The nation escaped an unspeakable tragedy that would have been profoundly destabilizing for the country by perhaps a few centimeters.
As it is, what happened in Butler, Pa., is godawful enough. A gunman tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump and grazed his ear with a bullet, while killing one rally-goer and seriously injuring others. This was a heinous act of violence and an attack on American democracy.
Trump’s reaction was truly extraordinary and will long be remembered. After Secret Service officers threw themselves on the former president and then picked him up to begin to take him to safety, he insisted on pausing on the stage, with blood streaming down his face, and pumping his fist to the crowd and repeatedly mouthing the word, “fight!”
The video and photographs of the episode will long be symbols of the current political era and of the Trump phenomenon. Trump’s presence of mind and sense of the moment, after having just been nearly killed and perhaps while still in mortal peril, speak to his natural talents and instincts as a politician and populist symbol.
Many of the condemnations of the shooting have included calls for lowering the temperature of our politics. If that is to mean anything, it should include an end to the fevered insistence that a second Trump term would be the equivalent of the Third Reich, which, if taken seriously, justifies any means of resistance up to and including assassination.
Given the collapse of faith in our institutions and the elevated emotions around this event, the authorities must be completely transparent about what transpired at the rally and be absolutely certain that they are putting out only accurate information. The Secret Service officers who jumped on Trump performed ably, but there will inevitably be questions about how, according to early reports, the would-be assassin was able to climb a nearby roof with a rifle undetected by security while bystanders pointed him out.
If the bullet that wounded Trump had traveled a slightly different path, we would have witnessed earlier this evening one of the most horrifying events in American history. It would have deepened the sense of crisis gripping our country and would have had unforeseeable consequences, none of them good. Sometimes the course of history depends on margins just that small.