Bloodied but unbeaten: Trump gets a shot at immortality

There will be red faces in the security establishment about how an armed young man reached a rooftop that had a clear line of sight to the podium where Trump was standing in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. All potential vantage points are routinely ‘sanitised’ by protection details, and yet that factory roof was left unguarded. Predictably, ‘liberal’ apologists are making generalisations about political violence to draw flak away from this failure, deliberate or otherwise.

But these generalisations point to the uncomfortable fact that mostly Republican presidents and candidates have been targets of attempts, successful or not. Three of the four sitting US Presidents killed by assassins were Republicans—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley; John F Kennedy was the only Democrat. Of attempted assassinations of Presidents and candidates, the tally is four each for both; the most recent were Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.

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It must be noted that for the past 18 months the Left-Liberal eco-system has been running an increasingly desperate and shrill campaign on the lines of “Donald Trump must be stopped at all costs”. Millions of words have been spewed out to this effect from not only politicians who support the Democratic Party but also academics, political scientists, columnists, TV anchors and even film actors. Americans have also been exhorted to make personal efforts to stop Trump.

So a 20-year-old man—supposedly a “registered Republican”—took these calls seriously and let off a volley of shots at a campaign rally, one of which narrowly missed Trump’s brain—it hit his ear—but others killed a bystander and injured more. Several attendees at the rally have subsequently told media, domestic and international, that they saw the man crawling round the factory roof and raised the alarm, pointing him out to the police and Secret Service but no one listened!

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Now that formal investigations have begun and the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by Republican Congressman from Kentucky James Comer, has asked the director of the Secret Service to depose about this, more embarrassing details will doubtless emerge unless the federal authorities and the Biden White House try to manage the news. Absurd theories that Trump engineered this to “win” the election will be rightly dismissed.

The White House and key departments of the federal government have been getting visibly alarmed by the possible return of Trump to the Oval Office, especially after President Joe Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside in favour of a younger candidate who could offer a more robust challenge. Whether that uncertainty led to shocking laxness in the security arrangements for Trump may never be known, but the urgent appeal to ‘contain’ him has been no secret.

Two allusions come to mind, one long ago and one more recent. The first was in December 1170 when the then King of England, Henry II is supposed to have uttered the fateful words, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” alluding to Thomas Beckett, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had fallen out with him and become a critic. Four knights took his rhetorical appeal seriously: they marched off to Canterbury and killed Beckett at the cathedral’s high altar.

The second was the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, on the election trail in December 2007. Even today it is still not clear whether she was killed by bullets fired by an assassin or by injuries sustained in aftermath of a suicide bomber denotating near her car. Whatever the method, then too assassination was seen as a way to change the outcome of a fraught election. Islamist terror groups were promptly blamed by the government, but security lapses pointed elsewhere.

That the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was allegedly a registered Republican makes little difference to the issue of that glaring lapse. But the notoriously partisan US media gratefully latching onto this factoid is also indicative. Anyone can put a name down in a list; that does not mean the person is really a supporter. In any case, this is the first election that the assassin would have been eligible to vote anyway, so his leanings either way certainly cannot be taken for granted.

But information has also emerged that according to a 2021 Federal Election Commission filing, teenaged Crooks had made a $15 donation to ActBlue, a very well-known forum that raises money for left-leaning Democratic politicians and organisations, three years ago. He had apparently given that donation for the Progressive Turnout Project, a national group that rallies Democrats to vote, according to Reuters. So far that group has not responded to this revelation.

The fact that the Democratic political pantheon has been quick to express outrage at the attack and sympathy for Trump, indicates that they have realised how far their anti-Trump rhetoric has affected Americans with impaired abilities of discernment. If it emerges that the young man had sympathies towards the Stop Trump project, it will affect many other electoral races besides the one for the White House in November as Pennsylvania is again a crucial ‘swing state’.

This latest assassination attempt should make the US sit up and reassess itself both as a society and as a democracy. Not only is much of the world sniggering at the spectacle of the “world’s greatest country” (self-anointed, of course) having to choose between a visibly doddering geriatric and a boastful billionaire, this latest incident has cemented its position as an endemically trigger-happy polity, with a long procession of murky political killings and attempted ones.

If the defining image of this election for the Democrat incumbent Biden is of slack-jawed, eye-twitching confusion on a debate podium, the most memorable one of his Republican challenger is far more dramatic: Trump with blood running down his cheek, fist raised defiantly as the American flag soars behind him and Secret Service agents scramble to surround him. It is evident which one will be more appealing to voters as the Presidential race approaches the final lap.

The author is a freelance writer. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.