more Secret Service protection but then made unrealistic demands for assets. Dallek says: “It seems like a political ploy so he can say, ‘they didn’t give me enough protection’.”
Dallek doesn’t see the end of the election campaign as the culminating point, either. He sees this latest incident as part of a continuum, a trajectory, towards yet more violence. “We have 24 days [to election day] but what happens in the few months after that is an even greater worry.”
Whether Trump loses and refuses to accept the outcome, or whether he wins and violent protests against him erupt, “it’s hard to see how this ends peacefully”. On Monday, Australian time, Trump added a new element of uncertainty. He said the US military could be deployed on election day to guard against “enemies within” if necessary. Holy crap indeed.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.