So much came together at 6:11 pm on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, creating the most sudden and singular moment of clarity in our political time.
At that moment, bullets from 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, came within inches of killing former President Donald Trump, striking him in the ear and killing a bystander.
After falling to the ground and being tended to by his Secret Service detail, Trump walked off stage, his face bloodied, struggling out of his security circle to yell “fight … fight … fight!” as he pumped his arm.
Fewer than one man in a hundred million would respond to being shot in this manner.
The image will be the icon of Trump and our political time. Decades from now, Americans — regardless of what they think of the New Right that Trump inherited and led to the White House — will see it as another indelible imprint of the extraordinary American political experiment: among modern images like President Theodore Roosevelt campaigning energetically, a desperate migrant mother with two children in the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt asking Congress to declare war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a black student walking past shouting segregationists to high school in Little Rock, President Richard Nixon leaving the White House after resigning, and President Ronald Reagan leading a revived West in imploring the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Ten minutes before Trump left the stage, Lee Greenwood, had performed his iconic song, “God Bless the USA.” That unofficial anthem of the 1991 Gulf War, which now more than ever features prominently at Republican events, intones: “If tomorrow all the things were gone/I worked for all my life/And I had to start again/With just my children and my wife/I thank my lucky stars/To be living here today/‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom/And they can’t take that away.”
But the lovely song is inapt in a way. Much of the Trump story — what gave rise to his candidacy and presidency and which animates his core supporters today — is that they can take freedom away.
The impetus behind the creed and the cry “Make America Great Again” is not just a reaction to economic and social decay, but that a corrupt government, abetted by corrupt business, academia, and media, are systematically changing the nature of the United States to take away our freedom.
Who better demonstrates this than Trump’s opponents. For standing against both the Republican and Democratic establishments in 2016, 2020 and now in 2024, the corrupt powers that be in our country have tried to take away Trump’s voice, his power, his wealth and even his freedom. Many have also mused about taking his life, and yesterday one man tried to do just that.
For Trump, a more apt song to come out of the 1980s, released one year after “God Bless the USA,” would be by Corey Hart, which implored: “No one can take away your right to fight and to never surrender…”
The upbeat and inspiring tone of that song conceals a darker human reality that entails fights against long odds. Winston Churchill captured it: “… you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
The quintessential American — ever the salesman, ever the optimist, ever the braggart — there is no way Trump would say publicly that the struggle of our time is one we might lose. He who has been the target of sham federal and local criminal and civil persecutions, who has been demonized by opponents more than any president since Abraham Lincoln, who has been threatened with bankruptcy, fantasized as murdered by Hollywood filth, and targeted by the powerful from Wall Street to Silicon Valley will never give in as long as there is life left in him.
Fight … fight … fight …
In the coming days, we will learn more about the events in Butler. We will likely learn that the young would-be assassin, shot only after great delay, was more disturbed than political. Our disgusting media will in turn try to conflate this act with general political violence and malaise, to which both political parties have supposedly contributed. Muddy the waters and change the topic.
Their hope is that the public will overlook that the overwhelming majority of political violence in America comes from the Left: the 2017 attempted massacre at a Republican congressional baseball game by a foster-child-beating Democrat activist, the 2020 summer of living dangerously, when Black Lives Matter and Antifa overran U.S. cities, and the 2022 assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by a man deranged by the looming possibility of regulating abortion.
Abetting the soft coverup are not just partisan Democrats but clueless, establishment Republicans. Statements condemning the shooting and hoping for Trump’s fast recovery, while seeming soothing at first, nonetheless contained a subtle moral equivalence. Former Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote that we must “lower the temperature of the political debate and uphold the hallmarks of a healthy democracy.” Her boss, former president George W. Bush wrote, “… And we commend the men and women of the Secret Service for the speedy response.”
What the hell are these people talking about? The $3.3 billion-per-year Secret Service, whose presidential motorcades make Roman celebrations of triumphs look modest by comparison, allowed a would-be assassin to take position on a roof just 400 feet from perhaps the most-targeted man in the world.
The shooter was detected by bystanders, not the Secret Service, and still ignored. A friend who served as a Secret Service agent wrote to me what struck many observers as time passed before Trump was hustled off: that the stage work was sloppy, too. We need not compliment another bloated, failed Washington bureaucracy.
As for “lowering the temperature,” voters know damn well who raised the temperature in the first place. Only one candidate talked about putting his opponent “in a bullseye” and it wasn’t Trump. Only one side has moaned for the better part of a decade how Trump will end democracy, despite a four-year term in which he helped restore this county and adherence to its Constitution.
Only one side failed to condemn the political terror — violence in the streets and irregular voting — that helped bring us to this moment in American history with a dotard president puppeteered by the century’s most ideological, radical, and inept White House staff.
Trump will take the stage at the Republican National Convention this Thursday to accept his party’s nomination for president amid adulation and an expectation that he is as close to unbeatable as any candidate in decades. But ultimate political success is far from certain and may be unlikely.
American meritocracy is gone from much of business and all of academia. Our government excels at harming the productive, the law-abiding and the Republican-minded, but cannot perform basic functions like maintaining a border or winning wars. Wall Street, Big Tech and the war machine, with their immense power and wealth, may be down on Biden for now — but certainly have no newfound love for a citizen-led Republic. Our media is dominated by Orwellian-grade liars.
Our children will know who won and who lost this political struggle. But regardless of the outcome, the image of that fight has been etched forever into the American story.
Fight .. fight … fight …
Christian Whiton was a senior advisor in the Trump and George W. Bush administrations.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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