- What is it that is really dividing us?

People are calling for unity, but there are real divisions in the United States right now, and those aren't going to be solved just with a, a kind of kumbaya moment.

[slow dramatic music] - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World", I'm Ian Bremmer and today we will look back on one of the most consequential weeks in modern American history, and we'll figure out where we go from here, or at least we'll give it a shot.

Millions of Americans watched in horror as former president Donald Trump came within millimeters of assassination on national television.

About seven minutes into his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a staccato of gunfire rang out.

A subtle turn of the head at the very last moment, cost the former president the top of his ear instead of his life.

If you saw it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.

Thank God the would-be assassin missed.

My heart goes out to the family of Cory Compertore, the rally goer who died protecting his family from a stray bullet meant for the former president.

It can be easy to think of politics as a game, and our 24/7 news cycle reinforces that notion.

Don't blame me, I'm only on once a week.

But we were reminded in that instant that politics is far from a game and can be a matter of life and death.

The former president was lucky.

The American people were lucky.

And in a rare oval office addressed to the nation, President Biden urged Americans of all political stripes to bring down the political temperature.

- We can't allow this violence to be normalized.

You know, the political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated.

It's time to cool it down.

We all have a responsibility to do that.

- But nothing happens in a vacuum, not even an assassination attempt.

And just two days later, a bandaged candidate Trump emerged to thunderous applause on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Moments later, standing next to his newly picked nominee for vice-president, the 39-year-old bestselling author turned Ohio Senator JD Vance, and that was just night one of the convention.

Here to help me unpack this historic week in American politics is a dynamic duo, Brian Stelter and Nicole Hemmer.

Stelter, a media journalist and former CNN show host, Hemmer, a Vanderbilt professor and historian who specializes in partisan media.

And later, a look at political violence around the world.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] - Brian Stelter, Nicole Hemmer, welcome back to the show.

- Thanks.

- Great to be here again.

- And Nicole, I wanna start with you.

Put this in historical context, the last week that we've witnessed in the United States, how does it compare to, to history politically in the United States?

Give us some context.

- So, it's tempting to compare this to 1968 and 1972 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail, when George Wallace was seriously injured by an assassin.

And I think that that's a pretty useful period to look at because I think that the broader historical context right now is that we're living in a period of escalating political violence and social and political instability that was true in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And I think that it's true today.

I mean, we've seen over the past 10 or 15 years, a real escalation in various forms of political violence, the insurrection at the Capitol, all of these moments that feel unprecedented and dangerous and like the US is on a crash course with catastrophe.

And I think people felt that way in the 1960s, and I think the assassination attempt really puts us back in, into that moment.

And we've been in that moment now, I think, for the better part of five to 10 years.

- Now, Brian, you know, we all know just how close we were.

I mean, like this close, half a second to Trump getting killed.

What do you think would've been the implications of both short and medium term if that had actually happened?

- I think the number of conspiracy theories, of course, would've been overwhelming.

The amount of emotion from many directions would've been overwhelming and the Republican party would've been left, you know, in a state of crisis that, that we can hardly even fathom because this party is so now controlled by Trump, as we saw the convention all week long.

This is now the Trump party.

So to remove Trump is unfathomable.

He is the dominant figure, probably the dominant political figure in the United States of this century thus far, for better or for worse.

I think that the notion that so many people are so committed to him and to have him taken away would've done unfathomable damage to the country.

- I mean, I think that it is a sign of both the depths of loyalty to Donald Trump, that there would have been such chaos after this.

But also I think as Brian was kind of indicating, there is a political movement that is connected to conspiracy theory, to vengeance.

And if those forces had been unleashed because of a tragedy like that, I think it would have just pushed the US over, as I was talking earlier about instability into just complete chaos.

And I think that it's a reminder of just how precarious a period we are in right now.

- Now, right after the assassination attempt, there were some calls for unity.

Biden's speech that night certainly moved in that direction.

I thought also Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker the next morning, very similar, but broader calls for unity, from my perspective, seemed to have lasted for maybe a few hours.

And now, we are back in a very quickly, in a very familiar and very toxic place.

Am I right or wrong about that, Brian?

- I think there are different definitions for unity coming from different people.

And so thus, you know, we're in a political, we're in political quicksand.

You know, when Donald Trump and his allies say unity, I think what they really mean is submit, conform, stop criticizing Trump, get on board the proverbial Trump train.

That's a lot of what I was hearing during the convention this week, that unity is a code for get in line behind Trump, he's gonna be the next president.

That of course is not unity.

One of the things that makes America great is the, the dissent, is the ability to debate freely.

And I've been relieved, quite honestly, Ian, that the, that the environment has not been as dark and dire as I might have expected after an assassination attempt.

You know, yes, there has been some heated rhetoric, but most politicians have said the right things.

The notable exceptions are out there.

They're all over the fever swamps of the social media world, but most politicians have actually behaved quite well in the last few days.

- So Nicole, are you a little more hopeful and as a consequence of what we've seen post that horrible incident?

- I'm not sure hope is the emotion that I'm sitting with right now, but I do think that, you know, one of the things that we've seen is in addition to these calls for unity and for the temperature to be turned down, I think one thing that people have returned to is, well, what is it that is really dividing us?

You know, people are calling for unity, but there are real divisions in the United States right now, and those aren't going to be solved just with a kind of kumbaya moment.

Those will only be solved as we hash out those ideas.

I think that if there's any sort of sign of hope, it's that maybe you could leverage this moment to say, "Okay, we can't agree on policy and we're not going to agree on the future direction of the country.

Could we at least on a couple of guardrails, including no assassination attempts, no violence, like sticking to the lanes of politics?"

I don't know that we're actually going to get there.

I don't necessarily feel particularly hopeful, given the years that we've been in, but that would be the direction I would hope people would push, not necessarily toward unity, but toward a kind of regular order or a set of norms that can police the differences that we have.

- So on the one hand, I agree with you that there have been, you know, most politicians across the political spectrum are saying political violence is not acceptable too much.

On the other hand, there still is an incredible amount of this existential threat language that the other side, if they win, will destroy the system.

It's the end of democracy, right?

Or, you know, Trump's saying it's gonna be World War III if Biden wins.

Biden's saying Trump's gonna be a dictator.

And I'm not trying to both sides this, I'm more trying to say that when a large percentage of Americans actually feel that the other side is a threat to the system, I mean, doesn't that sort of give true patriots a much greater feeling that they have to take this into their own hands?

- Well, certainly when there's a sense that there is an existential threat to the country, that does give permission for more aggressive forms of pushback.

I mean, the challenge is we are in an unprecedented time of threats to the future of democracy.

We've, as we know, like three years ago, there was an insurrection at the Capitol.

There is a, you can't kind of set aside the threats to democracy.

That's one of the huge issues in this election is whether or not we agree on kind of the, the infrastructure of democracy as the place where we're going to settle disagreements and differences.

So, it's a real challenge because on the one hand, wouldn't it be great if we were able to make each election feel a little less existential?

But if that's a correct description of where we are, we can't not name it.

- Yeah.

It strikes me that the real divides are not between Democrats and Republicans, although those are real conservatives and progressive, those are real.

But the biggest divide that we we're seeing is between extremists and those who are moderates, those, the great silent majority that that just goes home and wants to feed their families, that wants to hang out with the neighbors.

Most people, whether they vote Republican or vote Democrat, denounce political violence, want heated language, but never heated action.

They want a stable political system, they want representative democracy.

But there are these extremists who are very visible on the right, and there are some on the left who wanna burn it all down, who enjoy when Trump glorifies violence, who believe that Trump, on the left, believe Trump would actually be the end of the United States.

Those extreme views, those extremists are creating this volatility.

And I wish it was possible to make those, you know, the normies, the people in the middle, the moderates, I wish it was possible to make them more visible, to make their-- - I hate that term normies.

It just sounds so dweeby and pathetic.

Who wants to be a normie?

- I know, I know.

- I mean, even using it kind of undermines them in terms of the, call them like the awesome middle, you know, call 'em like, sort of the really, the true Americans.

Those are the real Americans.

- That's the true Americans.

Because as I watched the coverage of the assassination attempt, I drove by Trump's golf course out here in New Jersey the next day.

I was talking to neighbors, right, left everywhere in between.

Most people have a lot more in common.

Most Americans have a lot more in common than they realize, than they might even wanna admit.

And we need to be able to see those commonalities as much as we see the differences on social media.

- We also now know that JD Vance will be on the Republican ticket with Trump.

- I officially accept your nomination to be vice-president of the United States of America.

[audience cheering] - Certainly a decisive figure for, and a very loyal figure at least of late for the former president.

Brian, implications?

- About a decade ago I interviewed Vance on CNN.

Of course, now he's Trump's favorite.

That tells you Vance's arc in a nutshell.

He told me back then that Trump's appeal was a result of social anxiety.

I think that's still true today.

Vance has learned how to tap into that.

He's a culture warrior.

His slogan, if he had a bumper sticker now would be to make liberals cry again.

To me, that's a pretty depressing form of politics, but it's clearly what some Trump voters want.

So it makes a lot of sense why Trump chose the next generation version of Trump for his ticket.

- And Biden's slogan would be, "Don't you take my car keys."

Okay, Nicole, what do you think?

- In 2016, Donald Trump made the decision to pick Mike Pence because he needed to unify the party.

In 2024, he's picking JD Vance because he knows that the party is behind him and he just wants to continue to push it forward in the direction of his, his policy preference and his politics.

So I think that it's a sign of how united the Republican party has become.

- Okay, so Nicole, talk to me about how the media's done here, and I'm gonna turn you on this too, Brian, which is, you know, if you had to change one thing, if you had, if you had the ability to change one thing about the way the media in the US right now is covering all of this, it would be what?

- I would wipe out any coverage that was focused on trying to tell viewers what happens next.

Any sort of prediction focused coverage, especially something with the assassination attempt.

Does this make it more likely that Trump is going to win?

Does it make it less likely that he's going to win?

A, we don't know.

There's no way for us to know.

We can't predict what's going to happen four months from now as I think the past few weeks have shown.

But that's not informing listeners and viewers and audiences of what the actual stakes of the election are.

It's not informing them of why it's important that there was this fascination attempt.

It's not putting it in the context of years of political violence.

And I think anything that is focused on trying to comfort an audience by giving them some sort of assuredness about what will happen in the future is really a form of misinformation.

And, I would love it if political journalists just got out of the predictions game.

- But you do think that Trump is more likely to win now?

- I don't know.

- I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Come on.

You're supposed to let go with me on that.

Okay, Brian, you can change one thing in the media.

What is it?

And it can't be what Nicole just said.

No backsies.

- I would create a news environment that's better constructed for people who are casual news consumers.

Because right now, the news industry is really well built for political insiders and news junkies, but it doesn't serve casual consumers as well.

And there are a lot more casual consumers out there.

Pew Research recently found that 63% of Americans are embarrassed by both Trump and President Biden.

Most Americans don't want this rematch, they don't want this ticket, they don't want these elderly men running the government.

They're tired of the gerontocracy, they're burnt out by politics.

But that attitude doesn't come through in the news often enough.

Those views of voters don't come through often enough.

The last few weeks, the Democratic Party has been in crisis mode about Joe Biden's future, but the voters were screaming about Biden's age long before the elites were.

- For over a year.

- That was a media failure.

And so if I could wave a magic wand, I would make the voices of the political, the politically burnt out, the politically fatigued, I'd make them louder.

- Now, I'm gonna break Nicole's rule here, but you and I were talking a little beforehand and I was asking you about likelihood in your view that Biden is going to be on the ballot in November and you said 99% likelihood he's not.

I was surprised by that.

Explain why you think that.

- I'll probably have to eat my tie for being wrong about this come November, so there we have it, but I think if we were thinking about this from a day-to-day basis, ever since the debate, it's been drip, drip, drip, drip, drip for the better part of a month now, through reporting, through analysis, through polling, through donor statements, and probably most importantly from the statements of elected officials, it is clear the Democratic party elites are not with Biden.

And I don't see that tide turning.

I don't see how it changes.

Here's the one thing I know for sure.

Okay, I've been covering media 20 years, interviewing television script writers and actors and all that.

The way this happens, if it's a movie, right, is that all of a sudden, instead of having two elderly men up in their 80s basically competing for the presidency, to have a younger woman of color suddenly elevated, a prosecutor versus a convicted felon.

That's the way this ends if it were a Hollywood drama.

- And as we know, the United States frequently, truth is stranger than fiction.

Okay, so, Nicole, explain why you think the US is in a situation today where we have two such incredibly unpopular candidates and the people obviously know that and feel that and keep saying it, and yet that's where we are.

- It's a great question.

I mean, part of it I think has to do with the media environment that we are all operating in, that we live in a media environment that tends to credit and amplify the angriest and most dissatisfied voices.

So I think that there's something to that, that it's easy to build a sense of discontent, but I also think that the parties have not been particularly responsive to that group that Brian's been talking about, the politically disaffected, the people who aren't really paying attention, that there has been a lot of work put into shoring up people's little fiefdoms and not necessarily doing the work of serving people.

I think that's something that the Biden administration has been focused on doing.

They're trying to figure out like how do we actually distribute goods to people?

How do we satisfy not only our base, but help pull Americans out of an economic crisis?

But I mean, it's been so slow and it's happening in the context of a dysfunctional Congress and a Supreme Court that keeps knocking things down.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And so I think, like the big problem is there's not really a small D democratic infrastructure that translates the desires of Americans into actual policy.

And that's a huge structural generational problem that has to be solved if we want to not be so dissatisfied with our politics.

- Okay, last question for both of you, and I'll start with you, Brian.

In 20 years, what are American kids gonna be learning about what we're going through right now?

- They're gonna learn that the struggle for a true multiracial democracy was incredibly volatile, was in times even scary.

That this struggle for a more perfect union where everyone felt represented, whether it was the, the white Christian conservatives, the Protestants who, who ran the country and felt they were fully in control for many decades, to the young immigrants and the Muslim students and the new rivals to America who want a seat at the table, to create a table big enough for that entire diverse array of people was a real incredible struggle.

And as a result, figures like Donald Trump came forward with easy solutions that actually weren't that easy at all.

And figures like Joe Biden came, came forward to try to resist the Trumps of the world.

And those battles were fierce and ferocious, but they needed to happen because these fights we're having are about the ideals of America.

They're about trying to ensure that we can have a multiracial democracy for generations to come.

- Okay, Nicole, talk to the kids.

- I would echo that as well.

Look, it's multiracial democracy's testing ground.

It's its moment.

We haven't had a multiracial democracy for very long in the United States.

And one of the things that we're seeing right now again, is what happens when democratic desires and anti-democratic institutions come into conflict.

And so this will either be a story of counter majoritarian institutions stamping out public desires, or it will be a story of reforms that remade those institutions in order to make them reflect the will of the people.

And so we'll either be a more or less democratic United States after this moment and what happens in the next months and years will decide that.

- Yeah, the status quo, either way we go, it doesn't feel like it can hold for very long.

Nicole Hemmer, Brian Stelter, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thank you.

- Thanks so much for having us, Ian.

[slow futuristic music] - The Trump assassination attempt was the first of its kind in America in 40 years, but other democracies around the world have seen this kind of thing much more recently.

Here's GZERO's Alex Kliment with "The Global View".

- In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader.

The leader miraculously survives and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence.

Does that sound familiar?

Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania, in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia.

[slow dramatic music] [gun firing] But Fico is just one of many leaders or high level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.

Last August, gunman tied to drug cartels killed a leading presidential candidate in Ecuador.

[people shouting] [gun firing] In 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down by a man angry at a controversial religious movement that Abe was part of.

[slow dramatic music] And who could forget Brazil's right wing firebrand, Jair Bolsonaro getting stabbed on the campaign trail in 2018, just months before winning the presidency?

Other countries have had it even worse.

In Mexico, the number of candidates for office murdered in each electoral cycle has increased 10 times over the past 20 years, and in Haiti, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 plunged the country into a political and humanitarian crisis from which it has yet to recover.

Political violence has been with us as long as politics have.

Et tu, Brute?

And America, of course, has its own ugly history of political killings.

At least a quarter of all American presidents have suffered assassination attempts and four of them have died.

But across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again, as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles.

Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016.

And as we head into the most contentious and high stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more.

A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that 2/3 of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely.

Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence?

Is it our leaders, our media outlets, our social media platforms?

Is it ourselves?

Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.

For "GZERO World", I'm Alex Kliment.

[slow futuristic music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, because the United States is not having fun right now, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

[lively fast-paced music] [lively fast-paced music continues] [lively fast-paced music fading] [slow soft music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Announcer 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communication, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York.

And... [light upbeat music fading] [dramatic theatrical music]