Photo:Evan Vucci / AP

 

Volumes will be written about the scene in this picture.

Donald Trump was a great man even before a would-be assassin’s bullet hit his ear as he began to speak on Saturday, July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, attended by tens of thousands of his passionately enthusiastic supporters. If the bullet had hit his head a centimeter further forward, or further back, or further up, it would have killed him. He ducked down, and when he rose again it was to the towering height of a political martyr. He raised his fist high, shouting his defiance, “Fight!”  – and won a permanent place among the greatest men in history. 

Despicable “Democrats” – and Leftists of every stripe – will try to bring him down. Corrupted institutions of the federal state will “investigate” the attempted assassination and find the victim guilty and themselves blameless.

But try as they will they cannot reduce his stature by so much as a centimeter.

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Excerpts from Mark Steyn’s comment (italics and ellipses in the original):

Let’s cut to the chase – the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys could be this crap.

A goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.

Not long before shots rang out, rallygoers noticed a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local police, according to two law enforcement officials.

One local police officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and Crooks quickly took a shot toward Trump…

Uh-huh. Actually, over half-a-dozen shots – hitting the target, killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, and gravely wounding two others.

Thomas Matthew Crooks took his AR-15 to a political rally. And the reason he was permitted to do so is because he was ‘outside the security perimeter’ …yet still within range of the candidate’s head.

Does that make sense even by the arseholian standards of the federal government?

No. Even in rinky-dink no-account third-rate basket-cases, it’s understood that the first job of a protection detail is to establish where the lines of fire are, and neutralise them.

Can the failure to do that really be accidental?

Yet from the decision to demarcate the easily accessible rooftop as “outside the security perimeter” all else follows. Once it was determined by the Secret Service that the building with the spiffy line of sight was beyond their purview it ceased to be of any interest to them. So that fell to local law enforcement – and a village constable shinning up the ladder.

On Saturday, America came within an inch and a second of crossing a very dark Rubicon. As Trump reveals to Michael Goodwin in The New York Post:

The doctor at the local hospital, which has a trauma center, told him he’s never seen anyone survive getting hit by an AR-15.

Indeed. Because that’s what just happened. In 1981 Reagan was hit by a revolver; forty-three years of ever more extravagant security protocols later, a loser whose greatest accomplishment was a cameo in a BlackRock ad was able to hit the head of a president with his AR-15.

And this startling fact is of less concern to a corrupted American media than the fact that a few “loud bangs” at a Trump rally might provoke, ooh, a violent backlash from the crazy Maga types…

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Kurt Schlichter writes (in part) at Townhall:

We already know the investigation is going to be a complete cluster because there’s apparently nobody in charge. The FBI is doing some stuff, the state police is doing some other stuff, and the Secret Service seems to be in full CYA [Cover Your Ass] mode. So, we’re not going to get any information about what really happened. We’re going to get lies, and the administration is going to issue some report assuring us that it did the very best job it could, and that Donald Trump was really at fault for getting in the way of those bullets. …

What’s the political effect of this going to be? More cynicism, all of it justified, by the American people. Yet another vaunted institution has failed to perform its job adequately. We’re getting used to it. When institutions are headed by quota queens selected for their adherence to Marxist ideology rather than competence, and when they prioritize their ridiculous ideology over the job the institution is supposed to do – whether it’s the Secret Service, the FBI, the military, the NFL, the DMV … – you’re going to get failure. And we’re tired of failure.

It doesn’t have to be this way. America doesn’t work anymore. That’s why you see social media filled with video clips of people living joyously in the amazing 80s. This nostalgia is because America worked back then, and it does not work now. Joe Biden represents the failed present. The secret of Donald Trump is that he represents both our glorious past and a future where things work, and if you screw up, you hear that “You’re fired.”

And that’s why Donald Trump’s glorious defiance on stage, lifting his fist and refusing to give in, was so inspiring. He is the avatar of our vision of ourselves as Americans. They attempted to kill him, but they really wanted to kill us and, for one of us, they succeeded. It won’t work, though. They can lie about us and create fake scandals. They can try and silence us. They can try to frame us in kangaroo courts. They can try to murder us. But we’re not going to quit. We’re not going to surrender. We’re going to win.

Raise your fists, patriot. America will be great again.