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After surviving another assassination attempt last Sunday, Donald Trump tweeted: “I will NEVER SURRENDER!” Kamala Harris cannot afford to dismiss this talk as mere rhetoric. By proving himself willing to risk his life for his cause, Trump is seizing one of the most enduring themes in our nation’s political discourse.
Talk of martyrdom was everywhere in early America. As were their Protestant forebears, English colonists were trained from childhood to embrace the self-sacrificing death of the martyr as the most dramatic expression of a fully realized Christian masculinity. Throughout the eighteenth century, preachers routinely “mustered” colonial militia by describing the English cause in North America as a Protestant “holy war” against the hated Catholic French and their diabolical native American allies.
As the War of Independence came into view, leading revolutionaries embraced the word “patriot“ as a functional substitute for the word “martyr.” Speaking on the fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1774, for instance, John Hancock implored his fellow New Englanders to embrace “Patriotism … this noble affection which impels us to sacrifice everything dear, even life itself, to our country.” Among the Revolution’s most celebrated slogans were several that evoked this same sentiment: “Give me liberty or give me death!” “Live free or die!" "I regret that I have one life to give for my country!”
The ethos of martyrdom – its roots buried deep in the mythological soil of our nation’s founding – still holds a powerful sway in American culture. The reverence with which Americans hold our martyrs is inscribed in the ground of our nation’s Capital. The National Mall is rimmed by monuments to people who have demonstrated their willingness to risk their lives for our nation – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King., Jr., and veterans of the Vietnam War.
This ethos has served to galvanize the MAGA movement in recent years. Within days of being killed by a federal police officer in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, Ashley Babbitt was hailed as a martyr by supporters of the insurrection. Hundreds of others charged and convicted for their assault on the U.S. Capitol that day are revered by MAGA enthusiasts as “political prisoners” and “the January 6 martyrs.”
Say what you will about him, Donald Trump knows a thing or two about branding. He has been careful to encourage January 6 conspiracy theories and has long been playing the martyr himself. As he told a gathering of evangelical Christians in June: “In the end, they’re not after me, they’re after you. I just happen to be, very proudly, standing in their way.”
Kamala Harris cannot afford to surrender this ideological turf to Donald Trump. She has roundly condemned the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, and rightly so. But she must do more.
Harris must remind any who would listen that political violence reflects the darkest side of our nation’s spiritual inheritance. To underscore the point, she may need to abandon an argument that has been a central part of her campaign to date – that Trump is seeking to regain the Presidency for selfish, not selfless, reasons. This argument may be true, but it rings hollow in an environment in which Trump appears to be willing to risk his life and limb.
There is no guarantee, of course, that Donald Trump would match Harris’s restraint. But if she does it carefully, she can rise above the fray by abandoning this specific line of attack.
Harris would be wise to begin portraying herself as presiding over a country that is on the brink of civil war, echoing the declaration that Abraham Lincoln made in closing his first inaugural address – “We are not enemies, but friends.” By refusing to impugn Trump’s personal motivations (and, implicitly, the motives of his followers), she can appeal to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
And what about the rest of us who are hoping that American voters will spoil Donald Trump’s attempted return to the White House? We should hope that this is the last we will hear of political violence in this season of unprecedented partisanship. Every attempt on Donald Trump’s life amounts to an endorsement of his claim to be the rightful heir to the mantle of American martyrdom. Not every would-be assassin will draw blood, but they all reopen a vein that runs straight to the heart of our nation’s body politic.
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Want to learn more about the enduring legacy of martyrdom in American culture? Read my 2021 book, One Life to Give: Martyrdom and the Making of the American Revolution.
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