The assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump was the shot heard around the world, to borrow a phrase about the American war of independence, and it was recorded in a much reproduced still photograph: the shot seen around the world. That shows a bloodied Trump pumping his fist under the American flag as he is surrounded by four secret service personnel on the stage at a rally in Pennsylvania. The picture was taken by Evan Vucci, the chief Washington photographer for the Associated Press.
In Vucci’s instinctive composition, the eye is drawn to Trump’s face at the centre of a loose “box” created by his outstretched arm, the flag, and the arms of two agents, a woman and a man. It has been compared to classic photographs from American history such as that of marines raising the US flag at Iwo Jima during the Second World War. Parallels could also be drawn with paintings such as The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by Théodore Géricault.
Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818) Wikimedia Commons
One small but so far overlooked detail is that Trump is a more sympathetic figure without his pillarbox red—and partisan—MAGA cap, which came off in the incident. It draws particular attention to the fist held high above his head.
The president might not be pleased to hear that the clenched fist was a familiar symbol in Soviet iconography and was favoured by the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro. It also has shades of the Black Power salute of the 1960s, which was echoed by marchers supporting Black Lives Matter earlier this decade. But the raised fist is also one of Trump’s go-to gestures, which might explain why it came to him reflexively in his moment of extremis. During a campaign stop at a church in Detroit last month, he stood in front of an illuminated cross and raised his fist. He made a similar gesture to his supporters after he was found guilty of 34 felonies in New York in May.
Other images from the attempted assassination, showing Trump on his hands and knees behind his lectern, and being helped off the dais by his security detail, have prompted some writers to refer to images from the life of Jesus: the deposition and even the resurrection. One critic was reminded of the Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald depicting a bloodied Christ.
No sooner was Trump out of the emergency room with a dressing on his injured ear than images of Van Gogh’s famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) were circulating on the social media platform X, with the painter’s face replaced by the former president’s. A missing ear is also a feature of Self-Portrait in the Form of Jug (1889) by Paul Gaugin, who was living with Van Gogh in Arles when the Dutchman mutilated himself with a razor.
Van Gogh’s Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear (January 1889) The Courtauld Institute of Art / Wikimedia Commons
The shooting last weekend, and the photographs which document it, have almost inevitably been surrounded by conspiracy theories. One social media post suggested that Vucci’s picture, with the stars and stripes as backdrop, was “too damn perfect”. The post had almost a million hits before the author took it down. Other conspiracists claimed to see a curious yellow object in Trump’s hand and speculated that this contained fake blood. A striking feature of the scene in Pennsylvania is how relatively ungory it is: the most serious damage was done away from the photographers’ eyeline, where one spectator suffered fatal gunshot wounds and others were injured, while the man named by the FBI as the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by the secret service.
The TV footage of the event recalled an assassination as storyboarded in a movie or small screen drama, with the leading man improbably grazed by a bullet. This is not to suggest that there was anything staged about it, but the merciful lack of gore in Vucci’s Trump photograph adds to the sense that as an image, it could have been pulled out of cinema. The fatal shooting of another president, John F. Kennedy, was recorded in home-movie style by a bystander, in a film now known as the Zapruder film. But unlike with the Trump incident, what is never broadcast is any footage of JFK after he was hit, when he suffered a large and bloody exit wound to the front of his head.
What the pictures from Pennsylvania demonstrate, to Trump’s critics at least as much as his fans, is a moment of undeniable physical courage on the part of a man better known until now as a self-confessed “germophobe”, who also dodged the draft for Vietnam five times, including once for bad feet. A picture is famously worth a thousand words, but Vucci’s could also be good for millions of votes at the presidential election in the autumn, when Trump is expected to face a frail opponent who is even older than he is. One of the many memes it has generated contrasts Vucci’s shot, plus the caption “Trump vs bullet”, with what appears to be Joe Biden falling headlong up the steps to Airforce One and the slogan, “Biden vs stairs”.