Trump did not submit to events outside of his control. He embraced them

Donald Trump thrives on a big moment. He seized this one while almost everyone else at the rally was trying to process what had just happened.

Donald Trump swatted at his neck, as if a mosquito had landed there, then dipped to the stage floor.

After the first screams, when the popping noises stopped, a member of the rally crowd yelled: “Trump was just elected today, folks. He is a martyr.”

It turns out the spectator was slightly overstating the commotion. True, a shot had just been heard around the world.

But Trump wasn’t dead.

Trump swatted at his neck, as if a mosquito had landed there, then dipped to the stage floor. Picture: Getty

Indeed, wounded, and within centimetres of certain death, he seemed more unstoppable than he already was.

In shock, bleeding, and two years shy of 80, no one would have judged Trump for bowing to the most natural of fears.

He had just been shot at. Most of us would try to hide.

He could have – perhaps, should have – cowered and let a human wall of Secret Service agents protect him.

Trump seemed more unstoppable than he already was. Picture: AFP

Yet Trump did not submit to events outside of his control. He embraced them.

He had been separated from his bright red campaign cap, as well as his black shoes.

His crazy hair was crazier than ever. Blood flowed from the right side of his head, its vividness amplified by the whiteness of his dress shirt.

“Sir, sir, sir,” security people urged him.

Trump had heard a whizzing sound, and felt the sting of what he assumed was a bullet rip his skin.

But he wanted his shoes (it seems that he would salvage one) as agents blanketed him.

More than that, he wanted to own this moment.

Those Trump instincts, reptilian or otherwise, were unassailed in the moments after the attempt on his life.

Trump wanted to own this moment. Picture: AP

He is known for going off script, for practising expressions that veer from grim to mean. Trump is a showman, steeped in belligerence and sarcasm, who long ago said the key to promotion was bravado that “plays to people’s fantasies”.

He thrives on a big moment. He seized this one while almost everyone else at the rally was trying to process what had just happened.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he told his security personnel.

Trump raised his fist and punched the air, in images that will live in history books.

“Fight,” he appeared to say. “Fight.”

As the New York Times put it: “The moment epitomised his visceral connection with his supporters and his mastery of the modern media age.”

It had started out as just another everyday rally, in Butler, Pennsylvania, a hardscrabble town named after a hero of the American Revolution.

Trump thrives on a big moment. Picture: AFP

Trump was deep in Republican country, where local schools close for the first day of the hunting season, and more households than not own one gun or more.

He was late, as usual. Crowds queued for metal detectors and bag inspections. Music pumped. It was hot, and tens of thousands had sought patches of shade.

Trump was less than 10 minutes into his speech for what he described as a “big, big beautiful crowd”.

As usual, he had wearied of his prepared lines, alluding to his presidential opponent’s apparent reliance on the use of teleprompters.

“Look what happened to our country …” he said as the first of the pops could be heard.

Trump supporters seen covered in blood in the stands. Picture: AFP

Sunday’s drama was another bloody twist in a political odyssey marked by shows of anarchy and Trump’s unwillingness to yield.

In his refusal to accept his 2020 election loss, Trump’s hardline rhetoric spurred protesters to storm the Capitol Building in 2021.

Then, he drew on the same words he reached for when placed in mortal danger on Sunday.

“Fight,” he had told a rally beforehand. “Fight.”

More than 170 police officers were injured that day as people hid from the lynch mob in offices and closets. This unwillingness to bow to the constitutional framework of the world’s loudest republic was later described as a “coup in search of a theory”.

Trump now joins Abraham Lincoln, JFK and Ronald Reagan as US political leaders to be targeted for murder.

America may not be headed for a second revolution, not quite yet, anyhow. But Sunday’s chaos deepens the growing confusion of concerns about the world’s shiniest democracy.

Trump is the raging outlier whose theatrics, if not his politics, lends something from the sinister newsreels of 1930s Germany.

He is heavily favoured to beat President Joe Biden in the November poll. Biden has so far refused to yield to the unshakeable perception that he is medically unfit for another term of office.

Trump easily led opinion polls before Sunday’s events, and early indications suggest his lead will not slip after Sunday’s show of defiance.

Responding to the shooting, Biden said: “We cannot be like this … the idea, the idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of, it’s just not appropriate. Everybody, everybody must condemn it, everybody.”

His words, well meant as they sounded, were not strictly accurate.

In September 1975, president Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in 17 days.

Political rallies have been a favoured site for assassins. More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was shot as he prepared to give a speech in Milwaukee. A bullet lay in his chest when he famously said: “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

Sunday’s assassination attempt, if successful, would have been the West’s biggest tremor since 9/11.

The oddness of the election campaign would have deepened – a likelihood of two candidates, Republican and Democrat, who were not thought contenders only months earlier.

Instead, Trump survived, stamping himself with a presence of mind and boldness of nature that his supporters were quick to say reinforced his advantages over Biden.

The pair have regressed in recent weeks to a level of playground name-calling that might have once precluded their place in the Oval Office.

Trump calls Biden a “broken down piece of crap”. Biden calls Trump a “loser”. Biden seems too old, amid errors of speech and moments of confusion that cast him unelectable to many voters, including a rising chorus from his own side of politics.

Amid the quirks of the US Constitution, it seems that no one can sack Biden from the campaign except Biden himself.

As someone said last week, if an Australian prime minister was showing the same signs of senility, he or she would be gone by lunchtime.

Trump, a convicted felon, suffers from a Messianic contempt for democratic convention.

This contest between two poor contenders for the world’s most powerful position is timed badly for those who cherish freedom.

Western democracy, both inside and out of the US, has not seemed so shaky for decades, in part because of Trump’s natural aversion to its orthodoxies.

Younger generations of the extreme left have rejected democracy’s once unquestioned virtues.

Events in Gaza have inspired them to turn on a democracy, in Israel, which was assaulted by terrorism last October.

Hamas’s barbaric hostility to modern advents of the enlightened world, such as women’s and gay rights, gets overlooked in the protest rhetoric.

Meanwhile, China is on the rise. Russia continues its imperialistic attack on Ukraine.

As both European and Australian leaders have pointed out, the world needs a vibrant and reliable US.

Americans fretted about the future after the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr in 1968.

Sunday’s assassination attempt on Trump was a product of a different time, as Jonathan Weisman pointed out in The New York Times.

In the first 12 hours that followed, almost nothing was known about the motivations of the reported killer, thought to be a 20-year-old who used an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle.

Weisman noted that this was “the first attempted assassination of a current or former American president in the era of social media, and the conspiracy theories, finger-pointing and campaign gamesmanship moved at the speed of the internet, far faster than the actual facts of what transpired”.

Leaders of the right side of politics argued that Democrats had helped spark an attempted assassination by framing the 2024 election as a battle between the forces of democracy and the soldiers of fascism.

“(I)n the era of memes, X posts, Truths, Threads and TikTok, introspection was never going to be the dominant mood,” Weisman wrote.

“Rage, blame, even comedy were the watchwords of 2024.”

Originally published as Trump did not submit to events outside of his control. He embraced them