Experts fear GOP's post-shooting Trump idolization could have "incredibly dangerous" effect

Chants of "fight, fight, fight!" — though brief — peppered the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee Thursday, with attendees pumping their fists as GOP nominee Donald Trump solemnly recounted the attempt on his life during his acceptance speech.

The crowd took inspiration from the now-indelible image that came to characterize the deadly shooting at Trump's Butler, Pa., rally on July 13: the former president, face bloodied and contorted, forcing his arm through the cover of Secret Service agents and pumping his fist while mouthing the words, "fight, fight, fight!" with the nation's flag flying overhead.

"It's just the perfect shot for his message. It conveys things about presumed power, about patriotism, about defiance, strength in the literal face of adversity that is much more difficult to do with words," said Erik Bucy, Texas Tech University's endowed chair of strategic communication who focuses on political communication. "Everybody immediately understands what's going on with that photograph, and whether you like him or you hate him, he does convey strength and resilience in that moment."

But even as supporters rally around Trump following the harrowing attempt on his life, their hailing of the image and adoption of the accompanying chant distills a message that political communication and authoritarianism experts say plays into the heavily polarized nature of politics. That seemingly vast political divide — in part, cultivated through much of Trump's own rhetoric over the years — only widens with such iconography and rings as a cause for concern in the face of political violence, they said.

"Together with Trump’s chanting of 'fight,' the resulting framing is one of conflict, of heroism, of war," argued Yotam Ophir, a University at Buffalo associate professor of communication whose research subjects include media effects and extremism. "The 'fight' chants and the heroic visual framing are capable of fanning, not cooling down, the flames," he continued.

The image "works perfectly for the Republican platform" in its longtime portrayal of President Joe Biden as "weak and old," Ophir told Salon — a position that's more widely held amid the mounting pressure for the president to drop out of the 2024 race following his disastrous debate performance and lackluster subsequent interviews. Similarly, the photograph offers Republicans the opportunity to "shift attention away from policy questions around abortion or Project 2025" to place greater focus on the "character of the candidates," which "leads to political cynicism among voters," Ophir said.

The "'fight, fight, fight' chant is consistent with a sort of message that we've been getting from the Trump Republican Party for some time now — this idea that you have to take back the country, that they're fighting against a Democratic Party and a leftwing cabal that is trying to steal elections, change the country, all these kinds of things," added Sheri Berman, a Barnard College and Columbia University professor of political science whose research focuses include democracy and authoritarianism.

"I think this builds on this very divisive, polarizing imagery that has really fed the Trump version of the Republican Party since 2016, frankly, and has only intensified since the 2020 election," she told Salon.

The chants first took center stage when Trump made his first public appearance following the assassination attempt Monday at the RNC. Delegates greeted the soon-to-be GOP nominee with thunderous applause and calls of "fight, fight, fight!" — their fists raised to punctuate each word. In the days afterward, attendees even took to wearing bandages over their ears in solidarity with Trump, with one Arizona delegate proclaiming it "the newest fashion trend." 

Toward the end of his speech exalting his father's fighting spirit in the face of a near-death experience, second son Eric Trump even led the crowd in chanting their new rallying cry, declaring the senior Trump's action will be remembered as "one of the most courageous in American politics." 

These behaviors, Bucy told Salon, are indicators of the "rally effect" that can arise when a president or former president has to navigate a crisis, such as the boost to a 90 percent approval rating former President George W. Bush received in the wake of 9/11. In Trump's case, the assassination attempt represents a "very personalized crisis," the rallying response to which Bucy expects to intensify and have "lasting resonance" at least in the short term.

That Trump had sound enough mind in the heat of the shooting to perform for his base in such a way was "extraordinary" in its own right, Bucy said. But it's also a reflection of the former president's ability to lean into the United State's mediatization of politics — which shifts the "conventional notion of politics" as a discussion about policy, shared values and the country's direction to a "space of media logic" where the foremost goal is to "maintain attention" on a candidacy — a tool Trump's pulled out in the face of other challenges over the years to rouse his supporters.

During the moments photographers were allowed to document his criminal hush money trial in New York each day, Trump would don a stern and angry look for the cameras but relax his expression when they left, according to The Associated Press. The glare in his Atlanta mug shot, taken last year after his arraignment on charges alleging he conspired to overturn the results of Georgia's 2020 election, soon found its way onto T-shirts, posters and other memorabilia, encouraging his supporters to shovel more money into his campaign.

He also arranged a dramatic return to the White House after testing positive for COVID-19 in 2020 and receiving treatment from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the AP notes. He climbed the South Portico steps and removed his mask upon reaching the balcony, American flags flanking him, giving two thumbs-up to the helicopter as it flew off into the sunset.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, in her book "Confidence Man," wrote that the former president had considered a more dramatic return, in which he “would be wheeled out of Walter Reed in a chair" and "would dramatically stand up, then open his button-down dress shirt to reveal” another shirt with a “Superman logo beneath it.”

The imagery around the assassination attempt, then, takes the right's idea of Trump as a "Superman for the people, or a crusader against so-called mainstream media" and gives it a "real image" and "real force," Bucy said.

For his part, Trump said that, after seeing the crowd at his Saturday rally hadn't left, he felt he had to project strength and assure them he wasn't badly injured.

“The energy coming from the people there in that moment, they just stood there. It’s hard to describe what that felt like, but I knew the world was looking, I knew that history would judge this and I knew I had to let them know we are OK,” he previously told the Washington Examiner.

Taken with Trump's populist stance, the message he conveys to his base with the "fight, fight, fight!" chant is one that encourages them to "continue the fight against the entrenched elites or against whoever might be responsible for targeting them," Bucy argued. In so doing, Trump also draws on the notion that he's an underdog due to his move from celebrity to politician that's become a key theme of his campaigns and rhetoric, a point Bucy notes, reads as "farcical" given the former president's billionaire status and lifelong proximity to political elites.

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In a slight departure from his usual rhetoric, Trump's nomination acceptance speech Thursday night called for unity between all Americans, no matter their races or political affiliations, as he reflected on the attempt on his life. But he quickly returned to his rhetorical roots, couching the blame for the country's political polarization in the left's labelling of him as a threat to democracy — which the far-right has claimed led to the deadly shooting — and accusing Democrats of launching politically motivated prosecutions against him.

"In the aftermath of this assassination attempt, Republicans have really attempted to make an equivalence between the Democrats' claim that Trump is a threat to democracy. There's no doubt in my mind, and I think in the minds, I can say, of almost all political scientists, that Trump and the party under him have, in fact, threatened democracy in some very significant ways. I think pointing that out is totally legitimate because it is empirically verifiable," Berman said, noting that though Democrats have also gone against democratic norms and institutions, "there's a difference, however, in that the Republicans under Trump have done so in a much more consistent and systematic way."

Bucy said that, while he wouldn't say Trump is a "really strong populist, let alone a fascist" as far as his presidential policy outside of executive orders went, the populist theme Trump and others align themselves with being "really divisive" and "very aggressive in its language" has set the stage over the years with "enough rhetoric and verbal threats" that "we're starting to see actual physical threats" and political violence. The 2017 shooting at the Republican Congressional Baseball team's practice that injured Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and the 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., also serve as other harrowing examples, he said.

When considering the idea of violence, the lauding of the Trump image and accompanying chant "kind of offer a very uncomfortable continuation of the Jan. 6 iconography," Bucy said. "The people who don't see anything wrong with that, or who reveled in it, or who think they were the victims only acting out against their oppressors, well, now they have another kind of small, isolated case, but this time against Trump."

What the "gradual but now complete rehabilitation" of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol did was transform the politically violent event into a kind of "legitimate resistance," seen in how the Republican Party first condemned the actions before members of the far-right faction began to see the participants as "heroes," Berman explained. Political polarization, then, transforming into the "legitimation of or justification of violence" or even the "demonizing of opponents" is a cause for concern, she said.

"That is an incredibly dangerous thing," Berman said. "Any kind of legitimation of violence in politics is an anathema to democracy, and it tends to metastasize."

Instead of "celebrating" or extolling Trump as a hero in the aftermath of the "awful low-point" for the country that was the assassination attempt, "Americans should resist the temptation and not get dragged into extremism and political polarization," Ophir said, adding: "As hard as it may be, we need to use this moment to come together as a nation and fight extremism, not one another."