It is just after 6 p.m. on a hot Saturday night. Donald Trump is behind the podium at a rally at the Butler Farm Show in Pennsylvania. Behind him is an audience of men, women, and children adorned in campaign regalia and holding aloft placards. “Look what happened to our country,” Trump says, turning his head toward a screen displaying a chart with facts and figures about illegal immigration. “If you wanna really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened—”

A pop cuts him off. Trump pauses as looks of horror start to form on the faces behind him. Trump grabs his ear and realizes that he’s just been grazed by a bullet. Several more shots pop off and he drops to the ground. The shots miss him but strike members of the audience. Approximately 147 yards away, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks is perched on a rooftop, peering through the glass of a riflescope. He shoots again. In the bleachers, former fire chief Corey Comperatore is hit in the head and killed as he dives over his wife and two daughters to protect them from the gunfire. 

Seconds later, the ordeal ends when a Secret Service sniper neutralizes Trump’s would-be assassin. A security detail surrounds Trump, who rises to his feet and raises his fist in defiance as the crowd jumps to its feet and cheers.

Lenin said there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. The weeks of July 2024 had the bizarre feeling of both: nothing and everything had happened in a matter of moments. Though the country came within millimeters of seeing a former president’s head explode on live television, the trauma of that near miss did little to stir unity in the hearts of Americans. 

One poll published by UnHerd found that a third of Democratic voters openly agreed with the statement: “I wish Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed.” Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, lamented in The New York Times that “America is far more angry and far more violent now than it was in 1981,” when her father was shot. 

So angry, in fact, that it seems unlikely we’ll ever truly understand what happened that day. People on both sides of the aisle immediately resorted to conspiracy theorizing. Some of Trump’s supporters believe that some complex plot devised by powerful, evil entities had attempted to eliminate him. Some of his detractors insist that his campaign had elaborately staged the whole thing to help win the election this year. As the two camps argued, Meta and Facebook quietly tried to memory-hole the event by censoring the dramatic photograph of Trump with his fist in the air. At the same time, Google’s algorithm suppressed search results related to the assassination attempt (an Alphabet Inc. spokesman said in early August that the problem with the algorithm was unintentional and had been fixed).

If anything, Patti Davis underestimated just how divided we’ve become. We occupy different islands of reality. 

So where does that leave us? Twentieth-century Spain offers a glimpse at one possible future. Indeed, the parallels are striking, for the killing of a conservative politician served as the catalyst for the uprising that marked the formal start of the Spanish Civil War. In that case, there actually was a conspiracy at play between the left and the state. 

Tensions had been high after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. At once, the left descended like a storm over Catholic churches and institutions across the country. Precious architectural jewels like the Chapel of San José were reduced to rubble. Manuel Azaña, then the Minister of War, shrugged amid the violence. “All the convents of Madrid are not worth the life of a single Republican,” he said. The unrestrained fury of the left against Christian institutions was such that the Spanish liberal essayist Miguel de Unamuno quipped that it made the Inquisition seem tame. 

“Even the Inquisition was limited by certain legal guarantees,” he said in 1932. “But now we have something worse: a police force which is grounded only on a general sense of panic and on the invention of nonexistent dangers to cover up this overstepping of the law.” 

In 1934, radical leftists staged a series of organized miners’ strikes that effectively became an uprising, leaving scores of priests dead and many churches burned. What began as an alleged protest against a slightly more moderate government became an occasion to engage in an orgy of anti-Christian violence. Francisco Franco, then General of Division and aide to Minister of War Diego Hidalgo, characterized it as “a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism, and whatever attacks civilisation in order to replace it with barbarism.” Franco was tasked with quelling the insurgency, and when the guns fell silent, around 2,000 people would die. 

Two years later, a contested election would bring Spain a step closer to civil war.  

An electoral alliance of left-wing political organizations called the Popular Front, according to historian Stanley Payne, was “permitted to register its own victory at the polls, contrary to the spirit and practice of Republican elections.” That happened in nearly all provinces on Feb. 20, 1936, “but was carried out by new leftist officials, who ratified the results produced by major irregularities in at least six provinces, handing victory to the Popular Front.” Payne continued: 

In a four-step process, electoral results originally almost evenly divided between left and right were rigged and manipulated over a period of three months until the Popular Front commanded a majority of two-thirds of the seats, which would soon give it the power to amend the constitution as it pleased. In the process, democratic elections ceased to exist.

But the final catalyst for the war came that summer in the assassination of the conservative politician José Calvo Sotelo. His death occurred on July 13, the same day that a would-be assassin made an attempt on Trump’s life. Fate, like history, has a habit of rhyming. 

Leftist Assault Guard officers illegally arrested and kidnapped Sotelo. They put him in a police personnel carrier and shot him in the back of the head, then dumped his body in a cemetery. The government did nothing about it. Instead, much like Meta and Google, it attempted to suppress ugly facts, such as the fact that one of the men involved in Sotelo’s murder was the bodyguard of Indalecio Prieto, a leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party.  

Sotelo died on July 13, 1936. The Spanish Civil War formally began four days later when army units in the Moroccan Protectorate launched an uprising against the government. 

In the aftermath of the failed attempt on Trump’s life, his allies suggested that America would have seen a similar outcome if the shooter had succeeded. 

And yet, despite the country being the most polarized it has been since the War Between the States, it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s demise would have triggered an uprising. How and where would the lines of a Second Civil War be drawn? What, if any, portion of the military would defect? How would the logistics work? On what ideological grounds would the factions align? 

Even the shooter’s ideology and motives are, as of this writing, enigmatic. His high school classmates told reporters they considered him an intelligent and
“conservative” kid. Yet Crooks apparently made comments in support of Joe Biden on the social media platform Gab. Crooks also apparently had threatened to shoot up his school and put bombs in the bathrooms when he was just 15 years old. Authorities didn’t take it seriously at the time. Five years later, police found a pair of homemade bombs in the Hyundai Sonata Crooks drove to the rally.  

The circumstances of the shooting itself are baffling enough that it is understandable why people would assume a conspiracy of one variety or another. A SWAT sniper on security detail spotted Crooks nearly two hours before he opened fire on the president and notified his colleagues. Yet Crooks had time to wander around the building, take measurements with a rangefinder, and climb to his firing position. Investigators found that he had scouted out the area beforehand with a drone. 

The level of failure by the Secret Service and law enforcement agencies is astounding. “As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured,” acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. told Congress. 

Was Crooks an agent of some evil and clandestine organization, or a lone radical leftist? Neither possibility seems likely. Investigators found that Crooks had been researching information about the Democratic convention as well. Crooks also searched, “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” one week before the shooting and allegedly boasted online that “July 13 will be my premier, watch as it unfolds.” In other words, the best evidence we have now is that Crooks was a deeply disturbed person who had both a death wish and a desire for infamy.

The good news is that, despite all the remarkable similarities, America does not seem on track for a society-wide Spanish-style civil war along ideological lines. However, that does not mean things will not get worse. They likely will, as the enmity between neighbors continues to rise like a flame.

What matters now is preparing for a future of uncertainty. Americans should build and strengthen the ties of their lives outside the political. No one is coming to save us; we have to save ourselves. ◆