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In an instant, the political situation in the United States was transformed when a gunman shot Donald Trump while he was on stage at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania on July 13.

The situation is still evolving, but the initial political impact is highly favorable for Trump. Instructing his Secret Service detail to pause as they evacuated him from the stage, Trump pumped his fist and yelled to the crowd, “Fight!” — instantly creating iconic images that make Trump look heroic and strong. The contrast between his (self-created and false) image as an unstoppable fighter and Biden’s feebleness has never been greater.

Immediately following the shooting, the Biden campaign suspended its advertisements. Practically every major Democratic Party elected official rushed to express their sympathy for Trump and wish him well. A range of corporate leaders, perhaps seeing Trump’s victory as now inevitable, issued statements embracing him.

The main argument the Democratic Party had in the campaign up to now was that Trump was an aspiring dictator and pathological liar who represented an existential threat to democracy. They instantly dropped all these talking points in the name of “coming together” and “turning down the rhetoric.” The furthest Biden now goes is to say Trump has a “competing vision” for the country.

The right wing, on the other hand, immediately went on the attack. J.D. Vance, a vice-presidential contender, directly blamed Biden’s rhetoric for the shooting. Donald Trump, Jr. immediately said after the shooting that his father “will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.” There is zero indication the “radical left” had anything to do with this, as the shooter himself was a registered Republican, but such comments have saturated the far-right political ecosystem. They are meant to cow Trump’s liberal critics into silence, lest they be seen as supporting violence. It also lays the groundwork and creates a pretext for a new wave of repression, either under a second Trump presidency or even now under Biden.

Already the White House has signaled Biden is planning to go on a new political offensive this week against the campus encampments in solidarity with Palestine as an example of “violent extremism.” This is absurd. The encampments were launched to stop the genocidal violence against the Palestinian people; the student protesters attacked no one and were, in fact, targets of violence themselves.

Trump is headed to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention. His speech at the RNC will set the tone for the next phase of the campaign. Trump is reportedly rewriting his speech, which had originally been an all-out attack on Biden, to focus more on themes of national unity. With leading capitalists extending him an olive branch, Trump could calculate that his best move would be to move in a “moderate” direction and demonstrate to fellow members of the ultra-rich elite that he can be a unifying, “presidential” figure and present strength for the Empire. Trump has no fixed ideology and solely cares about his image and legacy.

In another sign that an elite consensus was emerging around Trump as the next president, the judge in the classified documents criminal case against Trump suddenly dismissed all charges two days after the assassination attempt. Soon, a DC judge will have to decide if other charges relating to the plot to overturn the 2020 election can go forward in light of the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

Fake pacifism and a new cycle of political violence

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence,” Joe Biden says. “No exception.” It is important not to lose sight of the extreme hypocrisy of the powerful figures now issuing blanket condemnations of violence.

The same people who are so appalled that someone would shoot at a politician did not bat an eye at the news the same Saturday morning that Israeli fighter jets had just killed 90 Palestinian civilians in a failed assassination attempt of a resistance leader in Gaza. They normalize and defend all the violence carried out by the state — whether in oppressed neighborhoods inside the United States, at the U.S.-Mexico border, or overseas. But then they turn around and say, “violence has never been the answer.”

All the politicians who have suddenly become pacifists for a weekend don’t really mean it. This is about their own safety and no one else’s.

More than anything, they are concerned about a new wave of political violence that could destabilize their rule. Contrary to Biden’s assertions that such political violence is “unheard of,” working-class leaders and social movement leaders have been targeted by violence throughout U.S. history. There have also been periods of U.S. history where violence and assassination have been the methods used to resolve disputes within the ruling class. The U.S. Civil War came about after years of escalating political violence. A century later, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and 1968 profoundly reshaped the presidential campaigns that were underway in each of those instances. Then came the shooting that left George Wallace paralyzed in the 1972 election, an election which also saw President Nixon order the break-in to the offices of the DNC. The impeachment of Nixon, and the subsequent appointment of an unelected president and vice-president, Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, capped off this period of extreme instability in the ruling class — and to end it, Nixon was pardoned in the name of “national unity.”

In periods of major upheaval domestically and internationally, the tendency to resolve struggles within the ruling class using violence grows stronger, as does the tendency to use violence against the people.

Lest we forget: from 2017 to 2020, Democratic Party leaders attempted to undo the 2016 election with the phony Russiagate conspiracy, asserting that Trump was elected because of Russian interference in the election. From Day One of the Trump presidency, the Democratic Party leadership and their supporters were looking to impeach him for being a “puppet” of Putin. Then, in turn, Trump tried to undo the 2020 election by mobilizing fascist forces to seize the Capitol at the moment the vote was to be ratified. And in between these two events, there was a mass uprising against police killing of unarmed civilians, during which the National Guard was called out, Democratic mayors complied with Trump to impose curfews and conduct mass arrests, and Trump itched to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military to occupy cities in the United States. Talk about instability.

Headed into the 2024 election, there remains all the same explosive potential around the election and the transfer of power. The underlying social crises — of job destruction, climate destruction, military confrontation, state violence, the cost-of-living crisis, etc. — cannot be solved by either faction of the capitalist class. Neither party can control the two egomaniacs who lead them. The trust in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court are at record lows. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in circulation among the population. The country appears to be on a collision course. No wonder they’re saying, “Cool it.”

All this is more important than who, if anyone, the shooter was connected to politically. Theories already abound, and there will now be extensive investigations by multiple different arms of the government with contradictory political interests. There is intense speculation about how the gunman was able to position himself so close to the stage and why police did not stop him. Some of that may become clearer in the coming weeks, but it also may remain shrouded in mystery. Rather than focus on that, class-conscious workers should pay more attention to how the ruling class will politically utilize this assassination attempt in the here and now.

Real working-class unity — no unity with the ruling-class establishment!

The Democrats now want to invoke “unity” and American patriotism to silence criticism of the institutions whose legitimacy has been rapidly in decline. The Republicans also talk of unity and wrap themselves in the flag, but they want to use this event to blast through any opposition to their radical pro-corporate agenda.

The hypocrisy of elite politicians aside, they are playing on a sincere feeling among many working class people that the United States has become deeply divided in a way that has dangerous consequences. People do desire peace over instability, unity over division. The question, then, is what is the answer to “polarization”?

Socialists desire working-class unity, but no unity with the tiny billionaire class that has doubled their profits in the last four years by exploiting people of all backgrounds. The problem is not that people are politically polarized, but that we are polarized on totally the wrong basis.

Working-class people who vote for Biden or for Trump, or neither, have more in common than they may think. They share the same problems paying for rent, mortgage, a tank of gas, and a dozen eggs while dealing with stagnant wages, disrespectful bosses, decrepit schools, exorbitant child care, and parasitic insurance companies. They have almost no democratic say in any of it. They generally want to stay out of wars abroad and would much prefer to see their tax dollars used to build stronger communities.