The most recent apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump raises a series of absurd questions. How many more assassination attempts on Trump should we expect before the election on November 5th? Will one of them be successful? How much of a factor will such assassination attempts prove to be in the eventual outcome of that election? And has American politics now entered an era where assassination attempts are an indivisible element of any election cycle, like post-Convention polling bumps or televised debates?

It wouldn’t be quite right to suggest that this latest attempt on a former US president’s life is unremarkable – far from it: I myself intend to remark on it here at some length, in a newspaper of record – but, after the comparatively seismic shock of the previous assassination attempt, at a rally in Pennsylvania barely two months ago, this one has seemed to struggle to rise to the level of major event.

For one thing, it might be argued that it was less an assassination attempt than an attempted assassination attempt, because the alleged attempted assassin, in this case, never actually managed to do any shooting. And then there is the matter of setting: the suspect assailant concealed with a rifle in some bushes off the fairway of the fifth hole of Trump International Golf Course at West Palm Beach, on which the former president was playing a round. It lacked the dramatic political charge that was so evident in the Pennsylvania rally assassination attempt, with its instant iconography of bloodshed and defiance.

[ Trump shooting: Photographers capture historic moment but media bosses have a different job in mindOpens in new window ]

At time of writing, the........

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