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Donald Trump pumps his fist after an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania
“I was 10 years old when my uncle was assassinated and I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr on Fox News, hours after a bullet skimmed the side of Donald Trump’s head. Kennedy recalled the days after that tragedy in 1963. “There was a healing that took place,” he said.
Not five years later, Kennedy’s father lost his life at the hands of an assassin, just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Andy Warhol took a bullet the day before. More than half a century later, the Smithsonian describes 1968 as “the year that shattered America”.
Anti-war protests rocked campuses. Democrats planned to convene in Chicago. A man named Robert F. Kennedy was on the ballot. It may seem like we’ve been here before, but what if we never actually left?
Donald Trump and Joe Biden were both in their twenties during the year that “shattered” America. On cable news, RFK Jr shared memories of his father’s assassination only hours after yesterday’s attempt on Trump’s life. We’re at the bookend of the Baby Boom generation.
In 1967, the year before America “shattered”, Joan Didion famously opened “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” with a placid description of the national mood. “It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege,” she wrote. “It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.”
That apprehension turned out to be well-placed, and we’d be wise to consider the similarities: superficial comforts and cultural unrest. We’re not okay, regardless of the GNP.
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SubscribeA reminder that the Left are crazy.
‘You only have to look at the insurrection of the US Capitol on January 6 2021 to see how quickly political violence can explode in the US.
This is due, at least in part, to the way violent rhetoric has been cultivated quite deliberately by elements of the far right in recent years. In particular, undercurrents of political violence have simmered at Trump rallies since the beginning of his first run for the presidency in 2016.
The threat of violence has become central to Trump’s political image, to his appeal and to his supporter base. You only have to watch a few moments of every Trump rally and every Trump speech to hear him speak about violence, often in graphic detail and with great relish.’
https://theconversation.com/a-bloodied-defiant-trump-could-become-the-defining-image-of-the-us-election-234629
That is a pretty spectacular piece of cognitive dissonance, if you assume the gunman has been radicalised to do this by Trumphobia.
Seems like the assumption I made there was wrong – attempted assassin looks to be a Republican after all.
Not necessarily. It’s been suggested elsewhere that the gunman only joined the Republican Party to get updates on when & where Trump rallies would be held
“Undercurrents of political violence simmering at Trump rallies since 2016”
How did you gauge this, and the effects theref? Following these rallies, did enraged Maga thugs take to the streets, engaging in rampant lawlessness, and burning city centres to the ground?
Or was that the left with the antifa storm troopers, during the BLM instigated ‘summer of love’?
It’s shocking to see Trump, bloodied by a bullet, walk off his sun-soaked stage with a fist in the air.
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Are you shocked that Trump leaves the stage with his fist raised?
Are you shocked that he is willing to continue fighting?
Are you shocked that he is not a coward, that he is a man, that he is full of toxic masculinity?
Life is not a green field with pink ponies grazing, baby.
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PS. The best account of this incident can be found here:
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I Was Four Feet Away When I Heard the Bullets.
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https://www.thefp.com/p/salena-zito-assassination-attempt-trump
It shocked me to read that sentence. Surely defiance in the face of an assassin is a mark of bravery.
Or arrogance. Perhaps the “near death” experience will cause Trump to have an epiphany and rethink his attitude towards the world.
It’s the hate- and lawfare-mongers who may have an epiphany.
Did it not shock you seeing Trump with half an ear missing? Was somebody taking a shot at him something you expected to see at a campaign rally?
I think you’re trying to find offence where none was intended. Ironically a tactic used regularly by the woke
Over, and often incorrect use of the word shock. I’m shocked when I don’t see a headline including the word shock.
Wait, BB…
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This is a question of perception of what was written, since it seemed to me that she was shocked not by the assassination attempt, but by Trump’s fist. Read the adjacent article, where the author also condemns Trump’s “bravado.”
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These are the authors we have now
If you go looking for offence, you‘ll find it.
If you think you can offend me, you’re wrong 🙂
I’ve already decided you’re beyond reason.
If people take offence where none is intended, it is surely their choice.
A tactic?
Yes, many expected attempts on Trump’s life. Trump’s bravery shocked me, not the shooter’s war against the “other”. I was glad to see it. Mayorkis needs to give Trump and RFKjr robust SS teams.
the idea of ‘healing’ appears overused, I think we evolve and develop greater resilience.
Healing must be enabled by resolution of the underlying conflict.
My interpretation was she was shocked by seeing his bloodied ear. Impressed by the fist as it showed remarkable bravery. But there ya go.
I do not deny that personal perception may vary, as I have explained here. Unfortunately, as I see, not everyone understood my explanation, but this is normal on the Internet, since asserting yourself here is often more important than hearing the opinions of others.
Recollections may differ.
Didn’t I say the same thing? 🙂
In the context of the preceding paragraph, I took her to mean that it was shocking to see a Presidential candidate injured and forced away from his election rally by a nutcase [of whatever variety] with a gun.
The nutcase is the bad guy, not the candidate.
Oh, dear. Incredible bravery?? Not just the usual self dramatising?
He just got shot and nearly was killed. Trump is very brave.
Just so you know, getting shot at is actually one of those experiences that most people find terrifying. I’ve been on scene to see people lose bladder control or vomit during times of life-threatening stress. Your comment tells me you’re not familiar with serious danger. Something else worth knowing: sometimes people we don’t like can be brave.
They don’t understand Trump in the same way they don’t understand humanity, or even themselves. Most liberals have been shocked by Trump since November of 2016, and it never has worn off really. The Obama era was the zenith of multiculturalism, globalism, and foolish ideas about a world without borders, races, religions, prejudice, or discrimination. It was the anticipation of the fulfillment of all those boomer dreams of creating the kind of world John Lennon imagined. Unfortunately for them, I think McCartney had the right of it. There’s no changing humanity really, so why not just do what you can to make things a little better and fill the world with silly love songs. They believed in the pink ponies however foolish, and Ioved them. I do not chuckle at the sorrow they experience watching them die.
I make it a point to at least attempt to consider other perspectives and now is as good a time as any to consider theirs. Just as it seemed like everything was rainbows and sunshine, the first Black President would be succeeded by the first woman, it all came crashing down. a crash that councided with Donald Trump. Then came a trauma conga line that included mass shootings, political division, media vitriol, COVID, George Floyd, Jan 6th, Ukraine, Gaza, and now this. To most hopeful idealistic and not hopelessly cynical souls like myself, it must be like they went to sleep one night and then the nightmare started, and it’s still ongoing, a brutal train wreck unfolding in slow motion where you keep thinking it can’t get any worse, but then it does. They keep wondering when they, and the world, will wake up, and more and more of them are realizing it won’t, because that was the dream, and this is the reality.
I can certainly see the parallels between the disillusionment of their younger selves that culminated in the assassinations of 1968 and the disillusionment of the present culminating with, in an ironic twist, the survival of an assassination attempt by the man they so thoroughly hate. I suspect more than a few caught themselves disappointed Trump lived while Kennedy and MLK did not, and are presently wrestling with their own emotions and their own conscience. Perhaps the author is among them.
Some of us saw this coming. Some of us could have warned people what was coming. Some of us actually did. I wasn’t the first, nor the only sailor to see the stormclouds on the horizon. Alas, to be right but to also be ignored is oft the burden of the farsighted and of the cynic. Nevertheless, I won’t condemn too harshly those who are contending with the destruction of youthful ideals. We all have our burdens to bear. Taunts of ‘I told you so’ do nothing to lighten out burdens past or present. Perhaps this is healthy. Perhaps this will encourage people to see Trump in proper perspective and separate the man himself from the destruction of their dreams. Hopefully this will encourage people to see beyond Trump himself and consider why he became so popular in the first place. Perhaps it will lead some to consider the problems globalism has studiously ignored. The cultural left is long overdue for some introspection. Then again, it’s likely just as many will be made all the angrier and more radical.
Thank you!
Well, yesterday’s article about the radical Right didn’t age too well…
It did not, and UH looks all the more ridiculous for publishing it.
Inundated by regrets from family and friends in the US that the ‘shooter missed ‘. Trump seems to have become the focus of quite illiberal Liberal sentiment. I find this odd, even though Donald’s appetite for fooling, fleecing and bullying others has been evident since Wharton.
What’s odd is Liberals identifying normal with the rule of money. That’s what’s behind globalism, austerity and the rest. Money rationales versus rhe actual lives of people (with all their peculiaritoes, which Donald evokes.)
If what goes on around Trump reminds us that putting people first isn’t likely to usher in an era of peace and harmony, what’s most shocking today is the violence of money breaking through the surface of liberal values
Old GenXer here. I will condemn their persistent idealism. Many Booms failed the important work of growing up. I was a left wing radical in my youth then I matured. Boomers didn’t because they see themselves as anointed people. The sin of pride.
Sweeping generalisation. I know many Boomers like me who were idealistic in their youth and then grew up to become more pragmatic. The notion that we see ourselves as ‘anointed people’ is laughable. We are human and we piss and shit exactly the same as all other humans. I’m sick of all the myths that have been constructed about the so-called Boomers.
Your narcissistic defensiveness is so irritating in the face of the obvious truth of Arthur’s statement, in which he wrote ‘many’, not ‘all’ boomers. Perhaps you’re not as grown up as you think?
I’m much too grown up to buy into the stupid, irritating myths that you and your fellow travellers propagate. And you seem to have missed the statement Arthur King made’ I matured Boomers didn’t because they see themselves as anointed people.’ What is that but sweeping generalisation with hysteria thrown in for good measure?
The narcissism you describe is not coming from me – you need to take a good honest look at yourself, if you’re capable of it.
You know precisely nothing about what I propagate. I’ve never once written about Boomers, though I know far too many who perfectly embody what Arthur wrote: they have destroyed academia – the sector in which I work.
But when someone writes ‘many Booms…’ & then goes on to make a truthful observation, immediately to get attacked by a Boomer, as if he’d written personally about you, you make his point about anointed people, ie people with zero self-reflection, for him. The ‘‘me’ generation’ indeed.
Arthur, I totally agree! I am a Boomer who has nothing but contempt for my generation. I only hope I live long enough to see GenXers and Millennials in the Oval Office.
You make a fair point. I don’t expect everyone to be as magnanimous as I am, nor will I assert my approach is the only correct one, only that it is the one I prefer.
There is no sin except stupidity.
Leftist ideologies are built on a foundation of stupidity – surely, the second half of the 20th Century, with it’s millions of deaths inflicted by communism and socialism, doesn’t say otherwise.
One should always accuse one’s enemies of doing the exact same appalling things oneself is truly doing. Sage advice from Alinsky. Accuse your opponents of being bigoted, illiterate, violent totalitarians, and the public will somehow fail to notice one’s own villainy.
That’s exactly what the left has done. “Fight racism” by enacting blatantly racist policies, if merely in reverse. Fight sexism by elevating females over men. Enact prosperity by taxing and regulating the economy to a ridiculous degree. Offend our allies and coddle our enemies, to achieve world peace.
And when elections come, enlist a complaisant, compliant, and credulous press to smear one’s opponents, and cover one’s own misdeeds. Failing that, censor bad news and dissent.
Failing that, resort to fictions from “Russian Collusion” to sex assault in a busy NYC department store.
Failing that, have your opponent arrested and prosecuted.
Is an assassination not the next logical step?
The stupid are often violent. They are often weak. They are often utterly unaware of their own stupidity.
But the public isn’t so stupid, certainly not nearly so stupid as the left imagines. The bill will now come due for years of very stupid policies, in that they’ll be out of power in both Congress and the executive branch, probably for many years.
It’s time to see which side is the more intelligent, sensible, realistic, and morally correct one. For some years now, many of us have been exactly wrong.
many thanks Steve – this deserves a wider readership. Is there any way to turn around the momentum of the train crash – I fear not. We have ignored/denied human nature (red in tooth and claw) and a regression seems well under way….
Boy, that was long.
The seen of the event is self evidently shocking. Trump’s hand on the air adds a powerful spirit of persistence, to say the least. The seen remains shocking. To be shocked by the hand fist is a sign of hate against Trump. From the text we read we can’t derive that the author expressed such hate.
Trump’s raised fist shocks because he is hardly the 60s black American yearning to be free.
I love the microaggression, the panthers do not own the solidarity fist. Trump usually holds the gesture close to his trunk, because of the situation he communicated with the crowd raising the fist higher.
But he’s a billionaire. It’s an empty gesture or a hypocritical one.
May be so; that he isn’t by any means black..! Nevertheless, raising high his fist after a shot that almost killed him is an act naturally justified in the circumstances..! It was during his rally anyways. As such naturally not shocking therefore..!
Not in the mood Mahmoud.
Well said.
After the 2016 election the watchword of the American Left was “Resist.” (Remember the bumper stickers?)
I suggest the watchword for the Right will be—as demonstrated by Donald Trump immediately post-shooting—“DEFY.”
I don’t think she meant what you think she meant by this. Emily Jashinsky is a pretty reasonable and fair-minded writer.
Please read more from me here. It seems to me that I did not claim that I was absolutely right.
Toxic masculinity indeed!
That picture is Iwo Jima 2.0.
Something most Democrats will never understand.
Exactly right – on both accounts. Thanks for posting.
I don’t think it was a political act. The shooter was yet another geeky, disenfranchised, white male blaming someone else for his woes. If it hadn’t been Trump the target would have been a school or a shopping mall. The fact that he shot people in the crowd would seem to validate that possibility.
Years ago I remember being told that George Bush Snr was the first US president to not have an assassination attempt against him. Is that true? If so, perhaps the US has had a period of stability unusual for it, which may now have ended.
That’s interesting – the ex-CIA Director was the one not to have an assassination attempt.
I don’t know of one that occurred while Bush I was still in office. But Iraqi operatives very nearly assassinated him in Kuwait, after he left office.
The Donald indeed leads a charmed life.
His ear doesn’t though
I subscribe to Unherd as the articles and comments are educated and interesting.
Now it seems, the drive to increase circulation has attracted a readership that is becoming uneducated and boring.
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It was just a joke. Educated people can make jokes too.
I’m a Trump fan, but he doesn’t use his ears enough.
But he does have Everything. Or, at least, his team does.
That’s why the Democrats are so desperate.
It’s conspiracy against far-right ears.
Good one!
Exactly!
The aphorism “The Devil looks after his own” comes to mind.
Good one!
1942 is too early to be a Boomer.
You surely aren’t suggesting a member of the silent generation? Forgive me, couldn’t resist, given his X output over the years. But in truth, Trump’s response is very much in line with the values of that cohort.
Biden is no boomer. Trump is.
Trump is a Boomer all right, he was born in 1946, but in terms of his mentality, he is a big time boomer and in all the worse ways.
It’ll be interesting to see the contortions of the progressive Left as it tries to keep condemning gun violence in principle while simultaneously regretting that the bullet missed its target.
I’m glad this assassination attempt didn’t succeed, but I would say the same whether the target was Trump or Biden.
It might have worked out well for Melania, however.
Why would anybody try to shoot Biden? Give it a few months, and he’ll die of old age.
Bizarre that the author fails to mention Robert F Kennedy Jr is also a presidential candidate. A candidate running at 19% per last poll in the teeth of censorship and smearing by the mainstream media. A candidate whose requests for Security Service protection have been repeatedly refused in spite of multiple threats to his life which have included a man armed with a machine gun at a rally pretending to be a US marshall. Bizarre that Unherd, too, joins the gaslighting while having the gall to riff on the assassinations of his uncle and father.
She does mention it, albeit obliquely, but I thought rather cleverly.
So obliquely it is like a stab in the back. The author cannot even count three baby boomers.
If you listen to her regularly you would know she believes Kennedy should be on the ballot and that he should have been included in the debate.
Then why does she gaslight him here?
Oh for goodness sake, does she really need to mention it, to satisfy your hair-trigger sensibility? Which Unherd reader wouldn’t understand the context without having it spelled out for them? But you choose to malign Unherd too, rather than granting them the ability to regard their readership as slightly more aware than a dead dodo.
Pretending there are only two Baby Boomers running for president is indeed to treat Unherd readers like dead dodos.
That would be true, if Unherd were doing that. The platform isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be.
False Flag to create a martyr?
Some of the Trumpanzees have been thinking about Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag.
You should be ashamed.
There’s really no need for conspiracy. Someone that had a gun and didn’t like Trump decided to try and kill him. Simple.
Yesterday I asked whether the piece by Lee Siegel in this publication did, in its last paragraph, advocate the assassination of Donald Trump.
It seems that Siegel and his confreres got their wish yesterday – almost.
Now give protection also to RFK Jr and triple shielding to the Don.
The author here is right. The USA has never recovered from 1963. And, perhaps, the long delayed shock is lethal.
Trump should not trust the SS. He should hire independent agents. The SS ain’t up to the job, as we’ve seen, and may be infiltrated by leftists.
Look at the behavior of the SS in the wake of the bullets. First DJT recognizes that he’s been hit; then he drops, THEN a gaggle of pony-tailed agents piles on him. (Alright, I only counted two pony tails). At least is one is too short to be part of a human shield. This is not even to mention the attendees of the event who loudly notified the SS & police that a rifleman was crawling on the roof of an adjacent building, minutes before the shooting. The warning seems to have been ignored.
That sounds paranoid.
People said exactly the same when Biden became President (apart from the “leftists” bit).
I think people are shocked but it’s hard to imagine many will be surprised. Is it necessarily a symptom of the era? The truth is, this happens in every generation in the US.
I don’t see that many genuine parallels with the 60s, especially from a socioeconomic perspective. Back then the US was an industrial powerhouse, GDP actually meant something. Wealth had been growing at unprecedented rates and a large part of the population shared in this growth. This was due to fiscally progressive New Deal / Great Society policies, solid welfare states and good public facilities. In contrast to the present day, trust in institutions and politics were actually high. Fear of the bomb was something else entirely. The boomers received good universal education and started to question social norms and foreign policy, in particular the Vietnam war. I wasn’t there but as far as I can see there was discontent, fear, but also a lot of hope. Tomorrow would be a bit better than today as it had been for the past decades. And yet there was political violence as well.
Today I don’t see much of that hope and comfort. Inequality is at Gilded Age levels and a lot of things have been deteriorating and continue to do so. It’s not that something is brewing under the surface, it’s out in the open and everywhere.
Wealth grew at unprecedented rates and was widely distributed due to New Deal/Great Society and a solid welfare state? Surely you jest (and no, I’m not calling you Shirley)?
The Great Society was an enormous drag on private sector investment. It created a permanent class of public dependents, and ushered in the economic misery of the 1970s, with its high inflation, unemployment, and squalid, crime infested cities.
The New Deal, a generation before, at best alleviated some small level of extreme poverty, and at worst prolonged the Great Depression and ushered in WWII.
Governments are always terrible at fixing economic and social problems, and best serve society when they intervene as minimally as possible. The failures of both the Great Society and the New Deal are strong evidence for that conclusion.
This piece reminds me of the young Chinese-American woman who appeared on the BBC TV news channel this week as a Democrat campaign consultant. She promptly described Trump as a threat to democracy, the American republic and to the world- a world which, in her words, should support her party in driving this threat out of the nation.
As I see it, this is the gender-based hive-mind of left-liberal ideology driven by female college graduates with a mission to convert the unwashed while pushing their own very partisan interests. They are helping to set the conditions for civil war as much as Biden’s inner circle.
Two days ago I saw a photograph of Trump supporters carrying high grade military armaments in public, so how can anyone be surprised when one disgruntled 20 year old takes a shot at an equally popular / unpopular; loved / hated would be president?
On 13 March 1996 in Dunblane, Scotland, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton killed 16 primary school pupils and one teacher and injured 15 others before killing himself, in an event that remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history.
It brought about legislation, specifically two new Firearms Acts, which outlawed the private ownership of most handguns within Great Britain, with few exceptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre
Was I surprised when I heard the news this morning?
Not at all; it’s what I expected to hear.
Yes, and now parts of London are beset by “knife crime.” Jews are defenseless, and the police are largely unable to protect them. A terror group could do considerable damage before “armed police” are able to respond.
Banning weapons simply makes it easier for criminals to commit crimes.
Was there a point to this article? If so, I missed it.
I can’t say I was shocked to hear of the assassination attempt. Not at all.
Certainly not an easy act to stage but if anyone would ever dare try, it’d be our dear Donald.
Another exercise in ‘both-sides’ ism. It’s BS. The animus is coming from the left. All the political violence is coming from the left. All the demonizing polarizing rhetoric is coming from the left.
You’re mistaken.
Very slightly. Most of the rancor, division, and, yes, undeniably violent political activity, from Antifa to BLM to Hamas and their sympathizers, is indeed coming from the left.
There are some extremists on the right, yes. There always are. But they’re marginal, well off to the fringe, and essentially powerless.
The extreme left, however, sits in Congress, in DAs offices, in big city newsrooms, in executive suites, in university departments, and on our television and computer screens every single day and night.
Wasn’t it the extreme right that invaded the capital?
Why wasn’t there security on that roof?
Shocked? No. This should have been expected. There is a wide crack in the intellectual edifice of the country and the shots can easily ring out through that. Where convicted frauds/felons are gleefully elected as leaders of people and, where there is no compunction in facilitating killings in the thousands on the flimsiest of pretexts, one shot directed at a deranged narcissist should not be seen as a big deal.
Heya moderators, this comment needs to be removed.
Nice little article, but it feels as if it was rushed to ‘print’ and a week’s worth of reflection would have fleshed it out. Not the author’s fault.
“He’s Hitler.” “He’s an existential threat to democracy.” Times endless repetition and sprinkled with numerous social media posts fantasizing about taking him out. Shocked? No. Not a bit. The left has done everything short of violence to derail his candidacy. None of it worked. No other options remain.
We’re now left to debate whether the Secret Service could be that breathtakingly bad at its job, or something more sinister. The sinister option is more plausible than it might have been 10 or so years ago. A pending House bill would have stripped Trump’s security detail. It was introduced by a J6 chairman with ties to Homeland Security, which overseas the sadly-initialed SS.
If the Republicans know a guy who can deliberately nick someone’s ear at 150 yards with an AR-15, they should recommend him to teach at the US Army’s sniper school, not have him shot by the Secret Service.
Whomever does the wind shall inherit the storm
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Just a paid shill trying to spin the fact that the Dems, celebrities, and media have been escalating the violent rhetoric since 2016. That level of violent rhetoric from the “elites” was not present in 1968 and is a very recent “algorithm” of the violent, progressive left to garner votes. I don’t mind reading articles that put forth different opinions, I learn from those, but this is pure Bullshit from a total hack. UhHerd needs to moderate this is the future, or call it out as that.
I haven’t observed that it’s dems who advocate violence.
That says nothing about the facts & everything about your powers of observation.
And the same does for you.
I wonder, did the author stay up all night, or have this ready just in case? How was this piece selected out of presumably many? Nothing wrong with it, except maybe the assumption about President Biden. 1968 is held up as an original moment, and 2024 as a follow on. Suppose 1968 was a follow on, say from the Vietnam War, and 2024 is something new. What then?
Actually, makes me think of Gavrilo Prinzip, more than the all-too-efficient assassins who seemed to come out of nowhere in the 1960s. Did the shooter think he was trying to start World War 3, or trying to prevent it? Might take a few more hours to find out.
I fear this is the birth of another ‘Lee Harvey Oswald-like’ conspiracy theory …or ‘where were you when you first heard…’ Hey ho.
The narratives have been set. For the left Trump has encouraged violence and now it has come back to bite him and for the right the deep state is trying to kill him.
I can only think of the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai. “Madness”
Headline edit, for God’s sake 1963 not 1968. 1968 was Woodstock. We’re nowhere near the summer of love today.
Apparently, you were too stoned to remember what a horrible year it was.
Way too stoned! Summer of Love was 1967! Woodstock was 1969!
Nope, Benjamin, I’m just getting too old. And in those days I was a gambling fiend, not a stoner!
Gun control would help.
It maybe too late for that.
WAY too late for that.
Maybe Nicholas Nassim Taleb would recognise the evolving DJT phenomenon; anybody who has read his great book ‘Antifragile‘ should get the point.
In reality we’ve been divided since before the war between the states. The country had an uneasy truce and reconciliation but now there is much distance between the founding populace and the current one, in many substantial ways.
If RFK had not been assassinated, we would have had the 1990s in the 1970s. The assassination was a tragedy and an outrage, but the delay was most welcome and productive. I wish it had lasted longer.
That all underscores how lucky we were on Friday. We will now have another beneficial delay of what I fear is the inevitable.
To me, it’s impressive to see Trump, bloodied by a bullet, walk off his sun-soaked stage with a fist in the air. He looks brave and unafraid. Campaign photo material here.
I am shocked to see how fully exposed Trump is. The Secret Service agent to his right appears bent down, the one on his left looks like is talking to him. Neither is covering or protecting Trumps chest or head. I am shocked to find out that bystanders alerted law enforcement about two minutes before the shooting and still the shots rang out.
I hesitate to take issue with something I find on UnHerd because most everyone on this site is probably much smarter than I am. But, it occurs to me that perhaps the sentiment motivating Trump when he thrust his fist in the air wasn’t one of creating an image as much as one of defiance and anger as if to say in American male street language “Nice try, asshole. You aren’t stopping me!”