The attempt by a 20-year-old gunman to assassinate Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday has plunged American bourgeois democracy even deeper into crisis.
[Originally published at socialistrevolution.org]
This is far from the first assassination attempt of a US president—in this case, a former president likely to return to the White House in November—but it’s the first to happen on live television and in the era of social media. The last attempt on the life of a president was the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the four decades since then, all the ruling political institutions have suffered a decline in legitimacy by nearly every measure.
Even in the weeks prior to this event, it was no exaggeration to say that US politics was already well within “crisis territory.” Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance had thrown the Democratic Party into full-on panic mode, provoking a wave of calls for the incumbent to withdraw from the race, or else risk handing Trump an easy victory in November. Liberal political strategists were calling Biden’s debate fallout a “DEFCON 1” scenario, a term suggesting the most urgent level of alert, usually indicating an imminent attack or a state of war.
It seems all their talk of “DEFCON 1” was a couple weeks too soon. Last night, the internet was flooded with the shocking footage of a bullet grazing Trump’s ear in the middle of his speech, while multiple shots rang out killing at least one person in the audience, wounding two others, and provoking screams of horror from the crowd.
After Secret Service agents shot and killed the gunman, who had fired from the roof of a manufacturing plant outside the rally about 300 feet away, they rushed Trump away from the scene, but not before a historic photo op. Sensing the political value of the moment for his campaign, Trump defiantly raised his fist to the crowd, with blood streaming down the side of his face, shouting “fight!” several times before the security team escorted him off the stage.
You’re either with this guy or you’re a fucking communist at this point pic.twitter.com/OSVQyR5M83
— Gregg Re (@gregg_re) July 13, 2024
As of yet, very little information has been published about the sniper, Thomas Matthew Crooks, or his motives. State voter records indicate that he was a registered Republican. He lived in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about an hour away from the location of the rally. Crooks had graduated high school in 2022 and worked in the kitchen of a nursing home. When he was 17 years old, he reportedly made a $15 donation to a campaign group ActBlue, which supports liberal Democrats. The donation was made on January 20, 2021, the day of Biden’s inauguration.
His former high school classmates described him as a loner who wore “hunting outfits” to school. On the day of the shooting he wore a T-shirt from Demolition Ranch, a popular YouTube channel featuring content on guns and explosives. Police found bomb-making materials in his home and in his car parked outside the rally. Though an investigation is ongoing, the FBI currently believes he acted alone, and his scattered volley of gunfire into the crowd certainly does not reflect the training of a professional sniper. He had no military connections.
Why communists oppose individual terror
Whatever the motives of the shooter, we must be clear that communists oppose individual terrorism. We oppose it not on moral grounds, or for pacifist reasons, but because it is counterproductive from the perspective of the class struggle, and detrimental to the development of proletarian class consciousness.
Trump’s base was already convinced that the 2020 elections had been stolen from their candidate, and that all the ruling institutions, including the mass media and the legal system, were conspiring against Trump. In a single instant, that siege mentality has now multiplied tenfold, throwing millions of Trump voters into an adrenaline-fueled state of panic and rage.
Almost immediately, the Trump apparatus began to accuse the “radical left” for this attack. This is the language of pure demagoguery—which will only serve to raise the likelihood of more frequent violent attacks from the right wing. The words of a Trump-supporting bystander give a picture of the current sentiment of much of his base: “They fired first! This means fucking war!”
It’s not hard to imagine what the reaction of Trump’s base would have been if the sniper’s bullet had hit its target. It would likely have ignited a social explosion of rioting and violent rampaging against anyone perceived to be “the other side.”
Communists naturally oppose Donald Trump. But it is clear that any outcome from an attempt to assassinate him results in a thoroughly reactionary development—one that does nothing to clarify the class division that runs through society, including through the camp of Trumpism itself.
The majority of Trump’s base of support consists of workers who have been temporarily duped into believing in his demagogy. Our task is to sharpen the class line in society and bring the interests of the entire working class to the forefront, showing workers that their common enemy is the capitalist class, not another segment of the working class. On this basis, Trump’s base could be split along class lines.
The majority of Trump’s base consists of workers who have been duped into believing his demagogy / Image: whitehouse45 on Flickr
This November, workers are being asked to choose, yet again, between the Democrats and Republicans. But millions are rightfully repulsed by Trump, Biden, and the rest of the ruling-class politicians and institutions. That class hatred expresses a healthy instinct that the entire system is in the hands of another class, whose interests are completely opposed to ours. The solution to this political logjam lies in the mass action of the working class, moving consciously and collectively as a class, in its own interests. This requires class consciousness to reach a very advanced level—and our job as communists is to help this happen.
Acts of individual terror inherently work against this process. They relegate the mass of the working class to the position of helpless bystanders, rather than giving workers a sense of strength and confidence in their own collective power to influence events, as mass strike actions or mass demonstrations would, for example. Individual terror also creates an atmosphere of fear and panic, rather than combative readiness for mass struggle. Incidents like assassination attempts do more to push fringe militia groups and crazed middle-class vigilantes into action than to motivate workers to come together in a fight against the ruling class.
Another reactionary political effect of individual terror is that it frames individual politicians as the main problem, suggesting that merely removing Trump—or Biden, Harris, Rubio, Vance, etc.—will represent a step forward. This is false, and diverts attention away from the recognition of the capitalist system in its entirety—along with the parties and institutions of the entire ruling class—as the source of the masses’ oppression and discontent.
Only if the working class sees itself as a class with common interests opposed to the array of capitalist politicians—including Biden and Trump—can the class war develop along the path toward establishing a workers’ government, which is the only solution to the problems that millions of people face.
The way to undermine the reactionary phenomenon of Trumpism is to convince the working-class segment of his base that their healthy class instincts are being cynically manipulated by a self-interested member of the ruling class. During the four years of the first Trump administration, the richest 1% were just fine and the swamp was not drained. If he gets back into the Oval Office, he will offer no relief for the millions of workers who are rapidly sliding into conditions of misery unseen in generations. The enemy of US workers is the US capitalist class, not immigrants or the workers of other countries.
Assassination does not help workers to draw any of these urgent conclusions, and in fact throws consciousness backwards. The result of this attempted assassination will be to create even more sympathy for Trump, and will only drive up his support in the polls. This attempt will reinforce various conspiracy theories that Trump is really “anti-establishment” and that the shadowy “powers that be,” such as the so-called “deep state,” must stop him from being president.
It is true that a majority of the ruling class is very much opposed to Trump, but this is due to the fact that he is an individualist out for himself and not looking out for the good of the system as a whole. They see that Trump has increased political instability in their dying system, and has helped to further discredit bourgeois institutions that are important for its continuation.
Marx called the executive of the modern state “a committee for managing the common affairs of the entire bourgeoisie.” Biden may be incoherent and incompetent, but Trump is unpredictable, erratic, and self-interested—not exactly qualities the ruling class wants in a head of state. Aside from Elon Musk, who endorsed Trump on X moments after the shooting, not a single Fortune 100 company CEO has so far backed Trump’s campaign, in stark contrast to all previous Republican candidates. In short, the “committee for managing the common affairs” of US capitalism is in shambles, and the coming years offer no sign of stability.
The boomerang of US capitalist violence
Trump’s base is now pointing the finger at the media and the so-called “left” for preparing the ground for this assassination attempt with all their alarmist rhetoric. Biden and the Democrats, and the vast media apparatus that sides with them, have been calling Trump a fascist and suggesting his election would establish a dictatorship—as if the establishment of a military police state were simply a question of the intentions of an individual president. The liberal chorus of “lesser evilism” made Trump out to be the personified threat to democracy, always dismissing his base as a reactionary bloc of “deplorables.”
By contrast, the Marxists have pointed out that a significant segment of Trump voters consist of workers with a degree of healthy class discontent that was being distorted and manipulated by the right wing thanks only to the absence of a combative class-war alternative on the left. By ignoring this reality and indiscriminately branding all Trump-voters as fascist sympathizers, the liberals and “lesser-evil” lefts have pushed a segment of workers even more tightly into Trump’s corner, complicating the effort to win them to a class position. Now, many of those who may otherwise have been open to a dialogue on topics like union militancy against the bosses to fight for higher wages, are being duped into thinking they are on the verge of an armed conflict with “the left.”
Of course it’s not just ruling-class liberals who are to blame. Trump himself has openly advocated political violence on multiple occasions, including calling on his supporters to “knock the crap out of” counter protesters at his rallies, promising to pay the legal bills of those who followed his suggestion. He also responded violently to the mass protests in 2020, tweeting “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Aside from inspiring the right-wing vigilantes who took up arms against the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump deployed unmarked federal law enforcement units to conduct repression and abductions, and gloated over the 2020 killing of an “antifa suspect” in Portland.
Now, the entire spectrum of the Washington establishment has joined hands in a united chorus to condemn political violence. In Biden’s public statement after the shooting, he said, “Look, there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick … The idea that there’s political violence like this in America is just unheard of. It’s just not appropriate. Everybody—everybody must condemn it.”
Many people are feeling their stomachs turn over this hypocrisy. Violence is encouraged in the war in Ukraine, where a vicious attack against Russian civilians on a beach in Crimea was recently accomplished with US weapons. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Ukrainian workers have been killed in the trenches fighting US imperialism’s proxy war against Russia. Biden hugs Netanyahu and gives him weapons and ammunition to kill innocent Palestinians, whose death toll could now be as high as 186,000.
Or should we look at the violence directed against the hungry, desperate families huddled at the border? Or the violence of killer cops that terrorize and murder Black people, and brutalize protesters in American streets? Should we be surprised when all this violence does not stay within the boundaries set by the ruling class? The hypocritical ruling class is not against violence; they just want to avoid it being used against themselves.
The American capitalist system was born dripping with blood from its earliest days. The world’s wealthiest, most powerful imperialist country rests on the violent foundation of centuries of slavery, the wars of extermination against the native population, and the long line of brutal attacks on the working class any time it attempted to fight for its interests. Bloody US imperialism subjugated millions in Asia and Latin America, seizing their natural resources, plunging them into desperation and forcing them to work for pennies. And after those conditions forced growing numbers to leave behind their homes and the lives they knew to try and find a better life abroad, the ruling class viciously attacked and made scapegoats out of them. Trump is now leading the anti-immigrant charge with his campaign of fear-mongering and division—a topic he was speaking about yesterday the moment the bullets started flying.
The dominant ideas and culture of the United States are a product of the ruling capitalist class. They are the governing force that sets the morals and shows what constitutes acceptable behavior in the way they rule over society, here and abroad. The capitalist class exalts rabid individualism and the “win at any cost” mentality. They have set up a society where violence is part of the way they operate. They set the rules to their game.
At least 12 presidents and presidential candidates have been the target of assassination. Of the 30 presidents who have held office since Abraham Lincoln, four of them—more than ten percent—have been assassinated. This does not reflect an anomaly. It reflects a political system and culture built on violence. This is the society capital has produced.
An investigative report published by Reuters last year under the title “Political violence in polarized US at its worst since 1970s” counts hundreds of cases of political violence, many of them fatal. This trend has been rising in lockstep with the polarization that has characterized US politics especially since 2016. It’s also what’s behind the growing sense that the US is headed for another civil war—a sentiment now shared by nearly half the population. In our era of capitalist decline, the political stability of previous decades is unraveling more and more each year.
This attempt will reinforce various conspiracy theories that Trump is really “anti-establishment” and that the shadowy “powers that be,” such as the so-called “deep state,” must stop him from being president / Image: Wikimedia Commons
The ruling class gives us a society overrun with violence that goes far beyond political assassinations. In 2023, about 118 people were killed every day in gun shootings in the US. Mass shootings have been sharply on the rise in the past decade in particular. There were 647 mass killings in 2022 and 656 such shootings in 2023. This is more than one per day. So far, 2024 has been a relatively “quiet” year: from January 1 through July 2, the US has seen 261 mass shootings over 184 days. This should not be a normal way for people to live—yet this is our normality under US capitalism.
The path forward
To be a communist is to see through the dominant ideology of society. Marx explained that “the ideas of the ruling class are, in any age, the ruling ideas.” Political science textbooks are full of trite references to “our freedoms,” “our democracy,” and “constitutional checks and balances.” Editors and journalists at major media outlets pass these phrases off as neutral, uncontroversial, common knowledge. We don’t look at politics that way. In Lenin’s words: “It is natural for a liberal to speak of ‘democracy’ in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: ‘for what class?’”
Communists see the world through a revolutionary class perspective. Beyond the bourgeois media headlines, between the lines of their rhetoric, and throughout their “analysis,” we spot the ever-present markings of class society. We recognize the fundamental dividing line that runs through our society. A trained Marxist will attentively pick up on the definite class outlook and subtle class interests that masquerade as “objective” commentary and “common sense.”
When we see panicky headlines screeching that “our democracy is imperiled,” we hear the voice of a group of people who, having ruled comfortably for generations, now find themselves at the helm of a sinking ship, utterly powerless to stop their demise. The credibility of their once-stable institutions has crumbled beneath them. Their once-solid grip on their parties, their courts, and on public opinion, has slipped through their fingers. While their class predecessors looked confidently on the future of their system, today’s ruling class is gripped by alarm and pessimism.
Before our eyes, millions are casting off illusions in the sham of bourgeois democracy, and the ruling parties and candidates are becoming the object of the public’s contempt. Trumpism’s momentum can only be attributed to the political vacuum arising out of the absence of a fighting working-class party to direct this anger against the system and its ruling institutions.
The truth is that most of the so-called “left” has miserably failed to read the situation. The pathetic display of the DSA-endorsed “Squad” once again lining up behind Biden says it all. Just two days ago, Bernie Sanders called him “the most effective president in the modern history of our country” and “the strongest candidate to defeat Mr. Trump.” Ilhan Omar assured the Democratic Party establishment that she “has his back” because “he’s been the best president of [her] lifetime.” Their subservience to capitalism and its institutions only served to drive left-wing popular anger back into safe Democratic channels.
But polls show that there is massive potential for a class-independent alternative. A record 63% of Americans support the formation of a new mass party. 55% of registered voters believe the political and economic system is in need of major changes—and 14% want to tear it down altogether. We are living in a time when revolutionary ideas can thrive—if we can successfully carry them forcefully enough into the political landscape.
The decline of US capitalism is accelerating, and the degree of social turmoil will continue to grow along with it in the months and years ahead. Yesterday’s events were yet another step—a significant one—in the direction we’ve already been heading: one of instability, political crises, and growing political violence. This ultimately reflects the historic impasse of the capitalist system. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any solution or means of cutting across this process. This is the perspective we must keep clearly in view. As Leon Trotsky put it in his classic 1911 article, “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism”:
If we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to be presented to some functionary called a minister. To learn to see all the crimes against humanity, all the indignities to which the human body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of the existing social system, in order to direct all our energies into a collective struggle against this system—that is the direction in which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.
As we head toward what could be the most turbulent presidential election in generations, we need to inject a class war perspective clearly and boldly. Now, more than ever, a mass communist party is urgently needed to rally the forces that can show how to fight both Biden and Trump, to unite the working-class majority around its own revolutionary program, and to aim the vast discontent in society toward its real source—the capitalist system itself.