America is on a journey without maps. No one has been here before.
Not one agent on former President Donald Trump’s Secret Service detail had ever leapt between a would-be assassin and a once-and-possibly-future president. They’ve trained for such incidents, but no one now in the agency has ever experienced one until now. The last attempted presidential assassination was when a madman, John Hinckley Jr., shot Ronald Reagan as he was leaving the Washington Hilton 43 years ago.
On a much bigger scale, the whole nation is in the middle of events it hasn’t seen before. It is uncharted political territory, or perhaps a more suitable label would be Hamlet’s “undiscovered country.”
For it involves death — political death and actual death.
Trump was less than an inch from being killed. Standing on a rally stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, he turned his head to look at data on a screen. If he had turned it less, Thomas Matthew Crooks’s bullet would have shattered the back of his head. If he had turned it more, it would have smashed the front of his head. Instead, the bullet ran exactly parallel to the side of his head and wounded only his ear.
The incident, and Trump’s rising bloodied from the floor to wave a defiant fist salute to the crowd, has transformed him from a nominee to a leader of almost mythical status. Courage is perhaps the most compelling quality in a leader, and even many former Trump skeptics have rallied to him. They were already doing so after President Joe Biden’s debate implosion last month, but the slide toward Trump has accelerated. The Republican Party is utterly his.
But while Republicans are coalescing around a leader who escaped death in such a manner as to breathe extra life into his candidacy and widen his lead over his opponent in polls, Democrats are trying to mount a putsch that, if successful, will mean the death of Biden’s political career.
The Trump assassination attempt appears only briefly to have let the air out of Democratic efforts, led by former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), to throw Biden off the ticket and replace him with someone younger, less feeble, and more capable of winning the election in November.
They are doing this because Biden looks close not simply to political death but possibly also to the end of his life. He can hardly speak, he whispers incoherently, he cannot maintain a train of thought, he gets unattractively testy when journalists ask him questions about his condition, he is now ill with COVID-19, and his staff “call a lid” on his public appearances before 10 in the morning. He is obviously incapable of leading the country for the next week, let alone for the next four years.
So the party in power is trying to unseat the incumbent president whom its members and apologists are trying to pretend has been a great statesman rather than a hapless incompetent. They are doing this even though this might mean elevating his equally hapless sidekick, Vice President Kamala Harris, to the presidency.
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And the party out of executive power is turning back again to the champion it picked eight and four years ago.
What are normal politics these days? The time is out of joint.