A lot happened at 6:11 p.m. July 13, Butler, PennsylvaniaIt produced one of the most sudden and uniquely defining moments of our political era.
At that moment, a bullet fired by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks struck former President Donald Trump in the ear and came close to killing someone nearby.
After falling to the ground and being helped by Secret Service members, Trump, blood streaming from his face, walked off the stage and emerged from the ring of security guards, waving his arms and yelling, “Fight… fight… fight!”
Fewer than one person in a hundred million would react to being shot like this. (Related article: Hausman: Of course Trump got shot. Just one weirdo who took the Democrats seriously got shot.)
This photo will become an icon of Trump and of politics today. Decades from now, regardless of how Americans feel about the New Right that Trump inherited and brought to the White House, they will see it as another indelible mark of an extraordinary American political experiment. Among the contemporary images are Theodore Roosevelt campaigning tirelessly; a desperate immigrant mother with two children during the Great Depression; Franklin Roosevelt asking Congress to declare war after Pearl Harbor; black students yelling racist slogans as they marched past a high school in Little Rock; Richard Nixon leaving the White House after resigning; and Ronald Reagan leading a resurgent Western nation and pleading with the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Ten minutes before Trump left the stage, Lee Greenwood performed his iconic song, “God Bless AmericaThe unofficial national anthem from the 1991 Gulf War now features more prominently than ever at Republican events, with lyrics like: “If tomorrow it were all gone/I'd have to work so hard/And start again/With just my kids and my wife/I'd be so lucky/To be here alive today/'Cause our flag still means freedom/They can't take it away.”
But this lovely song is somehow inappropriate: A large part of Trump's story is that they can take away freedom, which is what inspired his candidacy and presidency and which still motivates his core supporters today.
The impetus behind the creed and rallying cry of “Make America Great Again” is not simply a reaction to economic and social decline, but a demonstration that a corrupt government, encouraged by corrupt corporations, academia and the media, is systematically trying to change the very nature of the United States in order to take away our freedoms.
Who better to demonstrate this than Trump's opponents? In 2016, 2020, and now in 2024, because he opposed the Republican and Democratic establishment, the corrupt powerful in our country have tried to take away Trump's voice, his power, his wealth, and even his freedom. Many have also sought to take Trump's life, and yesterday one man tried to do just that.
For Trump, a more fitting song, released a year after the 1980s hit “God Bless the USA,” would be Corey Hart's “No one can take away your right to fight and your right to never surrender…”
Beneath the song's light and moving tone lies a dark human reality involving the struggle against hardship. Winston Churchill captured it.: “…the moment may come when we will have to fight against all odds and with only a slim chance of survival. It may get worse. We may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it would be better to die than to live as slaves.”
Trump, the quintessential American salesman, optimist, and braggart, would never publicly suggest that the modern struggle might be lost. Targeted by spurious federal and local criminal and civil persecution, demonized by his opponents more than any president since Abraham Lincoln, threatened with bankruptcy, deluded into death by Hollywood filth, and targeted by those in power from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, Trump will never give in as long as he lives.
Fight… fight… fight…
We will know more about the Butler case in the coming days. It will probably become clear that the young would-be assassin, who was shot dead after a long delay, was psychotic rather than politically motivated. Our damn media will now try to confuse this case with the general political violence and unrest that both political parties allegedly contributed to. Let's muddy the waters and move on.
Their hope is that the public will overlook the fact that the vast majority of political violence in America comes from the left, from the attempted massacre at a Republican congressional baseball game by a Democratic activist beating a foster child in 2017, to the dangerous summer of 2020 when Black Lives Matter and Antifa took over American cities, to the 2022 violence that has plagued the nation. Assassination Plot A man upset about the possibility of looming restrictions on abortion has filed a lawsuit against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The soft cover-up is not only being encouraged by partisan Democrats, but also by ignorant establishment Republicans. The statements condemning the shooting and wishing Trump a speedy recovery were seemingly comforting, but they still contained a subtle moral equivalence. Condoleezza Rice writes: “We must lower the temperature in the political debate and preserve the hallmarks of a healthy democracy,” she said. Her boss, former President George W. Bush, wrote, “…and commends the Secret Service for its swift response.”
What on earth are these people talking about? A Secret Service with an annual budget of $3.3 billion that makes a presidential motorcade seem tame compared to a Roman triumphal celebration has allowed a team of would-be assassins to take up residence on a rooftop just 400 feet from perhaps the most wanted man in the world.
The shooter was spotted by a bystander, not by the Secret Service, but was still ignored. A friend who served as a Secret Service agent wrote me a letter that described what surprised many observers as the time passed before Trump was taken away: that the behind-the-scenes work was also sloppy. We don't need to praise the bloated, failed Washington bureaucracy yet again.
When it comes to “turning down the temperature,” voters are well aware of who turned it up first. One candidate spoke He was going to hit his opponent “right in the middle of the bullseye,” but it wasn't Trump. For nearly a decade, only one side has lamented that Trump will end our democracy, even though he helped rebuild the county and defend the Constitution during his four years in office.
Only one side did not condemn the political terrorism of street violence and voter fraud that has led to this moment in American history under an aging president manipulated by the most ideological, extreme and incompetent White House staff of this century.
Trump will take to the stage at the Republican National Convention on Thursday to accept his party's presidential nomination amid the acclaim and expectations of someone who is nearly unbeatable in decades, but his ultimate political success is by no means certain and may be remote.
American meritocracy has disappeared from much of the business world and all of academia. Our government is good at hurting productive, law-abiding, Republican-leaning people, but it can’t perform basic functions like maintaining borders or winning wars. Wall Street, Big Tech, and the war machine, with their enormous power and wealth, may despise Biden for now, but they have no new found affection for a citizen-led republic. Our media is dominated by Orwellian liars.
Our children will know who won and who lost this political battle, but whatever the outcome, the image of that struggle will be forever etched in American history.
Fight… fight… fight…
Christian Whiton served as a senior adviser in the Trump and George W. Bush administrations.
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