The eight days that changed US history (and the course of the world)

On the day that American history changed, Vince Fusca was there. He’s a fixture in Pennsylvania’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, so on July 13, 2024, he couldn’t miss Donald Trump’s rally at the Butler County Fairgrounds. He arrived around 8:00 a.m. with his famous pickup truck covered in messages of support for Trump, who, as he recalled in a telephone interview last Friday, he had backed “from the beginning,” when, “unlike now,” most of his supporters “lived underground.”

The Republican presidential candidate didn’t appear on the scene until 6:03 p.m. Eight minutes later, Fusca, who had secured a spot in the stands behind Trump, well to the left of the television broadcast of the rally, heard the sharp sound of eight gunshots over six seconds and saw Trump go down. Like so many others in the audience, he assumed he was dead.

A year later, at 6:03 p.m. on July 13, 2025, Fusca premiered on Rumble — a kind of MAGA YouTube — an amateur documentary titled The Day America Could Have Died. In it, he asks what would have happened if the would-be assassin, a rather apolitical 20-year-old with little social life named Thomas Matthew Crooks, had succeeded in hitting his target. And he does so through the testimonies of a handful of the tens of thousands who attended the rally.

The film is also a reconstruction of those decisive hours: there’s the stifling heat, and the American flag, which at one point the wind wrinkled into itself, imitating, to the amazement of some in attendance, “the silhouette of an angel.” There’s also the candidate’s enormous luck — Trump turned his head toward a chart about immigration at just the right moment, which saved his life; the death of a volunteer firefighter named Corey Comperatore; and the security lapses that allowed Crooks to position himself on a rooftop 150 meters from the stage and aim the telescopic sight of his parents’ assault rifle at Trump’s head before the snipers killed him.

What happened next is one of the most astonishing displays of political instinct in living memory. Trump emerged from the huddle of Secret Service agents, his cheek bloodied, raised his fist, and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” “At that very moment,” someone who worked on his campaign recounted last week, “we realized we were ready to win the election.”

That gesture also marked the beginning of eight frantic days in which the presidential race took a monumental turn. It was a momentous week, which at times seemed to last a century, and which ended at exactly 2:13 p.m. on the following Sunday, July 21, when Trump’s opponent, the Democrat Joe Biden, abandoned by his supporters after a disastrous debate and after weeks of pressure to give up his bid for reelection, posted a message on X announcing that he was withdrawing. Six minutes later, he confirmed his support for the candidacy of his vice president, Kamala Harris.

“From the moment he decided to withdraw, there was never any other option in his head,” write the Washington journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Page, and Isaac Arnsdorf in a newly published book, simply titled 2024 (subtitled: “How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America”). For someone as stubborn as Biden, not anointing his deputy would have been like admitting he had been wrong to make her his vice president in the first place. For Harris, the call from her boss caught her that Sunday in July at her official residence in Washington, making pancakes with her great-nieces.

Thus began a race against time to convince herself and the world that she was ready to become the first woman in the Oval Office. She had to secure enough support and overcome the resistance of party heavyweights who, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, fantasized about mini-primaries to choose Biden’s successor.

Kamala, “the only one”

“From within, we experienced the change with a certain amount of resignation. We were convinced she wasn’t the perfect candidate, but also that she was the only one who could take the reins at that time. First of all, because she could legally access Biden’s $300 million or $400 million fundraising pot. With 107 days to go to the election, building a new candidate from scratch was almost impossible,” recalls Juan Verde, a strategist who has worked on every Democratic presidential campaign since Bill Clinton and also worked on Harris’.

The candidate also inherited something worse, according to a senior Democratic campaign official who preferred not to be named: “No matter how hard we tried, we were never able to get voters to stop seeing her as someone associated with an unpopular presidency.”

Verde agrees that the assassination attempt gave Trump a “martyr-like, almost messianic aura” that convinced many undecided voters and, most importantly, “the Silicon Valley leaders,” who “stopped playing both sides at that very moment.” The night he survived the shots, Trump received dozens of messages and calls from, among many others, Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta). Both tech moguls were “amazed” by the candidate’s “courage.” It was also the day that Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, announced his support for a campaign to which he would donate more than $260 million.

That Monday, Fusca — who ran unsuccessfully for a Senate seat in 2022 and before that was at the center of a QAnon conspiracy claiming that he is actually John John Kennedy, who died in 1999 in a small plane crash — drove four hours to attend the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Trump’s third coronation, after the more complicated ones of 2016 (when the party was not convinced of his chances) and 2020 (in the midst of the pandemic), was also something that Fusca simply “could not miss.”

Trump arrived at the event unchallenged, but what had happened in Butler elevated him to the heavens for the nearly 2,500 party delegates. In the hallways of the stadium where the event was held, conversations often revolved around one topic: God.

Trump, according to the book 2024, said in the hours following the assassination attempt that “if anyone doubted His existence, [his good fortune] definitively proved it.” At his inauguration in January, he said: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” And last week, the president once again resorted to divine rhetoric as he commemorated the anniversary of the attack.

Trump walked around the convention those days with the air of a changed man after a traumatic experience, while the Democratic campaign, says one of its staffers, had to change its attack strategy to dispel any suspicion of instigating political violence.

The highlight of the first day of the convention came with the selection of the vice presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, a convert to the Trumpist faith who, like the rest of the party, was kept in suspense until the very end. Part of the explanation about why all eyes were on the Butler rally—one of many for a candidate who loves to hear himself talk, all very similar—was the suspicion that Trump would announce his decision there.

When Trump finally called Vance, the latter didn’t pick up, and Trump left a message: “This was an important call. Now I’ll have to pick someone else.” Around the same time the announcement was made, news broke that the judge prosecuting Trump for taking White House papers to his Mar-a-Lago estate without permission had dismissed the case.

That decision could be appealed, but one thing became clear: the prospect of seeing the presidential candidate, who had been convicted of 34 felonies in a case related to hush money for the porn actress Stormy Daniels, sit in the dock again before the election was gone. A Supreme Court ruling in early July had done the rest by extending presidential immunity and, with it, Trump’s chances of escaping his other two pending trials related to the assault on the Capitol.

That night, Trump appeared in public for the first time since the attack, sporting a striking bandage on his ear, which some of his supporters quickly imitated during the convention.

The new Trump didn’t last long. It only took 20 minutes of his acceptance speech on Thursday night to confirm that the old Trump was back, with his ramblings, his insults, his lies, his half-truths and his exaggerations. When he finished speaking and the delegates began popping the red, white, and blue balloons that fell from the ceiling of the basketball court, a chill ran through those who had been in Butler a few days earlier: the pops sounded eerily similar to the shots fired from Crooks’ AR-15-style rifle.

While Trump was being consecrated before his supporters, Biden was at his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, tucked in bed, shivering. The president had spent the week trying to counter his rival’s high, but at least now he could enjoy a couple of days of respite after the attempt on Trump’s life. Suddenly, during that brief period of time, the world stopped talking about one topic: the urgency of his own resignation. Biden traveled to Las Vegas, where, according to the authors of 2024, he held a meeting with the powerful Hollywood donor Jeffrey Katzenberg, who encouraged him to stay in the race, while his Praetorian Guard restricted his access to the pollsters’ bad news.

After meeting Katzenberg, he began to feel ill. Doctors later confirmed the suspicions: he had contracted Covid-19.

Once the worst of the illness was over, Biden issued a statement on Friday, July 19, declaring himself ready to return to the campaign trail the following week. It was a mirage. On Saturday, he held a meeting lasting several hours with three of his closest aides, who reviewed the names of the 16 congressmen who had joined the chorus of those calling for his resignation in the last few hours. They also told him that, despite this and despite the polls, they still believed he could win. His wife, Jill Biden, attended the meeting occasionally.

On the phone was his son, Hunter, whose legal troubles had so damaged a father who was always ready to defend him, even to the point of pardoning him. Hunter thought that having contracted Covid created a space for his father to reflect for the first time, Pager, Arnsey, and Arnsdorf write in their book. Perhaps the illness was a message from God. By the end of that meeting, the decision to end his long political career had been made.

This past Sunday marked exactly one year since that meeting—which led, the following day, to Biden’s withdrawal from the race—and the United States has yet to move on from the debate about the former president’s mental and physical abilities. Another book that came out in the spring, titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, denounced a plot by his inner circle, “the Politburo,” as its authors define it, to “cover up” Biden’s deterioration. It also reignited the debate over whether the party and the media did enough to expose him.

The matter has reached Congress, where the Republican majority has opened an investigation to clarify what happened during the term of the oldest president in history (he is currently 82). Two witnesses, the White House physician and an aide to the First Lady, have invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying on a week that began with the publication of an interview Biden gave to The New York Times, a media outlet that he avoided while president, like he did almost all news organizations.

In the interview, he weighed in on the controversy surrounding the use (or abuse) of the autopen, an automatic marker used by U.S. presidents—not just him—to sign documents, in his final months at the helm of the world’s leading power. Biden admitted to the Times that he used the device to process the thousands of pardons he issued orally in his final days in office. “I made every decision,” he added, “but we’re talking about a whole lot of people [for me to be able to personally sign every document].”

Sunday also marked six months since Trump, whose obsession with Biden’s autopen has not let up—he calls it “the biggest scandal in history”— took office for the second time.

It’s been a dizzying six months during which the lines separating spectacle from politics have been blurred in the White House. During this half-year, he has governed with an authoritarian style through hundreds of executive orders, jeopardized the separation of powers, harassed immigrants and minorities, passed an ambitious tax law, imposed his domineering style on the international stage, and advanced, with the complicity of the Supreme Court, a conservative revolution with which he hopes to influence American society for decades to come.

Sometimes it’s difficult to remember in Trump’s Washington, so obsessed with what the president’s next big idea will be, but the epicenter of the earthquake that the city feels every day, and what it represents, is to be found in that Saturday night in Butler where the then-candidate nearly died. That day that changed the history of the United States and the course of the world.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition