Why the Palm Beach assassination attempt is unlikely to affect the 2024 race

Again? That was the immediate reaction I had when the Associated Press bulletin popped up on my phone as I was watching copious amounts of football on a Sunday afternoon: “BREAKING: Trump was the subject of an ‘apparent assassination attempt’ at his Florida golf club, FBI says.” The second question immediately followed: how on Earth could this happen again? 

Fortunately, unlike the incident in July when Donald Trump had to duck and cover on stage during a rally and spend a few days with a bandage on his ear, the former president wasn’t hurt this time around. The Secret Service detail prevented the attack from actually occurring, spotting a rifle scope through the trees as Trump was playing a round of golf at his Palm Beach, Florida resort. The agents fired at the intruder, forcing him to take off in his car. He was picked up shortly thereafter on the I-95 corridor, taken into custody, presented in court yesterday morning and charged with two gun counts.

We know a little bit about the suspect, a fifty-eight-year-old man named Ryan Wesley Routh. Even before he tried to kill the former president, the guy had a rap sheet — charged in 2002 with carrying a concealed weapon as well as several other misdemeanor offenses between 2001 and 2010. In typical sociopathic fashion, Routh apparently thought of himself as far more influential than he really was; in a May 2020 post on X, he invited North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to Hawaii for vacation, presenting himself as somebody who could act as an intermediary to bring peace between the United States and North Korea. He attempted to entice foreigners to fight for Ukraine. And he wrote a book, where he egged on Iran to assassinate Trump. 

Lots of ink has been spilled and air time filled over the past forty-eight hours dissecting a motive for the attempted killing. The most obvious — the guy was a nut job, hated Trump and wanted him dead — is clear enough to even the most cursory observer. Even so, the American media is fascinated with these kinds of stories because it makes for captivating television, gets viewership up and feeds into the idea that America as we know it is coming apart at the seams due to the country’s intense, irresolvable anger. Give it more time and it’s likely that at least one cable news host or commentator will allege that Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping are sitting on their thrones, watching the scenes play out with delight and preparing to take advantage of the chaos this latest development has created. 

As the FBI continues what will be a very long, exhaustive investigation, given that the target was a former president, a few things nevertheless come to the forefront. 

First, the assassination is unlikely to impact the race one way or the other. A majority of Americans from coast-to-coast already know who they’re going to vote for and are just waiting for November 5 to drop their ballots in the box. Speaking on a personal level, I’m exceedingly convinced that it doesn’t matter what Donald Trump or Kamala Harris do between now and Election Day — both have their base of support locked up, even in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. The quantity of persuadable voters one way or the other is frankly slim and getting slimmer as the campaign progresses into the fall. 

Second, you can bet your bottom dollar that, regardless of the exact motives involved in the attempted shooting, the Secret Service will be put to task — as it should be. While there’s no doubt the men and women of this agency take their jobs immensely seriously and are extremely dedicated to their work, the agency’s leadership has some explaining to do. 

Of course, we shouldn’t pretend that an attempted assassination against a president is somehow unprecedented. It isn’t. You can go down the list and find numerous examples — the JFK assassination in 1963, two successive assassination attempts against Gerald Ford over a span of seventeen days, Ronald Reagan surviving a gunshot wound in 1981, Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services planning a car bombing against George H.W. Bush during his trip to Kuwait and an attempted grenade attack against George W. Bush, to name just a few. Yet the difference today is that the attempted attack on Trump comes at a time when the country’s political divisions are baked into the fabric and where acts of political violence have disturbingly been on the rise. It doesn’t take a psychologist or sociologist to understand that this us-versus-them dichotomy can push some troubled people over the edge.

The United States will trudge on. But I think I speak for many Americans when I say that the sooner this election cycle is over, the better.