‘Is this what a second Trump presidency will be like?’ – our art critic on the chilling shooting image

This breaks your heart. Or at least it does if you oppose the politics of Donald Trump. For with one image, he may have won the 2024 US presidential election. Photographer Evan Vucci captured it, and has rightly won praise for it, but we should acknowledge that it was Trump who made it. And he made it with presence of mind and courage.

Red blood pools on his ear and stains his face. No wonder some people on social media want to pretend to themselves that the shooting was faked. For the reality, which any rational observer can clearly see, is that in this moment Trump is defying death. He can’t completely know that he’s OK. A bullet has drawn blood from his ear, close to his brain. As he rises from where he initially took cover, with black-clad sunglass-wearing Secret Service agents trying to enfold him, he makes an eloquent gesture of defiance: a clenched fist raised in the air, his arm straight up like a flagpole. His mouth is open in a shout: the words he uttered were “Fight, fight, fight,” words that seem chosen as if they might be his last. Who is he telling to fight? Against what?

He uses the rhetoric of struggle and division he always has, but with a new urgency as he calls on America to fight in his name, over his body. And he has instantly thought out how to communicate this visually. The raised fist is traditionally a symbol of the left, which became famous as the sign of Republican resistance to Franco in the Spanish civil war: Joan Miró’s 1937 poster Aidez l’Espagne portrays a defiant worker with a massively enlarged arm raised in this very same fist salute. So Trump could almost be saying “No pasarán!” in an unlikely appropriation of La Pasionaria. Since the 1930s this gesture of the left has been revived in many contexts, from the civil rights movement to Ukraine, yet this gesture has also been co-opted by the far right: white supremacists use a white clenched fist against a black background to symbolise “white rights”.

Hold your horses, for now. It would be straying into the realm of conspiracy theory to over-interpret Trump’s fist. It is not being used for any arcane political associations but as a pumping symbol of fighting spirit. Trump draws on the radical gesture just like he uses rock music against the wishes of musicians: whatever works. We see in this picture what a potent political bricoleur he is, borrowing images and rhetoric from any source and combining them in new, lucid collages with changed meanings. In this case, its meaning is given by the context, and that is a former US president with blood on his face in a huddle of protective agents under a billowing US flag. The flag and fist together are what make this picture so powerful: Trump reaches upward to make himself the embodiment of a wounded yet defiant America.

Remarkably, through a magical cocktail of chance and Vucci’s excellent eye, this scene with the close-knit human group under the stars and stripes echoes Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of US Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima in 1945. Both pictures portray an embattled collectivity with the stars and stripes triumphant above them. A similar scene was invented by Emanuel Leutze in his 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. This photograph joins those timeless patriotic images. It would not be the same without Old Glory. The American flag is the best-designed in the world, its abstract beauty striking and poignant in any setting. Here it is surrounded by violence and fear, as in the US national anthem: Trump makes his defiant call to fight on with the star-spangled banner perfectly situated parallel to his fist.

Yet the heart of this picture’s meaning can be summed up in one word: blood. And the connotations of that go deeper than politics or patriotism. Christian supporters of Trump won’t be slow to see his survival as mystical. And they will be right, at least from the perspective of art history. Whatever else this scene may be, it is, at the iconographic level, religious. It is almost literally a resurrection. Trump has risen up from below the podium where he’d hidden, as if he were Christ rising from the tomb. In great paintings of that central Christian moment, such as Matthias Grünewald’s spooky, perturbing vision of a triumphant Jesus in the Isenheim Altarpiece, there is blood. Grünewald’s risen Christ shows the bloody spear wound in his side, the bloody nail holes in his hands, just as in this picture we can see Trump’s gory ear and the crimson blood on his cheek.

Trump truly appears to be giving his blood here, a sacrifice for America. Like Jesus, he survives the sacrifice and rises again. Yet that resurrection is combined with details typical of the way earlier moments in the story of the Passion are depicted in art: the Secret Service agents surrounding him resemble the community of Christ’s close followers and supporters who lovingly tend his body in paintings like Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, or Caravaggio’s The Entombment in the Vatican. Uncannily, there is even a female agent passionately holding on to Trump like the Virgin Mary in such Biblical masterpieces.

That word “uncanny” is right. There is something genuinely uncanny, not quite explicable, about this image: how a scene with such deep meanings and a positively religious suggestiveness can happen spontaneously. But it did, just as a photographer caught Bobby Kennedy dying in a pool of blood with his arms out like Christ. American assassinations and attempts cross a line between politics, horror and martyrdom. This scene speaks to the unconscious. It is an incredible twist on America’s long and astonishingly public history of political violence. Even formally, this image of resurrection reverses and upturns the 1963 scenes of John F Kennedy’s assassination. In photographs taken just after JFK was shot, Secret Service agents protect his slumped body in the car: the president is down. He won’t get up again. Here, Trump is proudly vertical – not just standing proud but raising his arm.

Is it unreal, as some claim on social media? Yes, in the sense that American life exceeds and mocks fiction. As Philip Roth lamented, the American novelist “has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality”. And that was prior to Trump, who took America into new realms of the bizarre, beyond shame, beyond rules, beyond what previously defined the real.

Yet it actually happened. It is happening. Look at the blood. It’s real blood caused by a real bullet that shaved a real man’s ear. That man really raises his fist in defiance in a mystically patriotic instant myth of resurrection.

To say this is the image that may win Trump re-election may be the least of it. Surely what this picture tells us is what a second Trump presidency will be like. Bonds of blood between leader and people, sacrificial imagery – none of it fits into the calm, dull routines of stable democracies. An electoral campaign that begins with such an image of extremes is one that’s headed into uncharted, frightening places.