The bullet that could have started a civil war

As the news broke, a friend messaged me with the question on everyone's lips: "how will this play out in the election race?".

Who really knows? My best guess is that Trump will get a sympathetic bump in the polls fuelled further by justifiable mainstream outrage.

Doubtless, his cultish followers will view him as even more heroic, defiant and energetic.

"Unstoppable" posted the Christian-right House Speaker, Mike Johnson on social media above a drawing of Trump with muscles bulging from his T-shirt.

Trump's burger-and-coke diet has led to a less chiselled reality but hey, love is blind.

His opponent, on noticeably light duties after his fitness for a second term swamped the news cycle recently (and remains unresolved), was having a weekend off.

Even Joe Biden's official statement condemning the shooting took longer than those of other political figures to appear, despite his immediate access to the FBI and the Secret Service.

Its slowness felt like a metaphor, as did the fact that Trump had been on the campaign trail while Biden was, what, resting?

The last time he did that, he emerged for the presidential debate, and promptly wished he hadn't.

There is no particular logic to rely on but it is hard to see how this failed act of brutality in Butler, Pennsylvania doesn't strengthen Trump's hand while making Biden's task that bit steeper.

Pennsylvania is a crucial "swing state", along with Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. It has probably just swung toward the former president on emotion alone. That and his apparent resilience.

If the facts are as reported, the assassin very nearly pulled off a technical feat of elite-level competence - a head-shot from up to a hundred metres away. The round clipped Trump's right ear. A centimetre further to the right would have been serious and might have been fatal.

Such an outcome would have been incendiary in a polarised nation where anger is at fever- pitch and where firearms easily out-number people.

Revenge attacks would certainly have followed. The resort to vigilante violence which many Americans - particularly those loyal to Trump - defend as a birthright, would have seen blood flow.

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If the Sarajevo assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand could touch off the First World War, it is no a stretch to imagine that the political murder of a president could spark civil war in a country so heavily armed.

As it is, more violence seems unavoidable. Accordingly, all future campaign events will have tightened security, right when Biden needs all the voter contact and crowd energy he can muster.

American democracy is as broken as its social-civic fabric is threadbare. Already reeling from Trump's abusive norm-busting resurgence, it has now taken a direct hit.

For what could be more inimical to free elections than political violence and the smothering shield of security it necessitates?