I’m not quite sure how to say this, so I’ll just blurt it out: Donald Trump has never been more authentically admirable than in the moment someone came within an inch of blowing his head off on national television. I’d grimly chuckle about that irony — it took this! — if I weren’t so utterly relieved and utterly terrified about what we all just narrowly avoided.
I don’t need to explain what has just happened to you. We will be talking about it for a long time to come. The assassination attempt on Trump is of such enormity — a man is dead, and others are injured — that we will be dealing with its ramifications for months if not years. It is frankly a miracle that Trump survived — a bullet grazed him, taking a piece of his right ear with it.
But for now I want to offer a prayer for the dead and wounded, a sigh of relief that we have narrowly avoided a catastrophe that would have carried us full-scale into a grotesque replay of the worst of 1968, and . . . a genuinely heartfelt tip of the cap to Donald Trump, a man who actually rose to a truly terrible moment. Eight to ten shots ring out; Trump feels the upper lobe of his right ear get torn away by a bullet, the Secret Service rushes him as he gets down. There is chaos. There is terror. The immediate need is to get the former president — already wounded and bleeding — off the stage.
And then Donald Trump says “Wait, wait, wait.” And Trump reaches up over their protective shield to throw a set of fierce, proud fist-pumps in the air. Blood is streaking down the side of his head and on his arms. But he wants you to know he’s unbowed. Unintimidated. You come at the Don, you best not miss. The photographs are already iconic, from multiple angles. Trump, with his bloody fist raised in proud defiance of the Reaper and anyone else crazy enough to try to take him down, is going to become one of the most famous photographs in modern American political history — if you’re uncomfortable with that you best start adjusting to it.
I myself was thrilled. I loved it, the absolute sheer unbreakable moxie of it. If you can’t understand why that is exactly what every normal American was hoping to see in that moment, then you probably couldn’t grasp why George W. Bush electrified a nation by standing on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn and promising that the United States would come calling — and soon. I make no secret of my opinion of Trump. It doesn’t matter. This was, quite truly — in a way that even skeptics must concede reflects upon something in his core character, because you can’t plan getting your ear shot off.
That at that moment — literally a minute after being shot at — he still had the instincts to rile up the crowd, projecting strength and defiance, is simply remarkable.
There’s nothing that’s happened to Donald Trump since his rise to political prominence that has made him blink, and now we can add to the list an assassination attempt.
Trump displayed remarkable sangfroid in the immediate aftermath of an effort to murder him? Yes, of course, he did. He insisted on not leaving the stage before he’d made a gesture of strength and resilience? Well, what would you expect? He took a nightmarish attack against him and turned it into an iconic image that will cement his status as a populist legend? Are you surprised?
Trump’s extraordinary reaction in Butler, Pa., was entirely in character.
This is a man with an indomitable spirit that has seen him through business reverses, tabloid scandals, and innumerable battles with all comers over the decades. Like most anything else, this quality has its downsides — it can lead him to persist in error, or insist on his own reality — but he wouldn’t be on the cusp of the presidency again without it.
If Trump has never shown any sign of cracking under pressure, it’s because he simply doesn’t feel pressure like a normal person. A fatalism combined with a faith that he’ll find a way out of any fix means that he doesn’t lose sleep over anything.
Although there were any number of controversies during his presidency that would have cracked or worn down a more conventional politician, he carried on as usual. Over the last two years, his partisan opponents have thrown criminal charges at him that carry the risk of him spending the rest of his life in prison; sure, he’s fought the charges like a caged animal, yet he’s never seemed down or frazzled. And now this.
After spending so much time displaying coolness under metaphorical fire, he displayed coolness under actual fire.
A cliché in sports about particularly assured players is that they “slow the game down.” Trump, at his best, does the same thing, and we saw it on the stage in Butler. Whereas he could be forgiven for being confused and in shock after the shooting, he didn’t lose sight of the need to show that he was unbowed, to reassure his supporters, and to project strength.
There is an irreducible element of politics that is about performance, and there’s no accident that a certain former Hollywood actor understood it and that Trump, a TV star and showman, gets it, too. He understood the drama and emotion of that terrible, fraught moment, and rose to it.
This was Teddy Roosevelt getting shot by an assassin in 1912, and going on to give his speech anyway.
This was Ronald Reagan telling Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”
This was Archduke Ferdinand insisting on visiting in the hospital members of his entourage who had been wounded in an attack on him (although that display of courage had disastrous consequences — a wrong turn onto a narrow street put his car in direct proximity to Gavrilo Princip).
It is often said that Trump is lucky in his enemies; yesterday evening, he was just plain lucky.
The gesture that so impressed and inspired his supporters and, one hopes, the rest of the country wasn’t random or the product of good fortune, though. It was characteristically Trump, who has defied so many adversaries over the years, now including a cowardly assassin who came within an inch of ending his life.
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