OPINION: A powerful photograph that could change America forever

Before talking about images, talk about reality. One person is dead, two others are critically injured, and American political life is more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Former president Donald Trump was wounded in the right ear and will recover; the body politic was wounded far more deeply, and the prognosis isn’t clear. We don’t yet know the motivation of the shooter, but it seems the threshold between violent rhetoric and violent action has been breached once again, and every time it is crossed, the crossing gets easier.

There is another reality added to all of that: Evan Vucci’s photograph for the Associated Press of Trump in the immediate aftermath of a shooting at a Pennsylvania political rally. Trump is seen with blood on his face, his right arm raised to pump a fist at the crowd while the American flag streams above his head. Independent of how this photograph is read and interpreted, it is strongly constructed, with aggressive angles that reflect the chaos and drama of the moment, and a powerful balance of color, all red, white and blue, including the azure sky above and the red-and-white decorative banner below. Trump seems to emerge from within a deconstructed version of its basic colors.

It is a photograph that could change America forever.

It has the concentrated power that the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination lacks, and its impact on the fate of American politics probably transcends the infamous 1988 image of then-candidate Michael Dukakis in a tank, which changed only the course of a single political campaign. It emerged all but simultaneously with the event, spreading faster and further than any similar image from the analog age. And its symbolic meaning arrived at the same moment as its literal content, without a moment to think.

Vucci’s photo will create a reality more real than reality, transforming the chaos and messiness of a few moments of peril onstage in Pennsylvania into a surpassing icon of Trump’s courage, resolve and heroism. Densely packed with markers of nationalism and authority - the flag, the blood, the urgent faces of federal agents in dark suits - it will encourage some of the darkest forces in American civic life. People who preach violence, who revel in its political potential, can now say that one of their own is a victim, and he was. From that, more cycles of violence are almost inevitable.

Political violence can only degrade democracy, never advance it, and this photograph is painful proof of that corrosive power. Violence creates victims who must be avenged, and it very often strengthens the power of the people it targets, making heroes of them if they survive and martyrs if the violence achieves its terrible ends.

Vucci’s photograph distills and refines the basic themes of Trump’s political career into a single, explosive image. America is a dangerous place, and this image confirms that. Trump speaks often about how no politician “has been treated worse or more unfairly” than he has. Those wounds are now made real and visible. If blood alone is a sign of service, he has served.

He can now literally wave the bloody shirt, a phrase that recalls the sanguinary political rhetoric that followed the worst political violence in American history, the Civil War and the South’s resistance to Reconstruction. Blood is essential to Trump’s rhetoric, with its contrast between red-blooded patriots and the polluted blood of outsiders, or immigrants. The former species of blood, the right kind, the one he shares with his followers, is now visible, and all its symbolic power instantiated in the image of Trump raising his fist to the crowd.

Almost from the beginning of photography, the medium has been entwined metaphorically and actually with violence. We say we shoot photographs like we shoot a gun, though photographers do not always prefer the analogy. Photographs give us power; guns give us power. The camera is reflexively drawn to scenes of violence, and photographs freeze those moments, often killing our ability to analyze them dispassionately.

Vucci had an instant to make his image, and in that instant, that frenzied moment after a moment of real violence, new violence was done. The image is so powerful that it will make it difficult or impossible for millions of Americans to sort the reality of Trump, the sum total of his lifetime, from an image violently crafted in a moment, authored by a man with a gun and fixed in the memory by a man with a camera.

Moments after Trump was grazed on his right ear, and just as the Secret Service was about to whisk him offstage, he appears to have said, “Let me get my shoes.” Then he said “Wait, wait” and made himself visible through the bodily phalanx of agents working to protect him, pumping his fist to the crowd. He appears to chant, “Fight, fight.”

One can say two things of this moment: His devotion to his crowd is unshakable; his devotion to the camera is also absolute. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, given that he couldn’t be sure there was only one shooter in the crowd. At that moment, when he asked for a little more time with his people, the agents protecting him were also in danger. But it revealed Trump’s ultimate survival instinct - always look strong - with blinding clarity.

Another image, made shortly after Trump was hustled from the stage, is haunting. Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford captured a single shoe onstage, perhaps Trump’s, given that he can be heard on the still-open microphone asking for his shoes after the shooting. Shoes are bound up with their own rich stew of analogies and symbols, closely connected to death, as in devastating images of piles of shoes left behind by victims of the Nazi death camps. But they are also symbols of empathy, as in learning to walk in another person’s shoes. An abandoned shoe is deeply ambivalent in its resonance, standing for something unfinished, or all too finished.

What authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt was for Trump a near-death experience, and it should never have happened. The event, and the image, will bond the former president even closer to his supporters, who will find embodied in it everything they have sought from their leader: proof of his resilience, evidence of courage, even perhaps some of the godlike powers that are imputed to him in the popular memes that show him with an Olympian physique, bristling with power and vigor.

Near-death experiences, especially if they’re violent, change people. Some are transformed, returned to life with new appreciation for its fragility, reanimated with gratitude, love and the power of forgiveness. Others turn bitter, angry and resolute. We don’t know how this will change Trump, whether he will be the same man he was Saturday, or a new one. As always, we watch him as we watch the television, movies or videos on social media. What’s next, and what now?

Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post. He has been on staff at The Post since 1999, first as classical music critic, then as culture critic.