One is tempted to say Donald J. Trump became the 47th President of the United States at 18:11 EDT on 13 July 2024.
The image of him fist-pumping the air in bloodied defiance after the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania was instantly iconic and archetypically Presidential, if not outright kingly: There was more leadership on display in that one moment than Joe Biden has shown in nearly 55 years of public office.
He has weathered the ultimate crisis of his personal and professional life and emerged with a peculiar aura of inevitability.
We are all familiar with the mise en scene of political assassination attempts in the modern era, successful and unsuccessful; the target bewildered, confused, temporarily or permanently incapacitated, smothered by secret service and smuggled away in a blur of wheels to the surgeon’s knife. Trump by contrast looked like he’d just received the Mandate of Heaven, a certain prelude to the mandate of the electorate.
July 13, 2024 was also the day when with respect to the events of 6 January 2021, any debt owed by Trump was repaid in full, with interest. The man so often attacked by his opponents as a threat to democracy has now literally shed blood for democracy, in the process alerting the American people to the magnitude of the threats confronted not just by Trump personally, but by the democratic system itself.
It’s been chillingly clear for some time that there are forces at large in American society, tacitly encouraged if not actively supported by many intelligent men and women who should know better, fully prepared to see Trump dead rather than back in the White House.
Via its vocal hegemonies within the legacy media, the entertainment industry, and academia the left has spent eight years in ceaseless slander of Trump as an existential evil without postwar parallel, the natural born enemy of democracy, “literally Hitler” — a systematic process of mass-vilification which reached its fullest and most offensive articulation in the The New Republic’s June 2024 cover story, fusing Trump’s image with the Führer’s above the demented headline “American Fascism.”
Journalists, celebrities, pundits, and opponents alike have joked about Trump’s death, longed for it, wished it, urged it, sought to conjure it into being as in a collective spasm of sympathetic magic, albeit sociologists have a more scientific term for it: “Stochastic terrorism,” that is, political violence brought to life by a relentlessly hostile commentariat. In a febrile politico-cultural climate such as this, the distance between rhetoric and reality, at least in the mind of a would-be assassin, can be measured in nanometers, and closed altogether with one bullet.
It’s not so long ago after all that the left was encouraging us to “punch a Nazi,” beatifying violence as the highest expression — and logical culmination — of social justice. And as a Nazi is now basically anyone who isn’t a member of the far left, this vastly expands the numbers of the legitimately killable.
The central dogma of the Biden campaign itself thus far has been to paint Trump as a fascistic demagogue poised to overthrow the Republic; indeed, just hours before the assassination attempt at Butler, the President’s X account branded Trump a “dictator.” July 13 was nothing more or less complex than the essential energy of this message hastened to its inevitable explosion, in the process costing a blameless bystander his life.
To put the same thing another way, if a statesman is routinely and habitually diabolized as the Devil incarnate, which measures are forbidden when contemplating how best to thwart his accession?
Then again, and as the well-known saying has it, if you take a shot at the king, you’d best not miss. And right now we can be sure that Trump’s campaign team is breathing two sighs of relief: Not only did their man survive, but they don’t need to spend another dime on advertising. In an era of spin, counter-spin, focus groups, microtargeting and the dry, dreary et cetera of modern politics, the media has no context for the effect on the average American voter of a plain, simple act of bravery, or the atavistic power inherent in the image of the wounded but unbowed king.
This kind of courage harkens back to the rugged spirit of Theodore Roosevelt when he famously shrugged off an assassination attempt in 1912 by delivering a 90-minute speech with the bullet still lodged in his chest. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” said Roosevelt. “But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
If there was a caption contest for Trump on the podium on July 13 meanwhile the winner might well be “Nice try, a**holes.” He has weathered the ultimate crisis of his personal and professional life and emerged with a peculiar aura of inevitability twinned with invincibility, a potent political alchemy. Whatever the outcome of the November election, which he can now surely only lose either to unblushing fraud or a luckier assassin’s bullet, Trump has earned his seat in a very American Valhalla.
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