Trump’s promotion of an image of strength after assassination attempt borrows from authoritarian playbook.
Trump’s promotion of an image of strength after assassination attempt borrows from authoritarian playbook.
History is dotted with instances of strongmen who burnish their image or crack down on opponents after attempts on their life.
I get the idea here, but is there a suggestion that this was planned or that someone consulted such a playbook in the moments after he'd been shot?
It feels more natural to perhaps say this is a typical authoritarian response to escaping death, or tie it together in a way that that doesn't seem so conspiratorial.
Like shit, if someone tried to kill me and failed then I'd probably raise my fist in defiance too.
Why? The smart thing to do would be to cover yourself and get to safety. There could have been another shooter somewhere for all he knew. If this was done by smarter people, he'd be dead when he stood up like that. But adrenaline and his enormous ego got the better of him.
He reads and follows Hitler's book religiously. There is also rumor and a federal investigation into whether he was actually shot because he is not missing any portion of his ear where he was supposedly shot based on a photo of his ear taken 2 days later. Gun shots don't magically heal within 2 days.
I don't even see how his reaction was a "typical authoritarian response". I think there are only a few reasonable responses after being shot. Defiance is a pretty reasonable response. Anger, fear, running away, and mental breakdown are all also reasonable responses.
I detest Trump, but his immediate reaction actually seemed like the best reaction that a presidential candidate could have. I don't think it was planned and I do think that his reaction was genuine. I think it's very hard to have a calculated response in a situation like that.
That's really the gist of what I was saying. This article feels like it has the implications all wrong. My first take was definitely not the clearest way to communicate my thoughts. Thank you for expanding on it.
I think he didn't do it for any reason relating to political philosophy, but it may resonate harder with authoritarians than others.
If I almost got shot at a rally I'd probably fist pump too. At the bare minimum to show everyone I'm not dead. Fuck Trump but this feels insane.
Never let a good crisis go to waste
This a headline lol.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1354571X.2021.1950340
ABSTRACT
Between 4 November 1925 and 31 October 1926, Tito Zaniboni, Violet Gibson, Gino Lucetti, and Anteo Zamboni all tried and failed to kill Benito Mussolini. The significance of these attempts on Mussolini’s life and their relationship to the establishment of Fascism has gone overlooked as much scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the consequences of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti’s murder in June 1924. In this article, I analyse the impact that these assassination attempts had on Mussolini’s construction of the Fascist state. The article asks two main questions: What role did these assassins, and the state of emergency that their acts generated, play in the establishment of Fascist control? And how did they contribute to Mussolini’s cult status and his consecration as a ‘man of providence’? I argue that the failed assassination attempts were instrumental in allowing the Fascist regime to create a state of emergency and to capitalize on a fabricated demand for crisis management. These attempts fundamentally structured the conditions for the regime’s consolidation of power, including a vast expansion of laws that dismantled the liberal state and established the Fascist dictatorship.
Paywalled. I emailed the author for a copy. The authors almost always will provide.
Please don't do this unless you know how dry and boring academic papers can be and are sincerely interested.
I live/work in a very red state. When I got to work the day after it happened the dorks I work with were ecstatic. The were going on and on about how bad ass trump is and how he looked like a hero from a movie.
I just want this all to be over
No it doesn't
