We speak to award-winning American journalist and visiting senior editor at the Economist – Steve Coll.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: It does seem that political violence is now one of the defining features of this campaign.

Steve Coll: I think you’re right. It has been a long time, since 1968, that we’ve had such active assassination attempts during a presidential campaign. And the atmosphere, of course, is quite heated on both sides. The candidates and their followers believe that a victory by their opponent poses an existential threat to American democracy or our way of life. And that kind of language has been around for a long while.

Of course, in calmer times, America is plagued by assassination attempts against presidential candidates and other politicians. There’s been a massive increase in investment in the Secret Service. And yet, as we’ve seen just this morning with President Biden’s comments, the capacity of the service to deal with all these threats is still short of their scale.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: The first assassination attempt on Donald Trump didn’t seem to last as either a media story or a campaign feature. It was sort of almost all over in five days as his ear healed. What do you think happens with this second apparent attempt?

Steve Coll: Well, as you say, there was a rallying effect around President Trump among his supporters. And, you know, they’re competing, President Trump and Vice President Harris, they’re competing for what is at this point a pretty small sliver of genuinely undecided voters who will actually turn up at the polls. I think these are voters who tend to pay attention late in a campaign. And if there’s another rallying effect around President Trump, if he’s seen as determined and defiant and sort of able to cheat death, maybe that will attract some of these undecideds. But I think a lot of the electorate is pretty locked into their positions.

The danger is that their competition and the heat and intensity of it is going to invite more people into the public square with guns and rifles. As you know, guns are ubiquitous in the United States. I think our ratio of unsettled, troubled people prone to violence may not be higher than that of other rich societies. But the easy access to guns makes all kinds of people potentially dangerous, especially down the stretch of a campaign like this one.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: It’s also interesting seeing how Donald Trump calibrates his messages to different audiences. If you look on X or Twitter in the last hour, he’s been talking about the difficulties of talking to his grandchildren about attempts on his life. If you look on Truth Social where the real diehards are, he talks about the rhetoric and lies of ‘comrade’ Kamala Harris, talks about the communist left rhetoric. The bullets are flying and it will only get worse. If this is down to a very small number of people deciding how they’re going to vote at the beginning of November, do you think any of these messages reach them?

Steve Coll: I think Donald Trump is very intuitive and also a very effective communicator. He is a performer who has a sense of how to communicate simultaneously to different audiences. And you pointed it out, I think being shot at and missed is a human experience. And his own kind of vulnerability after the attack in July was part of what created the rallying effect, you know, the bandage on his ear and his own kind of slightly…being a little bit unsettled by being shot at – and having such a close call. This time around it wasn’t quite as vivid an attack and I’m not even sure that the man under arrest got a shot off.

But he has learned how to communicate successfully about his own vulnerability and his supporters have created a narrative of martyrdom that reinforces their message that there is something special about Donald Trump’s calling as a leader in the United States – and that more people should follow him. The United States has a very deep spiritual and religious tradition and a lot of Trump’s followers are not hesitant to compare him to Jesus Christ, sort of on the cross, and suffering for the good of his following. And some of us may not connect with that message, but a lot of Americans do.