The lives of political leaders are never up for the taking - including Donald Trump's - editorial

The shocking and horrid assassination attempt on former US president and current leading Republican candidate Donald Trump is abhorrent on all fronts. It is a reminder of the clear and necessary limits to the possible ways of effecting change. It serves as a sad and stark reminder that in democracies – including Israel and the US – certain baseline fundamentals cannot be broken for that identity to remain intact.

The Secret Service had confirmed that the shooter was neutralized. The FBI later confirmed the identity of the attacker as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. He was a registered Republican, according to state voting records. One spectator at the rally was killed, and two other people are in critical condition. A source told Reuters that the Secret Service began investigating the shooting as an assassination attempt.

The lives of political leaders are never up for the taking – because it is inhumane, wrong, immoral, illegal, and stands against every naturally derived human value of life.

Because political leaders position themselves as propagators of political ideologies and positions, they can become synonymous with those ideas in the eyes of the public. However, their person is separate from those things and is never a valid target for harm.

The impact of the attempted shooting

This event could affect the presidential race in several ways. It could stretch and expand Trump’s support and provide an even stronger lining for the ideologies he represents: a “martyrdom” effect. Additionally, whatever ideologies oppose his own – and the people leading them – could get demonized and lose support. Alternatively, they could avert this sort of crisis with the correct reaction.

Within a few hours after the incident, US President Joe Biden called for an end to political violence, saying in televised remarks that the former president appeared to be doing well. “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick,” Biden said, adding that he has been thoroughly briefed on the matter and planned to talk to Trump. “Everybody must condemn it.”

“Political violence in any form has no place in our societies,” said newly elected UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. French President Emmanuel Macron called the shooting a “tragedy for our democracies.” At the same time, Argentine President Javier Milei said that the bullet “is not only an attack on democracy, it is also an attack against those who defend and live in the free world.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz added, “Such acts of violence threaten democracy.”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, and the ends, honorable as they may be presented, are not legitimized by any means necessary – far from it. The assassination attempt is an extreme example of this. The people who carry out these acts and the ideology behind them become ripped away from the very ideals they claim to be trying to protect. People cannot perform an undemocratic act to save democracy; it undermines the same system they are trying to save and completely delegitimizes them, putting them in a position where they are losing that part of their identity that they’ve tapped into to carry out the act in the first place.

Democracies are established and depend on certain ideals and rights. Once these rights are violated, broken, or desecrated, the very nature of democracy is rocked and chipped away at; you can’t undermine people’s rights and still call yourself democratic.

Modern democratic countries were designed with internal brakes and checks on power to ensure that the system remains intact regardless of what the public may or may not want. The US is no exception to this and will remain a thriving democracy irrespective of who takes the ballot in November, as well as for years to come.

If changes are ever to be made, they can only be made legitimately by acts that work within the system: using your voice and your vote. Political assassinations, while they can “have a pronounced effect on history,” as Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1865 after the assassination of US president Abraham Lincoln, have never led to better conditions.