I WOKE at 5am in my London home buzzing with excitement because I’d snagged last minute tickets to the Euros final.
Then I picked up my phone, saw a gazillion missed calls and messages, and my heart sank.
What the hell had happened?
The subject line of an email from an American friend answered the question: ‘TRUMP’S BEEN SHOT!!’
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I involuntarily shuddered from the starting brutal realism of what those three words meant.
But in truth, I’d feared this moment for years.
There are few more divisive or polarising public figures in the world than Donald Trump, and a lot of people hate him with a dangerous, visceral passion.
There is also considerable precedent.
Four American presidents have been assassinated, the most recent being John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Two more survived assassination attempts, including Ronald Reagan outside a Washington hotel in 1981.
So, the threat of a sniper’s bullet is never far away for any occupant of the White House in a country awash with gun violence and increasingly toxic political tensions.
Tragically, as many predicted, it was only a matter of time before some deranged lunatic tried to kill Donald Trump.
But it was still a massive, seismic shock to discover it had finally happened.
I raced downstairs to watch the TV news coverage and was horrified to see the dramatic and terrifying scenes as Trump came under fire while he spoke on stage at a rally in Pennsylvania.
And stunned to see him rise himself up through his frantic Secret Service bodyguards, his face covered in blood, defiantly punching the air and bellowing, ‘FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!’
Those astounding images are already some of the most iconic in American history.
Incredibly, Trump cheated death by what must have been an inch at best as the would-be assassin’s bullets whistled past his head.
Instead, he suffered just a graze to his ear, and lives, as he shouted, to fight another day.
And thank God for that, as the consequences of him being killed in such an attack don’t bear thinking about.
I genuinely think America might have tipped into some kind of civil war given how popular Trump is with his many millions of supporters and how convinced they already were, with good reason, that there has been a deliberate attempt by Democrats to weaponise the justice system against him to stop him being re-elected president.
On a personal level, I was incredibly relieved.
Donald Trump has been a friend of mine for nearly 20 years, after I won his Celebrity Apprentice show.
We’ve had our ups and downs since he became President in 2016, not least when he shamefully refused to accept the result of the 2020 election and fuelled the appalling January 6 riots on the Capitol with his incendiary rhetoric.
But when he rang me recently for a lengthy chat, it was a very warm conversation.
And I know many of his family very well.
In fact, the first person I messaged about the shooting was his son Donald Jr, telling him how shocked I was, how relieved I was that his dad was ok, and how courageous I thought he’d been as it all went down.
‘Thank you very much, Piers.’ he replied. ‘I was just with my children when I heard the news and I’m truly shocked at how insane everything has become.’
He’s right.
It was complete madness for President Biden to allow a Democrat attorney-general in New York to bring criminal charges against his predecessor for paying off a porn star, Stormy Daniels, over an alleged one-night stand 18 years ago and then trying to hide it from scrutiny before the 2016 election.
When presidents try to put their political opponents in prison, the country they run becomes a banana republic no better than Russia, North Korea, or corrupt nations in South America.
And although I don’t want to blame Biden or Democrats for the actions of a mentally disturbed shooter, there is no doubt that the constant ludicrously exaggerated liberal depiction of Trump as ‘the new Hitler’ and their undisguised glee at the prospect of putting him in a jail cell, has played a part in whipping up partisan political rivalry to incredibly dangerous levels.
Only a few days ago, Biden told donors on a phone call that it was ‘time to put Trump in a bullseye.’
That kind of violent language, which Trump himself has often used too about his rivals, should have no place in a civilised democracy.
As we’ve seen in Britain, where two MPs have been murdered in the past 12 years, it can drive damaged impressionable minds to commit despicable acts against elected officials.
Fortunately, Trump didn’t die.
Though there are serious questions to now be asked about how the hell the armed shooter got onto a roof just 150 yards from his target, why he wasn’t stopped from shooting given that members of the public saw him moving into position and told police, and why Trump wasn’t whisked straight to his limo rather than be allowed to stand up again and address the crowd.
The Secret Service massively dropped the ball, and senior heads will doubtless roll as a result.
But the inevitable impact of this dreadful attack on American democracy is that it will now almost certainly propel Donald Trump back to the White House.
He was already leading the polls against Biden since their debate debacle two weeks ago which exposed the incumbent President as so cognitively impaired as to be utterly unfit for office.
Now, he’s literally taken a bullet for his country, and the images of his extraordinary and heroic defiance in the seconds after the shooting will surely compel many more Americans to vote for him in November.
The shooter wanted Donald Trump dead, but ironically, has instead cemented his political resurrection.
