After Trump attack, will the US unite?

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a quick take to kick off your week. Still talking very much about the United States, the elections, the assassination attempt on former President Trump. We now have the Republican National Convention kicking off in Milwaukee. And is it possible that anything good can come from this most tragic event and very close to a world changing event?

I wish I could say yes. I certainly was heartened to see in the initial hours after the attack that the president of the United States strongly condemned it, called for unity, a very nonpartisan statement, pulled down campaign ads and stopped with planned events for the president and vice president. This is no time to be campaigning. I saw the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, did the same in a statement that he made publicly a few hours later. And it's good to hear from former President Trump, that he is changing his speech and wants it to be a less divisive and a more unifying speech.

All of that sounds promising, and there is an opportunity here. But I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical. I think that the divisions in the country are too deep, and the weaponization and of the politics has come from inside the House. It's not from the Russians or the Iranians or the Chinese. It's from American citizens. And that's very likely to continue. When you say that former President Trump is a dictator and that if you elect him, the US will become a dictatorship, and you compare him to Hitler, then it is understandable that many people would view it as patriotic to do everything possible to stop him. If he is an existential threat to the country, then he must be stopped by all means. And if it is true that Biden and the Democrats will destroy the country, and we'll have World War III and the country will be gone if they're elected as Trump has said, then you have to stop them. You have to do everything possible to stop them.

And in that regard, I think this is not going to look like 9/11, where after an external threat, the country rallied together and said never again and meant it, made a lot of mistakes, of course, trillions of dollars and a failed war in Iraq, a failed war in Afghanistan. But it was unifying for America. The response to 9/11 was not red or blue. It was not left or right. It was all Americans, and waving a flag was something that all Americans were proud of and did not see in any way as polarized. I think this is different. I think this is a lot more like what we saw on January 6th. January 6th, you have a lot of people that were outraged, Democrats and Republicans outraged with the violence that they saw in the Capitol building with the illegal insurrection and attempt to overturn a legitimate vote.

And you saw the speeches that were made by Senator McConnell and many others that said that this would not stand. But in a short period of time, it became politicized. It became weaponized, it became Democrats saying one thing and Republicans saying another. And we're now at the point that the January 6th insurrection is singing the national anthem are seen as patriots by the MAGA right. And not only does Trump play that at rallies, but he salutes it. That is, I fear, what's going to happen in the United States in the next four months of this election. I want to see the country come together. I want everyone to recognize that the rhetoric is dangerous and leads to violence and that the US is not on the verge of becoming a dictatorship, and that Trump is not the second coming of Hitler, and that political violence in all of its forms in the United States is something that we as a democracy can't tolerate that. But I don't believe that's where we're heading. I think it is, unfortunately, much more likely that we are going to revert to an “us” versus “them” diatribe.

It is going to be an incredibly polarized election, and people really do feel like democracy at stake. 75% of Americans, when asked, believe that democracy of the United States is at stake with this election in November. The problem is, of course, they don't agree on who's behind that and who's responsible. 25% of Americans agree that it's patriotic to turn to violence in this environment to protect the country. And that doesn't mean that 25% of the people are prepared to actually take action on it. But the level of sympathy, private sympathy and public sympathy is an awful lot higher than the number of people that publicly said, “Oh my God, this is horrible, and nothing like this should ever happen.” And everybody that's watching this knows that.

And so, I fear, that we are not going to learn the right lesson from this near assassination. I'd love to see Trump himself prove me wrong, and we'll see, what the speech is like. But there have been many times, of course, over Trump's presidency, it's like now he's a leader, now he's presidential. And of course, the reality is that Trump is much less of a leader than he is a winner. And Trump won the presidency by dividing America, by taking advantage of the existing divisions and playing on them and preying on them, that he refers to others, his political opponents, as losers. Much more focused on that than fellow citizens. And the need for that to change is immediate and immense. The United States cannot be a country of winners and losers. The United States has to be a team with leaders that we respect. And there are many countries around the world, many democracies around the world, that have that manifestation that feels much more like that.

But the United States today does not. And that's fundamentally why the US is a democracy in crisis and is uniquely in crisis compared to all the other democracies in the world that have had their elections over the past months with no problem at all. It's not where we are right now in the US. We can't normalize this. We can't accept it. We have to be willing to fight together for our democracy, as opposed to fight each other and destroy our democracy. I will say I'm a little offended that President Putin thinks we need his help to destroy democracy. We're more than capable of doing that ourselves. Russians. Stay the hell out. But, seriously, this is a time that we need a lot more from Americans being together.

And that is not the way that we define our political system right now. So that's my honest take on this. I hope I'm wrong. My analysis is not where I want the country to go. And it's not where I'll work on the country to go.

So, I'll be back and I'll talk to you all real soon.