The United States' already-intense 2024 presidential race grew even more intense on Saturday afternoon, July 13 when presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh.
President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and many other Democrats were quick to express their horror, emphasizing that violence of this kind has no place in U.S. politics.
In a sobering article published by Vox following the attack, journalist Zack Beauchamp warns that the violence in Western Pennsylvania can only add to the United States' dangerous instability.
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"We should all be terrified about what comes next," Beauchamp warns. "American politics has recently become trapped in a state of simultaneous stability and instability. It is stable in the sense that there are clearly defined and seemingly unshakeable partisan divisions."
Beauchamp adds, "It is unstable in the sense that those divisions have grown so deep and so bitter that they threaten the basic faith in political coexistence that any democracy needs to survive."
The attempted assassination, according to Beauchamp, brings a "risk of serious, unpredictable consequences — up to and including further violence."
"In fact, the very circumstances that make political violence more likely in today's America are the same ones that render our political system ill-equipped to handle its consequences," Beauchamp explains. "Extreme polarization makes cooperation hard and suspicion natural. Some Republican members of Congress are already blaming Democrats for the attempt on Trump's life."
READ MORE: On yesterday's violence
The journalist continues, "The phrase 'inside job' is currently trending on Twitter…. The United States is an extraordinary country: the wealthiest and most powerful ever to exist in human history, but it is riven by what might be its greatest internal divisions since the Civil War. The gravity of that particular comparison should underscore both the dangers here and the uncertainty. A gunman's bullet has just sent the country hurtling into an abyss. The only question now is how far we fall."
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Zack Beauchamp's full article for Vox is available at this link.
