The Other Failed Assassination Attempt You Should Be Very, Very Worried About

Ukraine openly admits trying to murder Russia’s president

Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, the attempt to assassinate him that has just failed in Butler, Pennsylvania should frighten you. For one thing because if the would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had succeeded, he may have lit the fuse – not necessarily very long – of Civil War 2.0 in the USA: It is hard to see how Trump’s large and growing following would not have blamed his murder on the liberal establishment, the Democratic party, and, last but not least, the mainstream media.

Trump dead would not merely have become a political martyr. America is a country overflowing with guns and anger. Already in 2022, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way published a Foreign Affairs article with the title “America’s Coming Age of Instability: Why Constitutional Crises and Political Violence Could Soon Be the Norm,” warning that the US could well be headed for a “period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule.”

In the same year, an extensive, poll-based study first published as “Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence: First Report from a Nationwide Population-Representative Survey” found that half of all Americans agreed to some extent with the prediction of civil war within a decade. Disturbingly many, in addition, were ready to take part in it, too. A murdered Trump could easily have turned into a reason for bloody revenge and insurrection. In short, it is not only Donald Trump who has had a narrow escape but America as a whole.

Moreover, it’s not fair but, as with the American financial system, the whole world will suffer from the fall-out if – or when – the US political system finally breaks down completely and what is in many ways a latent civil war becomes acute. Hopefully, it will be different soon but, as of now, America’s fiascos are still the whole world’s problems.

Yet, at the same time, we have had news of assassination plans that pose at least equally grave dangers to the world as a whole, namely by Ukraine against Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.