The firehose of news since Saturday’s failed assassination attempt has been disorienting. It’s hard for me to even remember how different the world and the political landscape looked only three weeks ago. Biden’s debate collapse and the resulting firestorm of unprecedented chaos on the left completely upended what had already felt like a volatile, crucial, turning-point election.
And then Trump comes with an inch of being murdered, and all hell breaks loose.
As usual, the CO site has been a good place to come to sort it all out. CO has offered insightful and wry posts, the COSE has said what many of us were thinking, and the reactions of CO nation have run the gamut, giving voice to all of the conflicting emotions that we’re all cycling through.
For me, the surreal feeling on Saturday was compounded because I am toward the end of reading the true story of another assassination attempt on another American president – one I should have known about, but didn’t.
The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington, by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch tells the story of a plot that unfolded in the late spring and summer of 1776, during the run-up to the British navy arriving in force in NYC for the first big battle of the Revolutionary War.
NY Governor William Tryon and NYC mayor David Matthews were both enemies of Washington and the revolution, and they funded and led the plot. (Just as today, NY and NYC have been plagued by terrible governors and mayors, apparently.) The conspiracy was widespread, and involved many loyalist citizens, some Continental soldiers, and most shockingly, Washington’s own housekeeper and a small number of his own elite force of “life guards.” (Basically, our new nation’s first iteration of what would one day become our secret service protection teams.)
Watching the story of an unfolding assassination attempt in real time, nearly 250 years later, was very strange. Even with all of the obvious differences between our colonial beginnings and today, the sense of fate turning on the smallest of issues – a shooter inexplicably getting so close to a president, a fortuitus turn of a head – and disaster narrowly averted echoes from that tumultuous time to this.
Washington’s religious views could be semi-opaque at times, but he always spoke of Providence guiding him through the war years, and never so much as during the summer of 1776. And it’s easy for me to see that same Providence at work this weekend.
I’ve still got a lot of negative emotions to work through. After years of lies, demonization and Hitler/Trump comparisons, we don’t hate the media enough, for example. I’m appalled by the hypocrisy of the left, as they turned on a dime from throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us, to lecturing us about our need to “lower the temperature.”
But I’m going to do my best to focus on the many positive things to come out of this weekend, starting with the immense relief and actual joy that comes from surviving such a shockingly close call. I’ve always loved Churchill’s quote to the effect that, “Nothing is more exhilarating than being shot at without result.”
But today I think he was only half right. Because for Trump and for us, that quote must be revised: “Nothing is more exhilarating than being shot at and losing only the tip of your ear instead of your life!”
Even now, thinking of what might have happened, of how close we came to disaster, takes your breath away. Today, I’m the biggest fan of Providence – or as I call it, “Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus”– of any roving correspondents you know.
But for me, it’s not just a deep and abiding gratitude that is warming my heart. Because as another philosopher (first name: Conan) once noted, some of the finer things in life are also, “To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their press-titutes.” (I have paraphrased, loosely.)
I’m not thinking of the good and decent Democrats in this country – and there are many out there, and we need to remember that. Those people have to be grateful that Trump survived, even as they recognize the political boost his close call will give him.
But it’s not those decent Dems I’m thinking about. It’s the creepy, hysterical, malevolent and Machiavellian Dems I’m thinking about. And I am imagining with great schadenfreude their frustration and impotent fury today.
Because really: they spied on him, they launched conspiracies against him, they rigged the 2020 election to get rid of him. Then they saw him coming back, so they deployed transparently illegitimate and corrupt lawfare cases against him, and they even got 34 bogus convictions that will be overturned after the election is over.
And the more they smeared and fought dirty against him, the better his polls got. Then their candidate reveals his own fragility and dementia – and their own shameful, years-long coverup of same – at the 11th hour, sending them scrambling to find a desperate, last-minute solution that involves stumbling through a political-landmine-filled landscape.
And then, on a sunny Saturday, they hear the breaking news: somebody has shot Trump! And it sounds like it was a head shot! Maybe their decades of devotion to Satan and all of his dark ministers throughout the hoary underworld (including Slick Willy, Anthony Weiner and Hunter, and their consorts in the whore-y overworld) are finally going to pay off, and their great Orange nemesis will be neutralized at last!
Annnnndddd… it turns out the bullet grazed his ear, and he popped right back up, gave the fist-pump heard around the world, and within 30 minutes the first of a million memes appeared to troll his leftist haters. (My favorite so far: Trump’s mugshot superimposed over the words, “Missed me, b*tch!”)
Oh, the sweetness of it all. Their most hated foe cheated fate by an inch, literally. And in a way that makes the most perfect, campaign-bolstering photo op in human history!
If the bullet had missed him, the commie conspiracy theorists would have denied that any bullets were fired, or at least that any of them had come within a mile of him. He was never in any real danger, and he’s lying about the whole thing, which he probably staged!
But no. The bullet dramatically grazed his ear. Which, as Uncle Jesus would have it – sorry, I mean “as Providence would have it” — is filled with blood vessels, which can produce a lot of blood without threatening someone’s life the way a sliced femoral artery or jugular would. But the blood can produce an amazing, visceral picture.
Did I mention that as the inevitable photos were being snapped, there was an American flag right behind him?!
So you’ve got a white guy with light-colored hair, bleeding dramatic, scarlet blood, under a perfect blue sky, framed beneath Old Glory, rippling in the wind!
How upset were the deranged goons at the New York Times at that image? They digitally removed the flag from their photo. I’m not making that up! They photoshopped their own picture to make it less iconic.
Which is just an epic self-own, and a delicious echo of their shameful past as pro-Stalinist propagandists. Just like Stalin used to crudely doctor pictures to “erase” comrades who had fallen out of favor, the NY Times is now doctoring photos to erase the American flag, which has never been too highly favored at the Times.
Especially when it looks great in a photo, and helps Trump.
Note: I’m now on the road in TN to see mom and sis, and will be up in Illinois for several days to hang with the cousins, before heading back and spending some pre-birthday time with mom. I probably won’t be writing a Friday column, unless I just can’t help it!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 