Assassination attempt on former US President Trump: Was it an act of a lone wolf?

It is a huge development not only for USA, but also for the rest of the world that former President and Republican candidate for the upcoming election in November, Donald Trump was targeted by a 20-year-old man with an AR-style semi-automatic rifle while he was addressing a gathering in Pennsylvania. The 78-year-old former President was hit in the ear while the shooter was killed by law enforcers. At the scene two attendees were badly injured and one was killed.

Now a question is twisting in everyone’s mind: was it done by lone wolf? Famous US investigating agency FBI is now responsible to investigate the shooting. Although US justice department has been remaining intact as it had been valued by the early founders of that country, however, the political atmosphere has recently become such that the country seems almost like a bi-national state. A part of US people, who support Republican party, now think that the election in 2020 was manipulated, if not directly rigged. As a result, two months after the election, on January 6, 2021, a mob of Republican supporters stormed into the United States Capitol Building to preventing the certification of the election results. Fingers of the Democrats rose at the then President Donald Trump for instigate the occurrence, the kind that never happened in the history of US modern statehood. On the other hand, the Democrats have been desperate not to allow Trump to become President again in the upcoming election in next November. They think the country will face total chaos if Trump returns. There is another factor that the Europeans have deep relations with US politics. They are now highly interested to see the Democrats return in power. And it has an interesting recent history that would clear the points of this article.

In 2014, the Obama administration was trying to provide diplomatic support to the post-2014 Ukrainian revolution Yatsenyuk government in Ukraine, and then-vice president Joe Biden was at the forefront of those efforts. Biden's son Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, on April 18, 2014. Joe Biden traveled to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on April 21, 2014, and urged the Ukrainian government to reduce its dependence on Russia for supplies of natural gas. He discussed how the United States could help provide technical expertise for expanding domestic production of natural gas. Hunter, then an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, and a consulting firm in which Hunter is a partner was also retained by Burisma.

In 2016, democrats lost the election and republican candidate trump became President of United States. Trump and his surrogates speculated that hunter Biden was involved in Ukraine’s corruption and pressured new Ukrainan president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the matter while the later was reluctant to do so. Since that time Donald Trump has become non-supportive to Ukraine’s cause.

Just last month, in June 2024, Donald Trump blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately have that settled. He said, “He ( Zelensky) just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion. It never ends”. So it is obvious that Ukraine’s Western European Nato-member allies have been working to secure long-term assistance for Kyiv amid fears that Trump’s potential reelection could curtail U.S. support. Europeans know very well that if US retreat from her current position, the consequence would be dire and they would fell under Russia’s domination, what will make them totally vulnerable. Hence, all the West European countries like UK, Germany, and France are desperate to see the continued assistance from Democrats.

The fissure is getting wider day by day in domestic politics in USA. A Pew report suggests that Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years. The report says, “Both parties have grown more ideologically cohesive. There are now only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-72.” Months ago Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said, “Parties and candidates clearly believe that more polarizing candidates are more likely to win elections. This may be a self-fulfilling prophecy: voters exposed to more polarizing rhetoric from leaders who share their partisan identity are likely to alter their preferences based on their understanding of what their group believes and has normalized—particularly among primary voters whose identity is more tied to their party.” It says, Americans harbor strong dislike for members of the other party.

In such an atmosphere it is not easy to say that there was no hand behind the assassination attempt by a just 20-year-old boy. After the assassination attempt, on 13 July, worldwide news media publish the history of previous incidents. We should also remember the facts: There have been four US Presidents who were assassinated while in office – all of them were shot. In 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated the 16th president of the United States while he was attending the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. Booth slipped into the presidential box and shot him in the head. The shooting occurred at the end of America's Civil War, as Booth and his co-conspirators viewed Lincoln as a tyrant who had overstepped his authority and violated the Constitution. n 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley in the stomach at close range at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley died eight days later from his wounds. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas while he was travelling with his wife Jacqueline in an open convertible.

Besides that six presidents had escaped attacks: In 1835, an unemployed painter named Richard Lawrence hid and waited as the President arrived at a congressional funeral in Washington DC., In 1912, saloonkeeper John Flammang Schrank shot President Theodore Roosevelt in the chest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin while he was on the campaign trail for a third term in office. However, Roosevelt survived the assassination attempt. In 1933, unemployed bricklayer Giuseppe Zangara fired five bullets at the President-elect Franklin Roosevelt during a speech to a crowd in Miami's Bay Front Park, Florida., In 1950, two Puerto Rican pro-independence activists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attempted to assassinate Harry S. Truman, the 35th president of the United States., In 1975, Lynette Fromme attempted to shoot President Ford in Sacramento, California. However, she was stopped by Secret Service agents before she could fire her gun., In 1981, John Hinckley Jr fired several shots at President Reagan and his security team while he was leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. Reagan was wounded when one of the bullets bounced off his limo and spent 12 days in hospital.

Mohshin Habib is an author and journalist