Will the assassination attempt make Trump more popular?

Astrid Prange de Oliveira

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.

"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."

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.

https://www.dw.com/en/will-the-assassination-attempt-make-trump-more-popular/a-69684293#

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GUSNOTE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT JOE IS NOT RUNNING FOR A SECOND TERM... BUT WHOEVER IS CHOSEN BY THE OBAMA WASHINGTON OUTFIT WILL BE ANOINTED TO CARRY ON THE "OBAMA DOCTRINE" AS AN OBAMA FOURTH TERM (BIDEN WAS "OBAMA'S THIRD")— WARS AND MORE WARS (especially by proxy) WHILE TRYING TO CONQUER THE WORLD. THE OBAMA DOCTRINE IS ONLY A CONTINUATION OF THE MACKINDER GEOPOLITICAL VENTURE ADOPTED BY AMERICA SINCE 1917....

James W. Carden

A little over a decade and a half ago, at the close of the what had been up, until that point, among the most arrogant and clueless of American presidencies, there seemed, if for only a short while, a yearning both within Washington and the country at large for a return to normalcy, a desire to abandon the unilateralism and wars of choice that became the hallmark of U.S. foreign policy beginning on September 11, 2001.

The desire to rethink the prevailing assumptions of hegemony and endless war manifested itself in some quarters, mainly among journalists and intellectuals, in a renewed interest in the work of the mid-20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, known, if at all, among the churchgoing public as the author of the Serenity Prayer. The son of a German pastor, Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. He became among the most trenchant critics of America’s postwar transformation into a Cold War hegemon, which he saw as antithetical to both the best traditions of the country and to a vibrant and healthy democracy. 

Niebuhr understood that the exercise of global power in the postwar decades came with its own set of problems. The intellectual historian Wilfred MaClay has observed that for Niebuhr, “the pursuit of good ends in the arenas of national and international politics had to take full account of the un-loveliness of human nature, and the un-loveliness of power.”

As far as I can tell, the first major public intellectual to call for a Niebuhrian Revival was the international relations scholar Andrew Bacevich in 2008. At the time, hopes were high among conservatives (remember the ObamaCons?) that Obama, thoughtful, measured, mature, and, perhaps most importantly, Not Hillary, would take U.S. foreign policy in new, less sanguinary directions. He gave every indication that he might. Speaking with David Brooks in 2007, Obama claimed Niebuhr was his “favorite philosopher.” In 2009, the Pew Research Center held a conference featuring E.J. Dionne on “the recent revival of interest in Niebuhrian thought.” And as late as 2014, a TIME magazine contributor claimed to have “heard a distinct Niebuhrian strain” in a speech Obama gave on the Middle East.

It was not surprising that after eight years of Bush-Cheney— which brought us military disaster, economic ruin, and national disgrace—there would be a renewed interest in the work of Niebuhr who, in his 1952 book The Irony of American History, observed that,

if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

Unfortunately, Obama’s repudiation of Washington’s imperial arrogance was short lived. In some ways, in spite of a few adroitly delivered speeches, his foreign policy exhibited an arrogance on par with that of his predecessor: The destruction of Libya; the attempted destruction of Syria; and a new and more dangerous Cold War with Russia are among Obama’s troubling legacies.

Today, President Joe Biden, overseeing what is for all intents and purposes a third Obama term, makes Bush, Cheney and Co. seem almost humble by comparison. Niebuhr, citing John Adams, recognized what Biden and his team of liberal interventionists (they refer to themselves, by the way, as “the A-Team”) clearly do not, that power,

always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.

Consider the recent televised exchange between Biden and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

Stephanopoulos: Would you be willing to undergo an independent medical evaluation that included neurological and cognit– cognitive tests and release the results to the American people?

Biden: Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world. Not—and that’s not hy—sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.

Read that again: I am running the world. We are the essential nation of the world.

Which brings us to the man of the hour. 

Having been, by luck or some otherworldly power, spared his life after the nearest of misses, there are signs that the former President Trump might take a more measured, mature approach going forward. In a widely read interview with the Washington Examiner, Trump said he re-drafted his RNC acceptance address in light of last weekend’s assassination attempt. “It is,” he said, “a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.”

It might be too much to expect that the foreign policy proposals of his current crop of advisers will likewise undergo a thoughtful reconsideration. Time will tell. But Reinhold Niebuhr understood the “ironies of history.” Might it be Donald Trump, of all people, to be the one who brings us just a bit closer to that long hoped for Niebuhrian Revival?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/time-again-for-a-niebuhrian-revival/

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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has mocked George Soros and his son for quickly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the “most qualified candidate we have” to replace Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race on Sunday.

After Biden announced his decision not to seek re-election in November, Alex Soros, the son of billionaire financier George Soros and heir to his father’s philanthropic empire, promptly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, describing her as the Democrats’ “best” shot to defeat Donald Trump.

“It’s time for us all to unite around Kamala Harris and beat Donald Trump... Long live the American Dream!” Alex Soros wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), attaching a picture of himself with Harris.

“I’d just like to thank Alexander Soros for not keeping everyone in suspense about who the next puppet would be,” Elon Musk, the owner of X, wrote in response.

George Soros also personally supports Harris, his spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday. As a prominent US Democratic Party donor, George Soros funneled around $128 million to candidates and organizations during the midterm elections in 2022, and gifted $5 million to the main political action committee backing Biden the day after the president’s flubbed debate against Donald Trump last month.

Musk previously slammed the liberal Hungarian billionaire for effectively trying to dismantle society by ensuring laws are not enforced. “He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization,” Musk said during a podcast with Joe Rogan last year, explaining that the current lawlessness plaguing American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles is the result of Soros backing progressive District Attorneys who “refuse to prosecute crime.”

Musk also claimed that despite the 93-year-old Soros being “pretty old” and “basically a bit senile” at this point, he was nevertheless “very smart” and very good at arbitrage, figuring out that the highest “value for money” was in supporting local races rather than national election campaigns like those for the Senate or the presidency.

FOLLOW LIVE UPDATES: Republicans call on dropped-out Biden to resign, Democrats endorse Harris

Liberal tycoon George Soros, who shot to infamy for crashing the British pound in 1992, is among the wealthiest men on earth, with an estimated personal net worth of around $7 billion. Last year, he stepped down from the helm of his Open Society Foundations, handing over control of the $25 billion NGO to his 38-year-old son, Alex.

https://www.rt.com/news/601455-musk-soros-puppet-kamala/

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MANY TIMES ON THIS SITE, WE HAVE EXPOSED GEORGE SOROS TRICKS OF BEING A "SOCIALIST" WHILE BANKRUPTING POOR COUNTRIES VIA CURRENCY MANIPULATIONS....