History was made in Pennsylvania last night as much by the attempted assassination of Donald Trump as by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press. Vucci’s image shows a presidential candidate, blood from a bullet wound on his face, his fist raised defiantly, with the US flag behind him in the sky. Anyone in my line of work would have instantly recognised that this is a once-in-a-generation photograph – certain to becoming one of the defining images of American history.
The best photographers tend to be lucky rather a lot
Several bullets had been fired. More could have been forthcoming, but Vucci didn’t take cover. He was there in the thick of it, recording the moment. It’s said that much of photography is about luck, being at the right place at the right time. Perhaps so, but the best photographers tend to be lucky rather a lot. Vucci’s picture is photojournalism at its most powerful.
The resulting image is a perfect metaphor for the Donald Trump campaign. We see him wounded by an assailant and bleeding, showing undeniable physical courage. Rather than cower, he pushed himself above the human shield that his security detail sought to provide for him. The picture was taken as he was shouting: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’.
This chimes perfectly with the story he tells in all of his rallies. They come for me, with deplorable methods. They’re vicious, intolerant, contemptible. They persecute me, shoot at me, sue me and defame me and yes, sometimes they draw blood. But I carry on. And I’ll always carry on fighting: fighting for you. Fighting for America. As Trump was carried away, the crowd shouted USA! USA! The incident, for all of its horror, perfectly reinforces his political message.
Trump describes the lawsuits against him – the convictions, the smears, the relentlessly negative coverage – as political bullets fired by a corrupt leftist establishment. They are only coming for me, he says, just because I’m in the way. They’re really coming for you. ‘They try to jail him,’ wrote Texas governor Greg Abbott. ‘They try to kill him. It will not work. He is indomitable.’ I suspect there will be great many captions to that photo as the election draws near.
At home, I have a book put together by the late Harry Evans, a former editor of the Sunday Times, on The American Century: history, as told by photographs. As one of the great newspaper editors, Evans knew that pictures can say what 5,000 words cannot. For that book, he collected the most powerful photos taken over the century. But I’m not sure how many of have the political potency of the Vucci shot.
In Evans’s day, far more people drew their understanding of the world through newspapers. Photos, no matter how iconic, would always be surrounded by words. But today, social media tells stories through pictures and short video clips. Photographs can change immigration policy, as we saw with the 2013 image of the dead refugee child Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach. Short video clips on social media can sink presidential campaigns, as we saw with Biden’s performance in the recent presidential debate. Vucci’s photo says ‘it’s time to fight back.’
So what will Trump do next? How will he use this image? When Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt, he not just forgave but went to visit his would-be killer in prison. Reagan described his attempted assassin not as someone inspired by the language of the left but a ‘young man with a history of mental disturbance’. The Trump shooter may have given money to a left-leaning political action committee but he is a registered Republican: it may be hard to portray this as politically motivated violence. In his statement, Trump has thanked the security services and given condolences to the family of the rally attendee who was shot but said no more. The politics of this will have to wait: at least for now.
A photograph like this would have been powerful at any time in the past century – but published now, at this stage in the presidential campaign, in an era where half the world has already seen it? The historian Timothy Garton Ash has said it will ‘change the course of history of the world’. Maybe so. What we can say for sure is that the image will be remembered as one of the most important political photographs ever taken.
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