The Shooting of Donald Trump and the Future of Democracy

When a nobody shoots a somebody somewhere that had been nowhere except to locals, the whole lot become immortals. We’d never heard of Butler, Pennsylvania. We’d never heard of nursing home aide Thomas Matthew Crooks. But now they’re with us forever.

And always linked with Donald Trump’s bleeding ear. What a fate.

The climax of Robert Altman’s marvellous film Nashville came to mind.

Widely praised on its release in 1975, it is now rightly regarded as a masterpiece of modern American cinema.
It’s a tableau of American life, an ensemble piece, following 24 characters.

The US was in flux, coming to terms with its defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that had forced Richard Nixon from office – not to mention the political assassinations that had blighted the 1960s, of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as well as the attempted assassination of George Wallace, the segregationist Governor of Alabama in 1972.

Plus, the bicentenary of the proclamation of the 1776 Declaration of Independence was at hand.

The movie opens with a voiceover asking if Christmas smells of oranges.

Hal Phillip Walker, a new and mysterious independent populist candidate, is bidding to become the next President of the US.
His agenda includes taxing churches and removing lawyers from government.

Though he never appears in the film, he and his team are in Nashville to woo support. Cue wheeling and dealing, hope, hate and arrogance, celebrity fixation, vulnerability, exploitation, greed and grift, and lots of country music.

It was reissued in a 4K digital restoration in 2021. It’s terrific.

A BLOOD-SPATTERED HAMILTON

Nashville closes with a political rally for Walker.

The attendance looks like any crowd at any American outdoor event in the south or mid-west over the last 50 years, including Trump’s.

The event was filmed live, the crowd lured with promises of hot dogs and free beer.

Haven Hamilton (a superb Henry Gibson), and Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely) sing a song together (‘One, I Love You’), followed by a personal solo song from Barbara Jean about her childhood (‘My Idaho Home’).

Kenny is a Vietnam veteran who’s obsessed with Barbara Jean. As the song ends he pulls a gun from a violin case and shoots her, also wounding Hamilton.

Cue pandemonium around the stage, elsewhere not so much.

A blood-spattered Hamilton shouts at the crowd, “This isn’t Dallas! It’s Nashville!! Sing!!”

Winifred (aka Albuquerque), a wannabe country singer played by the late great Barbara Harris, finds herself holding a mike which she, perhaps subconsciously, handles like a pistol.

She looks ditzy and blousy, and has a history of failures, including her marriage. But in the crisis she’s the one who seizes the moment, tentatively starting to sing …

“It don’t worry me / It don’t worry me / You may say that I ain’t free / But it don’t worry me…”
And a throwaway tune becomes an anthem.

But is it reminding the viewers of Indian mystic Meher Baba’s advice to Westerners: “Don’t worry, be happy”?

“The price of bread may worry some / But it don’t worry me / Tax relief may never come / But it don’t worry me…”
Or is it characterising many Americans’ attitudes to others’ problems?

“They say this train don’t give out rides / Well, it don’t worry me / The whole world is taking sides/ But it don’t worry me…?”

That indifference – and its corollary: a deep commitment to one’s own interests – link Altman’s fictional event with Trump’s real one.

ACCUSED OF BEING LEFTISTS

Our present fractious, raging times have much in common with the mid-’70s, especially in rust-belt America. Indeed, you could argue that much of the current turmoil can be traced to the unresolved tensions of the later 20th century.

Just before Altman started making Nashville there was a bi-centennial re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party.

But the signs and effigies didn’t target the British monarchy and taxes. They demanded environmental protection, racial justice, an end to corporate profiteering and the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

One demand was met: Nixon resigned in disgrace fifty years ago this August, replaced by Gerald Ford. But environmental protection and racial justice, and much else, are still waiting.

The US, downbeat and demoralised after its humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam the previous year, was mired in political rage and angry introspection.

So, rather than embracing the future, the 1976 Bi-Centennial commemoration tilted backwards, towards restoration of “traditional” values and a nostalgic, non-inclusive vision of the American past.

Meanwhile, in New York City that same year, a young property tycoon named Donald Trump made his first big move, developing the Grand Hyatt Hotel on the grounds of the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad’s Commodore Hotel.

He, of course, had no angst about the war in South East Asia, having used college and medical deferments to avoid being drafted. A doctor said he had bone spurs. In his feet, we think, though it might have been his head.

Later in 1976, US voters elected Jimmy Carter as President. He wasn’t exciting but he was sincere and principled, a marked contrast to the shifty, foul-mouthed Nixon.

He only lasted one term before being ousted by the shapeless B-actor Ronald Reagan, and we all know how well that went. But regard for Carter has grown hugely with hindsight. He is now 99 and despite recent mischief by Republican Party stooges is, at the time of writing, still with us.

Not unlike Joe Biden, he was a decent man, and also genuinely devoutly religious – which, in his case, seems to have influenced his politics for the better. In Europe both Jimmy and Joe would be seen as centre-right, as Christian Democrats. In the US, they are accused of being leftists.

Joe Biden.

VAST RAMIFICATIONS FOR LIFE ON EARTH

The next commemoration of the US Declaration of Independence will be in 2026.

It’s to be known as the Semiquincentennial which means 250th anniversary.

One doubts that many of Donald Trump’s fervent devotees would understand the word much less spell it, or its synonyms sestercentennial and bisesquincentennial. But they’ll hear it a lot over the next two years.

Biden won’t now preside over it. That will fall to the next President.

If Kamala Harris, now the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, wins we may expect an outward-looking and future-oriented celebration and a reassertion of America’s role on the world stage.

Kamala Harris

If Trump is elected it will be the opposite: angry, authoritarian, inward-looking, vindictive and paranoid. There will be repression and civil strife. He has promised mass deportations.

Many among his inner circle and wider support want to return the USA to its white, Protestant ethno-state origins.

1776 preceded the Industrial Revolution, the excesses of empires and trade and metal machines and the fossil fuel industry,

the vast riches made and often squandered, the global domination of the 20th century, rock and roll, rap and digital dystopia.

How could anyone be mad enough to want to rewind the clock that far? How can they think anything of the sort is possible?

But they do, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the outcome of the USA’s November election will have vast ramifications for all life on earth.

Battle is joined. If you have a part to play, then play it.