THERE may be unfeeling people who have thought or even whispered “Third time lucky, lads!” in the wake of the second attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I would not be of their number. The former US President may be an obnoxious being, but he’s also a human being, and it’s important to respect and even love the most primitive of God’s creations.
That said, I’m afraid I take everything that comes from Trump with a very thick dollop of suspicion. That first attempt on his life at one of his rallies: Did he act like a man who’d come within centimetres of having his head blown off?
What we saw was a man who, in mid-speech, clutched his ear, dived out of sight and emerged seconds later with what looked like blood streaming around his ear and face. Immediately after, he clenched his fist and shouted “Fight! Fight!”
He could indeed have been wounded and courageously emerged roaring defiance. Alternately, he could have disappeared from view, hissed “Ketchup! Now!” then emerged with clenched fist shouting “Fight! Fight!” with streams of ketchup decorating his face and ear.
But tempting though the ketchup conspiracy is, we’re told that a man at that rally called Corey Comperatori died from a bullet wound while shielding his family. So maybe Trump actually was shot in the ear. He did have a little rectangular dressing on it for a couple of days. But you’ll have noticed that as soon as the dressing was removed, both of Trump’s lug-holes looked completely healthy. And the media haven’t got round to showing us a picture of his punctured lobe. Even an artist’s impression would have helped.
And now he’s gone and done it again. Or had it done to him. He’s emerged from the TV debate with Kamala Harris sporting a verbal pair of black eyes. His weird talk about immigrants as eaters of family pets was received with contempt from some and belly-laughs from others. It’s with that chaotic background that we come to a second assassination attempt on the man who champions the right to bear arms.
This time the attacker was almost as weird as the man attacked. Ryan Wesley Routh is 58 and has been in Ukraine, fighting the good fight. Despite the fact that he was at Trump’s golf course nursing an AK47 with telescopic sights, he didn’t have time to fire at the MAGA man before the FBI were after him as he fled the scene.
Apparently Ryan and his son used to build sheds, but the father gave that a break and went after Trump instead. “Everything has been blown out of proportion," his son protested to the media. His father, he told them, would never "do anything crazy, much less violent".
After the attack,Trump boasted “Nothing will slow me down!” and a spokesman for the former President declared, without a trace of irony, “There’s a lot of crazy people in this country."
There are people who worry that Trump might win the election and become President again. They fear he could be manipulated by tyrants and lead the world into the abyss. I don’t think they should worry. It’s unimaginable that the American people, having once elected this overgrown psychopathic baby, will make the same mistake again. And now that his tweets aren’t a daily occurrence, you get the impression of a man who’s running out of steam.
Trump’s mistake is that he does everything, says everything, right in your face. At first that may seem a novelty, but this encore from 2016 has a stale smell to it.
And even if he were elected, there’s a good chance he would be exchanging the White House for a prison cell. From those confined quarters, it’ll be hard for him to go after his political enemies, as he’s promised he will do. If the cell door has a big strong lock behind which an orange-faced figure stands glowering, we’ll know at least one major obstacle has been removed in the journey towards making America great again.
