An Iconic Image

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, July 13, 2024

 

I’m not quite sure how to say this, so I’ll just blurt it out: Donald Trump has never been more authentically admirable than in the moment someone came within an inch of blowing his head off on national television. I’d grimly chuckle about that irony — it took this! — if I weren’t so utterly relieved and utterly terrified about what we all just narrowly avoided.

 

I don’t need to explain what has just happened to you. We will be talking about it for a long time to come. The assassination attempt on Trump is of such enormity — a man is dead, and others are injured — that we will be dealing with its ramifications for months if not years. It is frankly a miracle that Trump survived — a bullet grazed him, taking a piece of his right ear with it — and questions will immediately turn to how on earth the Secret Service could have allowed this to happen. (You must watch all four and a half minutes of this interview, now. I am serious: Watch it now, because it will be the main story tomorrow.)

 

But for now I want to offer a prayer for the dead and wounded, a sigh of relief that we have narrowly avoided a catastrophe that would have carried us full-scale into a grotesque replay of the worst of 1968, and . . . a genuinely heartfelt tip of the cap to Donald Trump, a man who actually rose to a truly terrible moment. Eight to ten shots ring out; Trump feels the upper lobe of his right ear get torn away by a bullet, the Secret Service rushes him as he gets down. There is chaos. There is terror. The immediate need is to get the former president — already wounded and bleeding — off the stage.

 

And then Donald Trump says “Wait, wait, wait.” And Trump reaches up over their protective shield to throw a set of fierce, proud fist-pumps in the air. Blood is streaking down the side of his head and on his arms. But he wants you to know he’s unbowed. Unintimidated. You come at the Don, you best not miss. The images are already iconic, from multiple angles. Trump, with his bloody fist raised in proud defiance of the Reaper and anyone else crazy enough to try and take him down, is going to become one of the most famous photographs in modern American political history — if you’re uncomfortable with that you best start adjusting to it.

I myself was thrilled. I loved it, the absolute sheer unbreakable moxie of it. If you can’t understand why that is exactly what every normal American was hoping to see in that moment, then you probably couldn’t grasp why George W. Bush electrified a nation by standing on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn and promising that the United States would come calling — and soon. I make no secret of my opinion of Trump. It doesn’t matter. This was — in a way that even skeptics must concede reflects upon something in his core character, because you can’t plan getting your ear shot off — arguably the finest moment of his entire life to date.

 

He probably won the election tonight.