The image the world will forever recall is Donald Trump, having been grazed on the side of his head in a shocking assassination attempt, pumping his fist in defiance, determined to stand tall even as the Secret Service crowd around him.
Trump sometimes seems metaphorically bullet proof. Sometimes people seem to forget that Trump is a human being at all.
Yet had that bullet been just a couple of millimetres closer to Trump, the former president would now be dead.
Any normal human being would be hurled into a state of shock by such an incident.
The normal human reaction to such shock is mental paralysis and physical shakes.
Yet it looked like Trump kept control of himself, knew exactly what he was doing and exhibited defiance and leadership in the face of the attack.
First, he seemed to go down voluntarily, knowing that that’s what you should do in the event of an attack. Second, while he didn’t disregard the secret service and the need to evacuate and go to hospital, he wanted to be upright, he wanted to look the crowd in the eye, and he wanted to pump his fist in defiance, salute, leadership and strength.
Whatever you think of Trump’s policies, and his broad approach to politics, it was an impressive display.
The contrast with President Joe Biden’s inability to finish a sentence in his recent debate with Trump could not be stronger.
Though nothing is certain, it’s likely that this incident will strengthen Trump’s candidacy.
It’s worth pausing to pay tribute to the routine, quotidian heroism of the American secret service. As soon as the shot was fired, they surrounded Trump with their own bodies, so that if there were more shots, and no-one knew at that stage that there was only one shooter, the bullets would hit them rather than Trump.
This happened in the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981. A secret service agent took a bullet that was intended for Reagan.
The larger political fallout of this shocking and appalling assault on democracy itself will take time to become clear.
However, there is a giant, devastating and black irony at the heart of all this.
Trump frequently uses intemperate rhetoric. I think he’s wrong to do so. It’s one of the things which has led liberal America to regard Trump as unacceptable.
Every day the New York Times and CNN scream that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. Biden and his surrogates keep repeating that Trump is a threat to democracy. The New Republic magazine compared Trump with Adolf Hitler. Liberal newspapers and mainstream web sites routinely claim that Trump plans to impose authoritarianism on the US, although there is no evidence for this. Biden routinely calls Trump racist and evil.
It’s not altogether astonishing if some marginal or easily influenced person comes to the grotesque conclusion that they should take Trump out of the equation so that he can’t destroy democracy.
The Democrats have exceeded Trump in their trashing of norms and institutions.
To give just three examples.
Hillary Clinton paid for a fake dossier falsely implicating Trump in collusion with the Russian state in the 2016 election and this stunt dominated the news, to Trump’s detriment, for years.
In the 2020 election, a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden surfaced full of incriminating material regarding the Biden family. Joe and Hunter Biden both knew it was genuine. Both lied to the effect it was a fake. The Biden campaign organised for 51 former senior intelligence chiefs to claim, wholly wrongly, that the laptop looked like Russian disinformation. Nothing has done more to discredit the precious institutional credibility of these agencies than that political intervention.
And now there are a slew of ludicrous, wholly politicised prosecutions of Trump.
Of course, the Democrats are not directly responsible for an individual, either extremist or unhinged or both, taking violent action.
Nonetheless, the idea that Trump has uniquely debased American politics while left liberal Democrats and supporting media uphold the norms of decency and democracy is a complete fake.
Grievous and shocking as this incident is, there has been a lot of violence in American presidential politics. Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy were assassinated in office.
Perhaps the nearest parallel to the Trump case was Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. He had been president, left office for a number of years, and was attempting a comeback as a third-party candidate. At an election rally he was shot. The bullet lodged against an obstruction in his coat pocket. He was injured and bleeding, nonetheless. Yet he went on and completed his speech before he sought medical attention.
Ronald Reagan reacted with such grace, courage and charm when he was shot that the nation fell in love with him all over again and he went on to win the greatest landslide re-election in modern American history.
Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the famous song lyric says.
I’ve always thought that particular lyric to be utter nonsense.
Except, perhaps, in American presidential politics. If someone shoots you and you don’t die, it does indeed make you stronger.
Trump’s core brand is strength. The shooter may have reinforced that mightily.
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