Phenomenology of the Assassination Attempt on Trump

“…the exceptional form taken by contemporary events: these are both dramatic and insignificant, impatient to occur and indifferent to themselves (and to all of us).”
-Jean Baudrillard

The grasping of the ear, the dropped jaw, and the ensuing dive of the mob first come with a sort of nostalgic remorse, the feeling you get when you’ve won a debate but at too high a cost, when you know you’ve gone too far (even if you also know, deep down, that you haven’t gone far enough).

But then he gets up, fist in air, and you realize that you’ll never be able to enjoy that sappy remorse, that royal clemency: an emperor’s mercy is always made to look foolish when his supplicant instead demands an honorable death. But what happens when the emperor himself refuses death, and the supplicant nevertheless tries to stab him in the back?

Remorse thus turns to disappointment. You wish he was just offed, damn it (but you gauge the room before saying anything too brash). Fits and starts: “I don’t know what to think, I mean….”

Despite what some have already undoubtedly said (“everything will be different after this!”), after only a little bit of time, you realize that this is an event without effect — something akin to a means without end. Things will go on as normal. This is America. There was no “assassination attempt,” just the simulation of an assassination — hence all the inevitable conspiracy theories (when everything is credible, everything is undecidable).

An assassination attempt is never any longer a tragedy but a possibility, a potentiality, something to be predicted. Thus the precession of simulacra: the idea of the assassination attempt, even in the nitty-grittiest of its details, always long predates the assassination attempt itself (which thus renders powerless the banal observation that “I knew this would happen”).

Even the discussions whispered in corners of the bar with friends aren’t enough to counteract the hyperreality of everything here. Nothing happened…again.

And that’s the whole point.