This election was already shattering norms. Then Trump was shot.
MILWAUKEE – This election was already historic.
Now, with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump Saturday night, the word unprecedented seems inadequate to describe where we find ourselves four months before Election Day.
Our polarization? Sharpened.
Conspiracy theories about the shooting? Swirling.
The blame game? Begun.
Sometimes shocking events bring the nation together, reinforcing a sense that we are all in this together. When President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, it was his surgeon, Dr. Joseph Giordano, a liberal Democrat who bridged party politics.
Right before he put Reagan under anesthesia, he assured him: “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans."
But the instinct that, at bottom, more unites us than divides us, seems like a muscle we no longer exercise. Especially not in the middle of a roiling election. Especially not during an election in which both parties predict catastrophe, even the end of democracy, if the other side wins.
Words of unity before politics resume
To be clear, there were words of unity, expressions of outrage, promises of prayers in the aftermath of the shooting.
President Joe Biden called Trump late Saturday to express his concern, apparently the first time the two men have spoken directly since their last contest, in 2020. “There is no place for this kind of violence in America,” Biden told reporters. His campaign was pausing its political ads, most of which target Trump as a danger to the republic.
On Sunday, Trump in a post on Truth Social called for national unity, too.
”This isn’t an opportunity for politics or strategy or how this is going to play out,” Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman told CNN, saying he was “just so glad that Donald Trump is going to be OK.”
But the actions of politics were set to be triggered, and soon.
Republicans were already arriving in Milwaukee for the definition of partisan politics, the national political convention, which opens Monday.
Trump's third consecutive nomination for president was already assured. Now the dramatic photos of him pumping his fist at the Pennsylvania rally, blood streaming on his face, will assuredly be in evidence everywhere – the GOP’s depiction of a leader who cannot be vanquished.
On the social media site X, formerly called Twitter, thousands of supporters reposted a drawing of Trump staring down the path of an approaching bullet as God placed one hand on his shoulder and blocked the bullet with the other.
Democrats are scheduled to meet for their convention in Chicago next month, a session already thrown into disarray by calls from a growing list of Democratic officeholders and donors for Biden to step back from the nomination. They cite concerns about his mental acuity, his vigor and energy.
The contrast of Biden’s fragile demeanor with Trump’s defiant reaction to being shot – to being shot! – are sure to become part of some Democrats’ calculations, too.
The post-Jan. 6 election
The 2024 election was already on track to shatter all norms.
The Biden vs. Trump rematch would be the first contest between a president and a former president in modern times.
If the Democratic nominee turns out to be someone other than Biden, it would be the first in modern times that a party dumped its presumptive nominee in the weeks leading up to its convention.
It's the first election in which a major party nominated a person convicted of felonies.
It’s the first election since the assault on the Capitol after the last one, on Jan. 6, 2021, the biggest challenge to the peaceful transfer of power in the nation’s history.
Now it’s the first election in a half-century, since 1972, in which a major presidential contender was hit by a would-be assassin’s bullet.
Unprecedented? We had already moved past that.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Shooting shakes Biden v. Trump election already shattering norms
