On Saturday 13 July, in the middle of a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump escaped an assassination attempt: several shots rang out, a bullet wounded him in the ear, panic in the crowd, and the gunman was immediately shot dead by security. Then Trump, his face bleeding, stood up with his fist raised, chanting to the crowd ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’. The images taken on the spot have already gone down in history. The current investigation is revealing little about the assailant: Thomas Matthew Crooks, aged 20, is a Republican voter with no criminal record and no psychiatric history. Reactions were swift: the international community unanimously condemned the ‘political violence’. In the United States, some Republicans accused the Democrats of being behind this climate of tension. While conspiracy theories abound on social networks, Trump’s evangelical supporters see him as ‘the chosen one miraculously saved by the hand of God’. Never mind that arms sales, ardently defended by Trump himself, have multiplied by 4 in twenty years… The very next day, on the eve of the Republican convention, Trump called on Americans to unite, as if he had already been re-elected. We knew this campaign would be crazy. It’s not over yet.
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