Will the assassination attempt make Trump more popular?

Following Saturday's assassination attempt,  Donald Trump has officially been selected as the Republican presidential nominee at the party's national convention. Some say the shooting may have made him more likely to triumph in the US general election in November.

"It's certainly the case that the attack will garner him additional sympathy," political scientist and Latin America expert Günther Maihold told DW. "As a consequence, the individual moves into a different realm. The population sees them as both particularly vulnerable, and, at the same time, as a savior. This also applies to Trump."

Maihold compared the situation with the attack on Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was critically injured at an election campaign event in Rio de Janeiro on September 6, 2018. The following month, Bolsonaro won the presidential election with 55% of the vote.

'Combination of victimhood and catharsis'

"I do believe there is a kind of Bolsonaro effect," Maihold said. "The candidate becomes a symptom of the disintegration of their society, and, at the same time, a sympathetic figure. It's a combination of victimhood and catharsis. This combination endows them with an additional element of charisma."

Brazilian columnist Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca went one step further.

"Bolsonaro is not the only one to win an election following an assassination attempt," he wrote in the daily newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. "[US President Ronald] Reagan was reelected by a landslide in 1984 after the attempt on his life [in March 1981.]"

In Pinheiro's analysis, "Both were already the favorite; the attempt on their life only sealed their victory. The same is likely to happen with Trump."

Modi survived an attack

This was also true for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On October 27, 2013, he survived a bomb attack in Patna, the regional capital of the Indian state of Bihar, carried out by the Islamist organizations Indian Mujahideen and Students Islamic Movement of India.

The attack occurred in the middle of the election campaign. Voting took place between April 7 and May 12, 2014, and Modi and his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) won a majority in the Indian parliament for the first time. He has now been in power for ten years.

Like all heads of state and government around the world, Modi condemned the attack on Trump and called for peace. However, beyond the official condemnation of political violence, social media platforms are full of people apportioning blame.

'Global Left networks'

Indian government spokesperson Amit Malviya, for example, blamed the so-called "global Left" for the attack. Shortly after it happened, he posted on X, formerly Twitter: "Shinzo Abe, then Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and now Donald Trump. […] The threat is real. Vile global Left networks are at work."

Bolsonaro's son Flavio is spreading the same narrative. "The far left demonizes and dehumanizes its opponents with lies — with the support of the mainstream media," he wrote, also on X. "And then a 'lone wolf' appears, who has to save the world from the 'enemy of democracy,' the 'genocidal murderer,' or the 'militias.' This is the formula of hate, which has real and almost deadly consequences."

Both commentators are convinced that "assassination attempts always target right-wing and conservative political leaders." But history shows us that this is not the case.

Political murder in Quito

In 1968, the Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was murdered during the US primary campaign. He was the brother of President John F. Kennedy, also a Democrat, who was assassinated in 1963.

A particularly shocking example was the murder of the Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year. An investigative journalist who had reported on corruption and violence in his homeland, Villavicencio was shot dead following a campaign rally in Quito on August 9, 2023.

Political violence on the right and left

Worldwide, the list of attacks on presidential candidates is long. Victims include former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who survived being poisoned with dioxin in 2004, as well as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest and former president of Haiti, who was fired on when traveling in a motorcade on March 20, 2017. He escaped uninjured.

"It's irrelevant whether the attack is perpetrated by the left or the right," said political scientist Maihold. In any case, he points out, the attack on Trump doesn't fit the pattern: The shooter was a member of the Republican Party.

"It's more about us reaching a point where polarization is entering a new phase," Maihold said.

He warns that the use of violence is becoming increasingly acceptable.

"This new level of escalation is particularly dramatic in a country like the US, where there is such a high density of weapons," he said.

This article was originally published in German.