Donald Trump survived the assassination attempt, fortunately, carried out against him on Saturday evening. The brutality and immediacy of the shooting were very specific to our digital age. Video of the calamity enveloping the presidential candidate at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, raced across mobile phones, social media platforms and TV screens shortly after shots were fired.
Eyewitness accounts, specific and harrowing, soon followed.
The violence played out in real time on screens nestled in palms or beamed from flat-panel displays. And the anarchy and misery of the experience sits on the opposite side of a communications chasm from the failed attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan 43 years ago, which relied on old-school TV, radio and newspapers for word to circulate. In that regard, the Trump shooting is even further removed from John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; further still, of course, from Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865.