Trump in his element: “Only the truly relevant leaders, those who have the most impact, are targeted.” Trump knows that violence feeds on itself and seeks to capitalize on attacks like the one at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. A criminal act by a poor man, Cole Thomas Allen, who has forged his delusions in a country with maximum tolerance for gun use.
Mariana Mazzucato says that “the years of United States hegemony are over; we are witnessing the end of the Roman Empire”, with “a dysfunctional government that harms its people”. I don’t know if such grandiloquence is necessary, but, in any case, it is evident that the United States’ reputation is declining and its influence, too. It is no coincidence that all this coincides with the term of who is, arguably, the most irresponsible president in its history. Trump has, on his record, taken verbal aggressiveness to its maximum expression and has become an icon of “everything is permitted for those in power”, that is, for him and for those who accompanied him, with money and influence, to where he is as their representative. Violence has always been present in American life and politics: four assassinated presidents are not an accident. Violence is transmitted through a culture in which guns readily available to everyone highlight the fragility of a very diverse society. It seems that killing is not taboo. And Mazzucato is probably right when she says that uncertainty is not a euphemism, but “an uncertainty manufactured” by certain powers to allow impunity.
In any case, the failed killing of alleged lone wolf Cole Thomas Allen comes at a complicated moment for Trump. Caught in the Iran war, the president is accumulating frustrations, unable to unblock the situation and highlighting that vanity and reason, the absence of awareness of limits and harsh reality are often incompatible. Right now, the United States' impotence in the region is pathetic and shows the president's detachment from reality with the fabrications being built around him in the era of the drone war. As Jean-Philippe Rémy says: with the exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “no bombing has forced a regime to abandon combat. No war has been won from the sky.” Dragged along by Netanyahu —whose objectives, much more concrete, are not necessarily the same as those of the US president—, Trump has given the totalitarian Iranian regime the opportunity to exhibit power and resistance, without an exit being drawn from a situation in which Israel plays its cards and has the Americans trapped. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says, the United States is being “humiliated” in the war.
The lone terrorist from Washington has shifted attention for a few moments, but he offers little politically, beyond confirming that violence is rooted in the customs and manners of American society, and that Trump contributes powerfully to it by making threats his way of being in the world. The violent feed each other. Even more so with a president educated in intolerance and self-satisfaction who believes that everything is resolved by imposing oneself by force and who, for the moment, is managing to dismantle the balances of American society with a pyramidal exercise of power that disregards the legislative and seeks the complicity —that is, corruption— of the judiciary, which too often laughs at his antics.
Fortunately unsuccessful, the Washington assassination attempt —which was not solely aimed at Trump, however much his vanity may claim it, but intended to be massive—, the umpteenth warning to American security, will quickly be a closed chapter. But this does not prevent the imperative debate about a presidency that has made violence its way of being in the world, based on the denial of the separation of powers and the conception of the head of state as a limitless character to whom anything is permitted. And it is difficult to understand, unless what they seek is the state's futility, that certain technological and financial powers protect themselves by it, and openly make it their own. Today, Trump is an icon of (fake) gold and insolence.
