“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, asked Henry II in 1170, to no one in particular. He was referring to his fractious Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket; in turn, some of Henry’s knights took his remark as their cue to murder the Archbishop.
This is hardly the last time incendiary language has, however indirectly, prompted violence in the real world. Nine centuries on from Henry II, Donald Trump’s characteristically florid turn of phrase has been repeatedly linked to real-world threats to public safety. Then just last week, his repetition of a rumour about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating local pets sparked a media furore — and reported bomb threats in Springfield itself.
But what if the real heirs to Henry II are actually Trump’s enemies? Hot on the heels of a week’s pet-food discourse, Trump himself was reportedly the target of a second assassination attempt in as many months and FBI agents apprehended a gunman at his golf course in Florida.
The conspiracists are already poring over details of the two attacks, and drawing inferences from them about the perpetrators. They have, for instance, noted that this weekend’s alleged would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, and the previous attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had both appeared in campaign videos produced by well-known players in the conspiracy-theory pantheon: Crooks appeared briefly in a 2022 BlackRock advert filmed at his then high school, while Routh, a pro-Ukraine activist, appeared in a 2022 campaign video reportedly produced by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Little is known about the political views of Crooks, but the fact that he seems not to have had any political opinions or social media presence whatsoever has, for conspiracy-lovers, itself been interpreted as some kind of institutional cover-up.
Inevitably, then, the internet has donned its tinfoil hat and set out to uncover what this all means. Trump had, after all, pledged to bring a swift end to the conflict in Ukraine, likely by ceding some territory to Putin. Figures such as the former NSA intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden have hinted that Routh’s Ukraine links mean he must have been in contact with “White House agencies”. Other partisans speculate that the instigator is some element of the neoconservative establishment desperate to sustain the war with Russia.
Are these people mere disposable foot-soldiers for some shadowy institutional player who fears a Trump win above all else? Who knows. Just as plausible, however, not to mention less paranoia-inducing, is the possibility that no such coordinated conspiracy exists — but rather that “stochastic terrorism” is becoming a mainstay of politics, across the ideological spectrum, as a byproduct of the new, post-truth politics of attention and weaponised “truthiness”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe