The failed assassination Saturday against the former U.S. president and Republican candidate for the upcoming presidential election in November is likely to only further undermine faith in the U.S. among Washington’s allies abroad, particularly those in Europe.
Obviously, assassination attempts are not exclusive to the United States, and several have occurred recently in other wealthy democracies. Just two months ago, Slovakian PM Robert Fico survived a politically motivated shooting. Former Japanese PM Abe Shinzo was less fortunate in 2022, when he was assassinated by a disgruntled member of the public two years after leaving office. Nor is Europe a stranger to political violence more generally, as witnessed by The Troubles in Ireland, the Years of Lead in Italy and the Basque conflict in Spain and France, among other examples.
But those events are more distant historically, whereas this weekend’s attack comes after nearly a decade of heightened political polarization in the U.S. since Donald Trump’s rise in 2015. That polarization has been accompanied by increasingly violent rhetoric as well as incidents of actual violence—including the mass shooting that left a member of Congress wounded in 2017 and the Capitol insurrection in 2021—that has raised doubts about the country’s political stability. Considering that many European governments were already openly expressing concerns about Washington’s reliability as an ally, the attempted assassination of Trump only serves to heighten those fears.