It’s not simply Trump that dodged a bullet – America has, too

For once, dare I say it, Donald Trump looks, well, Presidential.

His reaction to the failed assassination attempt has been measured, mature and worthy of someone who aspires to lead the free world for a second time.

The Iwo Jima-style image of a bloodied, defiant Trump pumping his fist under the American flag, surrounded by Secret Service agents, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting was striking.

But what came next was even more impressive. Trump tore up the incendiary speech he was due to make to this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and is now promising a more conciliatory address.

He told the Washington Examiner newspaper that he had intended to attack ‘Crooked’ Joe Biden and his policies.

‘The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger. Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches. Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now. This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.’

 As he told the New York Post: ‘I had prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible administration. But I threw it away.’

Surviving a near-death experience does that to a man. As Trump himself put it: ‘I’m supposed to be dead.’

By the grace of God, he’s still alive. Had the assassin’s bullet not grazed his ear and instead penetrated his brain, the consequences would have been too awful to contemplate. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to speculate that America could have descended into civil war.

I’ve been visiting the U.S. since I first spent a long, hot summer in Detroit as a teenager, when the embers of the race riots were still smouldering and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War were peaking. My parents and my sister moved there with my father’s job in the mid-1970s.

Lately, I’ve been in the States for a couple of weeks, since I covered the first, car-crash debate between Trump and Biden. And, frankly, I’ve never known the country more polarised.

On Saturday night, in the small Florida town where I’ve taken my holidays for more than 50 years, the conspiracy theories were coming thick and fast.

Terry, the weekend bartender at Bobby’s, the last of the great pioneer town bars, was convinced the assassination attempt was the work of Biden’s Deep State. How else to explain the failure of the Secret Service to spot a gunman on a roof little more than 130 yards away from Trump’s podium?

The Golden Girls lookalike in the red ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap and the chap in the ‘Deplorables’ T-shirt sipping vodka martinis concurred wholeheartedly.

This is Trump Country, where they consider Fox News to be dangerously Left-wing and are still convinced that Biden stole the last election.

Just as Bruce Springsteen wrote that you learn more from a three-minute record, baby, than you ever learn in school, so I’ve come to think you learn more about the mood of America in bars like Bobby’s than you ever learn inside the Beltway — the U.S. version of the Westminster Bubble.

Neither side has clean hands when it comes to stoking division. Trump stood back as his more deranged supporters invaded the Capitol Building in Washington on January 6, 2021, to try to stop Congress endorsing the result of the election. Some of his wilder rhetoric on the campaign trail has been inflammatory, to say the least.

He regularly talks about the ‘Biden Crime Family’, particularly Joe’s dodgy business dealings with nefarious foreign actors, and with special reference to his degenerate son Hunter, who it has emerged recently is attending meetings in the White House and, along with First Lady Jill, is influential in persuading Joe to stay in the race.

Biden’s belated, unconvincing response to the shooting was to condemn all ‘political violence’ — still hoping to link Trump to the Capitol invasion.

The President has also weaponised the criminal justice system against Trump, whom he now labels a ‘convicted felon’ following the preposterous, politically motivated prosecution by a partisan New York district attorney of the former President over alleged pay-offs to publicity seeking porn star Stormy Daniels.

Equally outrageous was the military style raid on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, two years ago in search of classified documents allegedly taken by the former President when he was evicted from the White House.

Yesterday, a judge threw out criminal charges against Trump arising from that raid. She said the special prosecutor bringing the case had been appointed ‘unlawfully’.

We can’t know whether the timing of the judge’s decision was deliberate, or merely coincidental, but it is certainly timely. The widespread calls for unity and dialling down the aggressive rhetoric will count for nought while the Democrats are still pursuing a vendetta against Trump through the courts.

Nor should we forget that a Trump supporter in the crowd, a fire chief, was killed by a stray bullet as he shielded his wife and daughter. Political violence has tragic real-life consequences.

Of course, you can never legislate for a lone madman, although the Secret Service should have secured the perimeter of the rally and stopped him taking a shot.

But these things don’t happen in isolation. The Biden camp and the Left-wing mainstream media has been fuelling the hatred against Trump for years, claiming that re-electing him would destroy democracy in America. The CNN anchor who ‘moderated’ the recent debate is on record as describing Trump as ‘literally Hitler’.

Is it any wonder that in such a volatile political climate, an impressionable, mentally disturbed 20-year-old believes what he hears and decides it is his duty to take Trump out?

Much of the commentary on our side of the Atlantic has been of the ‘only in America’ variety.

But although we have no comparable gun culture, we also have no grounds for complacency. Political violence is on the rise in Britain, too, inspired by the sewer of social media and intemperate comments by MPs and activists. Not so long ago, our new Deputy Prime Minister Ange Rayner was calling the Tories ‘scum’. Labour luvvie David Tennant, the former Doctor Who actor, said he wished Kemi Badenoch ‘didn’t exist’.

Two MPs, Labour’s Jo Cox and the Conservatives’ David Amess, have been murdered by extremists. At the recent General Election, sitting MPs like Jess Phillips have been menaced by pro-Gaza activists egged on by George Galloway and the pro-Hamas ‘river to the sea’ mob.

Nigel Farage, the nearest thing we’ve got to a Trump, was hit with a milkshake. The #beKind Guardianistas thought it was hilarious. Would they still have been laughing if it had been an assassin’s bullet?

To his great credit, Keir Starmer rang Trump to express his sympathy. Let’s hope he can also persuade some of his more excitable colleagues to temper their language.

If any good has come out of the assassination attempt, it has been the reality check on the escalating war of words. Whether the break in hostilities will be permanent or temporary remains to be seen.

But it is encouraging that Trump himself has not reacted in the juvenile, knee-jerk fashion we might have been expecting.

Since he now looks nailed-on to win back the White House, it is reassuring that he is behaving in a Presidential manner, befitting someone who aspires to be seen as a modern-day Ronald Reagan, who responded to an attempt on his own life with characteristic good humour.

Civil war has been averted. The world has never been more dangerous than it is today and needs a strong, grown-up rational U.S. President.

Today, at least, it looks as if we’ve all just dodged a bullet.