James Johnson is co-founder of JL Partners. He was the Senior Opinion Research and Strategy Adviser to Theresa May as Prime Minister, 2016-2019
I was in a swelteringly hot downtown Chicago when the attempt on Donald Trump’s life took place. Within moments of the news dropping passersby were sharing the news, exclaiming ‘Trump has been shot!’. Social media and push notifications meant a nation of 330 million heard the news of the attempted assassination of one man more instantly than ever before.
The event was a shocking moment. The near-unbelievable turn of Trump’s head that saved his life – and the alternate reality if he had not done so – is hard to fathom.
One refrain that echoed around Chicago and social media: we were a half-an-inch head turn from civil war.
It is easy to imagine America being on the brink, especially from Britain. The events of January 6th might be one reason for the thought, the availability of guns another, the very fact a shooter went for a former president hardly reassuring.
But being here permanently, interviewing voters and polling almost every day, has taught me that the American public is a lot less rancorous than they are made out to be.
The reaction to the shooting is telling. If you based your read of the American public on social media, you might suspect a plethora of bitterness, conspiracies, and even in some quarters disappointment. But at J.L. Partners we asked a nationally representative sample of Americans for their reaction to the shooting. The response was uniform across party divides: “Surprised”, “sad”, “shocked”, “violence”, “shocking”, “scary”, and “crazy” were the top reactions by far.
At the Republican National Convention, it suited some journalists to portray the Republican rank and file as baying for revenge. Emily Maitlis of the Newsagents podcast called the mood in the halls “dystopian”.
That is nonsense. Yes, there is reverence for Trump, whose ascendancy in the party has never been so firm. But the reaction to the shooting at the event was more a state of shock than fury. There were prayers for Trump, not plans for revenge. Trump’s speech was long and free-roaming but fundamentally a call for unity.
Most of the content at the convention reflected entirely mainstream concerns of the American public: a better economy, securing the border, and stamping down on crime. Trump’s stature at the convention was more vulnerable than aggressive. I am not pretending the event’s platform was exactly normal by British standards but no rhetoric felt dangerous or concerning. That might not sell as well on a podcast for liberal Brits, but it doesn’t make it less true.
In my focus groups across America, I am constantly struck by the underlying urge for unity amongst voters. Much like in Britain the median voter recoils at the harshest rhetoric. Despite holding divergent views, they want to see polarization come to an end. There is a reason the most outspoken and aggressive candidates (on the Republican side as well as the Democrat one) are losing elections and primaries this year.
There is a tipping point between holding a political view ardently and acting on it violently or encouraging violence. The vast majority of Americans have a restraint mechanism against that tipping point that the keyboard warriors, the shrillest media commentators, and the most extreme politicians do not have.
The same observation might have applied to ordinary people in the 1860s. You only need a minority of people and those in leadership positions to start a civil war. But unlike in the nineteenth century, the issues at play today are less clearcut, less existential, and less welded to the future of individual states than the issue of slavery was. And this time round most of the keyboard warriors and the shrillest media commentators are the ones least likely to have the cojones to act on their beliefs.
A friend made the counter-argument to me. If Trump were assassinated, there would have been targeted attacks on media outlets, the Democratic National Committee (the DNC), and prominent politicians from the other side.
Perhaps. But any individual perpetrators of, say, a firebombing of a newspaper office would be promptly arrested. America has been there before, with spates of assassinations in the Seventies and Eighties, and survived without conflict. January 6th was undoubtedly concerning, but the system worked and many are now facing lengthy jail sentences with a clear deterrent in place. The only recent widespread violence in America came in riots motivated by theft and nihilism in heavily Democrat cities (with lukewarm police responses) in the summer of 2020.
Language by leaders needs careful policing. Though both Trump and Biden called for unity (in Biden’s words “that most elusive but important goal”), the Republican nominee has in the past been far too loose with his language and reveled in the chaos it has caused. Most galling on the subject of violence has been his mockery of Nancy Pelosi’s husband who came under attack from an intruder.
But it is in no way a one-way street. The hysteria of much of the liberal media plays the same game. Joe Biden said Trump needed to be put in a “bullseye”. Hillary Clinton has all but denied the legitimacy of the 2016 election. The Supreme Court has been called “dangerous” and “divisive” by the president. The Court has made controversial decisions, but such a lazy reading ignores the fact that almost half of its decisions in 2023 were unanimous, with only 11 cases splitting 6-3 on ideological lines.
Democrats allowed the legal pursuit of Trump, including in a hush-money case seen as spurious by even Democratic lawyers. The indictments are part of what propelled Trump back into the ascendancy with Republicans. They are also much of what has fueled the ideas behind conspiracies that the establishment wants Trump out of the picture.
These aggressive remarks and actions come from our elites, not the public at large. They do not come up in focus groups. The media and leaders – on both sides of the divide – need to control their language more than the public does.
I was going to end with a quote from Walt Whitman. Writing in the aftermath of the Civil War and the fatal shooting, the poet wrote: “Strange (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense – perhaps only really, lastingly condense – a Nationality”. The nationality condensed by the reaction to the attempt on Trump’s life is not without blemish but there is more to be optimistic about than pessimistic.
But someone else sums things up better than Whitman. I will leave the last word to an X account with 2,000 followers, a self-described “bisexual country bumpkin” 27-year-old. I stumbled upon their tweet, currently at 4 million views, on Monday.
What’s crazy is my kids are gonna be like ‘mom what was it like to be alive for the pandemic and the storming of the capitol and the attempted assassination’ and im gonna just have to be like ‘well son I just got high and went to work’.
Listen to the bisexual country bumpkin. Most of America is getting high and going to work, not preparing for war