An Indomitable Spirit

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, July 14, 2024

 

There’s nothing that’s happened to Donald Trump since his rise to political prominence that has made him blink, and now we can add to the list an assassination attempt.

 

Trump displayed remarkable sangfroid in the immediate aftermath of an effort to murder him? Yes, of course, he did. He insisted on not leaving the stage before he’d made a gesture of strength and resilience? Well, what would you expect? He took a nightmarish attack against him and turned it into an iconic image that will cement his status as a populist legend? Are you surprised?

 

Trump’s extraordinary reaction in Butler, Pa., was entirely in character.

 

This is a man with an indomitable spirit that has seen him through business reverses, tabloid scandals, and innumerable battles with all comers over the decades. Like most anything else, this quality has its downsides — it can lead him to persist in error, or insist on his own reality — but he wouldn’t be on the cusp of the presidency again without it.

 

If Trump has never shown any sign of cracking under pressure, it’s because he simply doesn’t feel pressure like a normal person. A fatalism combined with a faith that he’ll find a way out of any fix means that he doesn’t lose sleep over anything.

 

Although there were any number of controversies during his presidency that would have cracked or worn down a more conventional politician, he carried on as usual. Over the last two years, his partisan opponents have thrown criminal charges at him that carry the risk of him spending the rest of his life in prison; sure, he’s fought the charges like a caged animal, yet he’s never seemed down or frazzled. And now this.

 

After spending so much time displaying coolness under metaphorical fire, he displayed coolness under actual fire.

 

A cliché in sports about particularly assured players is that they “slow the game down.” Trump, at his best, does the same thing, and we saw it on the stage in Butler. Whereas he could be forgiven for being confused and in shock after the shooting, he didn’t lose sight of the need to show that he was unbowed, to reassure his supporters, and to project strength.

 

There is an irreducible element of politics that is about performance, and there’s no accident that a certain former Hollywood actor understood it and that Trump, a TV star and showman, gets it, too. He understood the drama and emotion of that terrible, fraught moment, and rose to it.

 

This was Teddy Roosevelt getting shot by an assassin in 1912, and going on to give his speech anyway.

 

This was Ronald Reagan telling Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

 

This was Archduke Ferdinand insisting on visiting in the hospital members of his entourage who had been wounded in an attack on him (although that display of courage had disastrous consequences — a wrong turn onto a narrow street put his car in direct proximity to Gavrilo Princip).

 

It is often said that Trump is lucky in his enemies; yesterday evening, he was just plain lucky.

 

The gesture that so impressed and inspired his supporters and, one hopes, the rest of the country wasn’t random or the product of good fortune, though. It was characteristically Trump, who has defied so many adversaries over the years, now including a cowardly assassin who came within an inch of ending his life.