Trump’s shooting and a broader picture of US violence

Your editorial on Donald Trump’s shooting (14 July) neglects to mention the long history of violence that has characterised life in the US since its founding. It’s a violence against the perceived other, the violence of slavery and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, the violence against workers as a product, the violence of capital that creates violence against authority.

You might well have mentioned the history of state violence overseas: from the so-called Spanish-American war through Vietnam and much of south-east Asia and Central America to Iraq and Afghanistan and the ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank.

Our American culture of violence is inseparable from our identity: a historical product of myth-making and media capitalism that sells, under the guise of free speech and unrestrained commerce, a cult of rugged individualism peddling AR-15s without regard for public safety and general welfare.

All these highlight the cruelty of the hollow pleas of a rich white political class to condemn violence against them.
James C Wright
William R Kenan Jr chair and professor emeritus, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, US

• Jonathan Jones describes the “religious suggestiveness” of Evan Vucci’s picture of a bloodied Donald Trump, fist raised beneath the stars and stripes (‘Is this what a second Trump presidency will be like?’ – our art critic on the chilling shooting image, 15 July). To Jones’s iconographic parallels we can add Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, in which the wounded Christ rises, holding a flag in his fist.

Christian supporters of Trump will see his survival as “mystical”, as Jones says. Let’s hope they remember the words of the man in Piero’s “flag and fist” picture: “If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it.”
Rev Robert Titley
London

• Jonathan Jones’s excellent tour of imagery echoed by the Trump post-assassination attempt photograph missed one parallel: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. All he needed to do was rip his shirt open, Superman-style, and his installation as embodiment of the nation would be complete.
Roy Stewart
Caterham, Surrey

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