Hardly anyone manipulates the cameras as effectively as Donald Trump. One habit stands out from his repertoire. It could actually take him to the White House.
Shots are fired, blood flows, the man on the podium is taken away by security guards. At that moment he raises his fist and calls out to the crowd: “Fight!” What sounds like a scene from a Hollywood blockbuster is a moment that will probably go down in history.
It’s no wonder that days later the first Trump fans had this same gesture carved into their skin, in black ink, more or less well done. But what is pretty is in the eye of the beholder. There it is, anyway: Trump’s fist.
75 seconds after the assassin shot him and before Secret Service agents dragged him away, Donald Trump responded with this gesture: the raised fist, Trump’s standard gesture for years. He shows it in many appearances – and more and more often since his failed re-election in 2020.
On that day in Butler, Pennsylvania, he finally elevated it to a monument – thanks in part to Pulitzer Prize winner Evan Vucci and his image of the assassination, which balances on a fine line between fiction and reality: the blood on Trump’s face, the US flag majestically filling the bright blue sky, and the presidential candidate’s raised fist; it all seems almost staged, as if posed.
Vucci’s incomprehensible recording is the ultimate aestheticization of the assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump. And at the same time his canonization as a political martyr.
One could almost think that the 78-year-old Republican could have prepared for this moment, had planned it all in an act of sinister campaign staging. Of course, that wasn’t the case. Trump was able to prepare himself, though. The history of political photography is rich in protest images. And Trump is a man of images. He knows exactly how to stage himself, where the lenses are and in which light his powdered complexion appears even more vibrant.
At this crucial moment, shortly after the bullets from the shooter’s semi-automatic rifle have flown past him and ripped open his ear, as he narrowly escaped with his life, he makes this gesture. An instinctive gesture that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing would have said was the “fertile moment”: the drama caught at its climax, but not yet decided. The fate of the protagonist remains ambivalent. It can go in either direction.
According to commentators, it seems clear which direction the US president will take after this iconic photo of the assassination attempt on Trump: Trump will win the election in November. Also because of this photo.
In fact, images can not only write history. They can also change it. The image of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in December 1963 went around the world. The President, fatally hit by a bullet, collapsed in the back of the open Lincoln and the First Lady, in a pastel-colored dress, climbed into the trunk in panic while a security agent reached out to her.
The image left the USA in shock. Afterward, the country was a different place. It drifted apart. The shootings in Dallas made the United States more and more into the disunited states that the country presents itself as today. “The American right, with Donald Trump as its defining figure, is a direct result of this dark chapter in American history,” writes historian Lloyd Cox.
