Thomas Matthew Crooks shared some of the characteristics that have defined several of America’s other casual, day-light assassins. He was white, male, educated and reared in suburban normality, lacking few of the privileges that America confers on those born with these advantages.

In a global context, these attributes of race, colour, nationality and family placed him among the top quadrilles measuring economic stability. He bore none of the justified grievances that black and Asian people often harbour in affluent western societies and stemming from systemic discrimination and racism.

Forty-five years ago, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot and killed the principal of Cleveland Elementary School as well as another staff member and wounded eight pupils and a police officer. Her stated reason for committing this act was “I don’t like Mondays.” Since 2015, more than 20,000 Americans have been killed or wounded in mass shootings. In 2022, more than 600 people lost their lives and a further 2,700 were wounded.

In the course of the next few weeks assorted theories and explanations will be offered to explain the actions of Donald Trump’s would-be assassin. I’ll be surprised if any of them make much more sense than Brenda Spencer’s.

You can’t really look for a salient pattern of psychopathy or unresolved emotional hurt when these incidents occur in America, not when they happen so routinely often that most now rate barely a mention on the national news networks. It’s tempting to point to how absurdly easy it is to acquire high-calibre assault weapons as a major factor in these incidents.

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Presumably, America’s social and political leaders know this too. Yet, on each occasion there’s a concerted campaign to impose meaningful gun control it founders when the National Rifle Association, America’s most powerful civic organisation, flexes its unmatched financial and political muscle.

Thus, we are left only to count the ironies surrounding the attempted assassination of President Trump, starting with the fact that of all previous inhabitants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue he is the gun lobby’s most persistent and assiduous champion.

Consider too his pledge in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of wanting to unite America. This is the man who mocked the husband of Nancy Pelosi, following a brutal assault on him with a hammer in 2022. “I will stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco,” he said last September. “How's her husband doing by the way? Anybody know?” Mr Trump said to laughter at the California Republican convention.

In the immediate aftermath of Sunday evening’s shooting in Pennsylvania almost every commentator insisted that America was a bitterly divided nation and that the attempted assassination had brought it to a dangerously unstable precipice.

Yet you struggle to recall a period when America wasn’t bitterly divided. Unlike in other western democracies, there are rarely any other parties in which to lodge a protest vote as a means of issuing an occasional warning to the Big Two. The Left simply doesn’t exist in American politics: it’s Right or Righter Still. Military might reinforcing overseas dominance and a multi-billion-dollar internal security apparatus ensures that even mildly Socialist ideas are quickly suppressed.

In few other countries identifying as "civilised" would a convicted felon who’s already been found guilty of falsifying business records on the grand scale be permitted even to campaign for the presidency once more. He still faces charges - amounting to treason - that he tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.

More than five decades after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, poor black Americans are still being targeted by law enforcement agencies. Research by the Pew Research Centre indicates that approximately eight out of 10 African-Americans claim to have experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity. An increase in white supremacist hate groups is cited as a major factor in this.

Seven out of 10 African-Americans believe that racial discrimination inhibits their careers and that inherent prejudice in the judicial system leads to the small number of convictions arising from police brutality against members of this community.

According to America’s National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers (NACDL), Black and Hispanic people represent 31% of the US population, but 53% of death row inmates. This is 30 years after Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman said: “Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die. Perhaps it should not be surprising that the biases and prejudices that infect society generally would influence the determination of who is sentenced to death.”

in Huntington Beach, California, on SundayTrump supporters in Huntington Beach, California, on Sunday (Image: PA)

The ultimate irony, of course, lies in the massive support Mr Trump commands in blue-collar, rust-state communities. He has successfully portrayed himself as their representative against the Washington political elites, while at the same time dealing with those money-changers under the table by handing their donors and supporters significant tax breaks.

Perhaps, having seen their communities abandoned by Washington, they channel what remains of their aspiration and sense of selves into the flag and all that they think this represents: global power, military might and the cultural triumph of Americanism across the planet. In that defining, clenched-fist image of Mr Trump immediately following the attempt on his life they see themselves as they’d wish to be seen.

In Britain, as in the US, campaign slogans have also come to define progressive politics in the absence of anything truly radical. For "Unity" see "Change", the word that featured in every Labour candidate’s manicured UK election literature (as it has in every party’s propaganda in the last 30 years). At UK level, Sir Keir Starmer may be sincere in wishing to effect societal change, but doesn’t believe it can be done without the privateers and predators of the private sector.

In Scotland, we all voted for Change by backing devolution in 1997. Yet, the Scottish Parliament this conferred on us is now largely home to a class of professional scavengers, entirely detached from the communities they purport to represent. They are reinforced by Scotland’s dismal lobbying sector, whose lips are permanently attached to the boots of whatever party or politician will attend their clients’ drinks parties. Those communities occupying all the bottom places in every measure of social deprivation in 1997 have since seen no improvement in their circumstances.

Like America, we are a divided nation too. Only radical change rooted in reversing the flow of capital can heal those divisions. And only the deluded and the naïve believe that Keir Starmer’s Labour will dare to do that.