July 21, 2024
The attempted assassination of former United States president Donald Trump at one of his rallies on the 13th of July, 2024, has already drawn enough coverage. In fact, Trump and his sycophants at the Republican National Convention seemed to bring up the attempt on his life in EVERY single speech they gave on the 18th. Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, in the same speech that he claimed Trump–an openly self-interested man in terms of his finances–cares deeply about the struggles of "average, everyday Americans", made great use of parallelism to describe how close the Republican candidate came to death. The speech, while overtly religious to an almost shocking extent, was effective. Arguing that Trump's survival could only be attributed to divine intervention, that one "can't deny that God protected him", Pastor Sewell passionately said the following:
"If President Trump had moved one millimeter, he wouldn't have been here on Monday to talk to us about how America was going to be made wealthy again. If President Donald Trump would have moved just a millimeter, he wouldn't have been here on Tuesday to talk about how he was going to make America secure again. If President Donald Trump would have moved just a millimeter, he wouldn't have been here on Wednesday to tell us how he was going to make America strong again. And if President Trump would have moved just a millimeter, we would not be hearing tonight how he was going to make America great again."
Watching this speech I finally understood why Europeans find American religiosity so odd. When religious appeals permeate even secular arenas like political conventions, the results are bafflingly inappropriate. And yet Pastor Sewell's nominally Christian speech wasn't as distasteful to me as all the sickening pandering and glorification of Trump as a person that came after it, with some of the addresses by many "personal friends" of Trump being truly saccharine and hollow in their attempts to laud Trump the man rather than Trump the politician. Moreover, the speech made me realize just how unlikely it was that Trump's head was so perfectly aligned at the time shots rang out. As someone who adheres relatively strictly to belief in logic and reason, I am loath to admit just how reasonable Sewell's defense of divine intervention's existence might seem to someone who is credulous in matters of the preternatural. The truth is, Trump's survival was miraculous in the commonplace sense if not the religious.
All this reminds me of one of my favorite books of all time, which I have actually just reviewed in the library section of my website, The Day of the Jackal. This novel, which centers on an attempt to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle of France, is a classic political thriller that was written in 1971. On a surface level, connections can easily be made between the subject matter of the book and the events that transpired on the 13th of July. However, in terms of actual technical details, the two attempted assassinations are startlingly similar. If you wish to read the book and don't want to spoil the ending for yourself, I would refrain from reading further.
Both the fictional pseudonymous "Jackal" and the real Thomas Matthew Crooks botched their assassinations of the presidents they targeted. Both met a similar end at the hands of national security forces, each only managing a handful of shots from an elevated position before their lives were cut short. When news first broke of the disturbance at a Trump rally, media sources were vague about the origin of the "series of pops" that erupted. But it soon became apparent that a sniper had taken aim at the former president and, missing by a hair, proceede to squeeze off more shots. In Trump's retelling of the story in his self-aggrandizing RNC speech on the 18th of July, and in other independent analyses, the assassin's bullet was described as going through the man's ear at an angle that, had he not turned his head moments before the shot, would have burned its way through his skull and likely killed him. This is actually far closer to home than the killer's projectile in The Day of the Jackal comes. In the book, even though the Jackal has his specially made weapon aimed precisely at de Gaulle when he fires, the French president suddenly bends his head to kiss a veteran's cheeks as part of ceremonies for the anniversary of the Liberation of Paris. The shot thus passes harmlessly over de Gaulle's head, and the Jackal is foiled, only managing to reload once and slay a policeman before he is shot to death by a detective seconds later. The American amateur assassin, Crooks, also killed a person other than his target—in his case a bystander who was later transformed into a martyr for the Trumpist cause—before the Secret Service "neutralized" him. In a way, the real attempt was more politically significant than the fictional, with this rally incident promising to be political fodder for MAGA Republicans in the years to come.
Both killers ostensibly acted alone, with the real criminal's motives still yet to be ascertained and the fictional Jackal's near-perfect OAS-sanctioned hit on the French president being covered up by the French government in the book. Both utterly failed at the one job they tried to carry out, the Jackal not even registering on the stubborn old de Gaulle's radar, and Trump being all but emboldened by Crooks' attack. But both came within inches of changing history. Examining the Trump incident in detail has made me realize where claimants of divine intervention are coming from, even if I resent the way they think. De Gaulle was always sure to live, as the plot of The Day of the Jackal demanded the titular assassin fail at the last second. But there is no such prescribed fate in the course of actual events. Even if Trump's survival was a coincidence, it sure doesn't seem like it.