Dear Progressive Reader,

A lot has happened in the past week.

Last Saturday evening, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump was wounded in an apparent assassination attempt. While the Secret Service and the FBI comb the cellphone and social media records of the alleged shooter (who was killed at the scene) it seems no one is asking the very basic question—why did a young man, little more than twenty-years-old, have access to an AR-15 rifle and deadly ammunition? If Pennsylvania (currently ranked seventeenth in the nation) had stricter gun laws, “we could save 11,258 lives in the next decade,” states the website of the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Trump’s survival, which he explains occurred because he was turning his head to point to a chart during his speech, has been taken up by his supporters a sign that God intervened. The incident has certainly given Trump a huge campaign boost, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates. As Emilio Leanza writes in his coverage of the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “Speaker after speaker during the five-day convention dubbed the would-be assassin’s near-miss a ‘millimeter miracle.’ ”

This assumed divine intervention reminded me of another assassination attempt against a rightwing political candidate. On September 6, 2018, Brazilian presidential contender Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed during a campaign rally about a month before the election (which he would go on to win, later earning the nickname “the Trump of the Tropics”). By way of our Latin America correspondent Jeff Abbott, I reached out to María del Carmen Villarreal Villamar, a political scientist who is now at Universidade Federal Rural in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She pointed out the many differences between Bolsonaro’s candidacy in 2018 and Trump’s in 2024. Bolsonaro, at that time was not well known, while Trump, even before his 2017-2021 term, was a media celebrity in the United States. But some parallels are important to note. “The attack against Bolsonaro turned him into an almost perfect ‘victim’ and a ‘martyr’ that reinforced his religious discourse and the idea that he was having a second chance and was ‘the chosen one’ by God,” she tells me in a series of WhatsApp messages. “After the attack, his campaign was able to lie without filters and create an ideal image of his figure for various types of voters—against corruption and the PT [the political party of his opponent], in favor of religion, against minorities, etc.—practically without contrast, without receiving criticism.” All of this sounds familiar as the past week’s RNC has shown. In Milwaukee, many convention attendees even wore fake bandages on their ears to emulate Trump’s prominent wound dressing.

In the U.S. press, much has been made of the comparison to the October 1912 assassination attempt against candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was on his way (coincidentally) to give a speech in Milwaukee when he was shot by a would-be assassin at close range. The bullet (of a much older technology than the one fired from an AR-15) was slowed by the fifty pages of Roosevelt’s speech, which was in his coat pocket, and did not reach the candidate’s vital organs. Roosevelt would refuse immediate medial attention in order to go on stage and give that speech, telling the crowd, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet [hole]—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” He went on to speak for eighty-four minutes.

Trump’s Thursday night acceptance speech at the RNC was timed to exceed Roosevelt’s 1912 rally oration, coming in at a record ninety-two minutes. Cartoonist Mike Konopacki, writing for the Capital Times, notes, “The speech that saved Roosevelt’s life, “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual,” advocated principles of “social and industrial justice” that, today, are completely at odds with Trump’s.” Donald Trump, as Konopacki points out, is no Teddy Roosevelt. And as Leanza concludes in his report from the RNC, “Although there are countless examples of the GOP pandering to Christian fundamentalism, when Trump and his entourage lay claim to God’s favor—in the wake of having attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election—it rings especially authoritarian.” And as Bill Lueders writes in his third dispatch from the scene of the convention, “All of this meanness and nonsense is uniformly accepted among the Republican Party faithful packed into this convention. And there is no denying that, at least right now, they have the upper hand. Trump’s candidacy is ascendant; Joe Biden’s position at the top of the Democratic Party’s ticket has never seemed more ill-advised.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Mike Ervin looks at the potential threats to the ADA inherent in the Supreme Court’s recent ruling undoing the doctrine of Chevron Deference; Audrey Thibert conducts an interview with Algerian freedom fight Zohra Drif who looks at the similarities between her own struggle nearly seventy years ago, and the situation in Gaza today; and environmental justice advocate Sambhav Sankar opines on the longterm impacts of the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. Plus we had had a bunch of great convention photos from itinerant photojournalist Joeff Davis, with more to come in future reports.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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