We have had a few days to digest, a little, what happened on the weekend. There remain a lot of questions, many of which will never be answered to any degree of satisfaction. But we can at least start to get a sense of what the assassination attempt on former President Trump has changed in terms of the campaign and the wider national political orbit.

First off, there is going to be, or at least ought to be, a considerable shake-up at the United States Secret Service. While it appears that agents on the ground acted swiftly and admirably, there is no question that somebody, at some level, messed up rather spectacularly. Granted, providing security for campaigning political figures in a democracy is not a cut-and-dried proposition – the very access and approachability a campaign requires is also what a would-be assassin requires – but logic and evidence tell us quite plainly that this was failure. That shake-up should start with the resignation of USSS Director Kimberly Cheatle, upon whom responsibility ultimately resides. A full Congressional investigation – a real one, not a political theater production – and reexamination of USSS priorities is also in order.

What about the political dynamics? The conventional wisdom suggests that an attempted assassination would generate such public sympathy and rage that polling would no longer be necessary to gauge the relative prospects of the candidate who was shot at. A generation or two ago, that was probably the case. Had Robert Kennedy survived his assassination, or if someone had shot at, say, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and he survived the attempt, it’s a pretty good bet that Nixon and Reagan would have had to put their respective plans on hold for another four years, whatever misgivings anyone may have had about Kennedy, or despite Carter’s fumbling of the economy and foreign policy. Today? Not so much.

The attempt did generate some sympathy for Trump, no question, but it is unlikely to translate into anything resembling a major electoral shift. If you didn’t like Donald Trump before he got shot at, you’re probably not going to vote for him just because some crack-pot Van Goughed his ear.

What it did do, however, was to serve to galvanize his base, and give those on the outer edges, who may have been contemplating just ignoring the presidential ballot, a reason to go ahead and vote for him. That may not be an inconsiderable number of people, and could well make a difference. But as for pulling a decisive number of “undecided’s” over to Trump, that is unlikely in my estimation, insofar as it is debatable at best as to whether that many true undecided’s really exist.

There is a great deal of talk about the vitriolic nature of political rhetoric. Exhortations to return a modicum of civility to political speech are certainly welcome, and certainly overdue, but it is probably naïve to think they will be heeded for long. That does not dilute the grave necessity for doing so.

Everyone talks about how there is no place in this country for political violence; but that’s not entirely true, is it? The 
United States was founded on a violent rebellion. A hundred years later it took up arms against some of its own rebellious countrymen in an effort to preserve the nascent union and liberate their enslaved fellowmen. Those were fundamentally political acts, were they not? If, God forbid, the social and constitutional convulsions took place that would enable the ascent of an actual new homegrown Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, then violence in the service of preventing that would be entirely justified.

But Trump is not Hitler, Biden is not Mao, and the institutional cataclysms required to usher in such civic horrors have neither occurred nor are likely to occur. But the more talk there is about how one candidate will dismantle democracy, or the other will destroy the fabric of the nation, the closer some minds will get to justifying the application of violence. We in the West, particularly North America, have enjoyed a sort of insularity from the violence that denotes political activity in much of the world, and for much of history. That is due in part, in large part, to the institutions, customs, and traditions that Western civilization has vouchsafed us, and why ideological jettisoning of those inheritances, from either side of the spectrum, is both foolhardy and dangerous.