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A week that could have been unimaginable disaster just gets better and better for Donald Trump. By literally dodging a bullet in Pennsylvania, Trump came up with the campaign photo for the ages. A bloodied Trump, fist raised in defiance against a backdrop of blue sky and American flag, has come for many to symbolise the American spirit. Its accidental likeness to the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising hasn’t escaped many.
Even if you don’t like Donald Trump – and many very much do not – there’s no denying the power of the image.
Especially when it feeds directly into Trump’s biggest campaign message. At the end of the day, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.
After what transpired in Butler, Pennsylvania, last night, when a bloody-faced Donald Trump stood up after almost losing his life, waving his fist in the air, asking his audience to “fight,” there should be no doubt: Donald Trump has a lot of courage and the strong sense that he is fighting for a cause greater than himself.
It’s a message that Trump repeated at the presidential debate. With a Kennedy-esque flourish, Trump reiterated that he was in the race, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. The easy path would be to retire to Mar-a-Lago with his presidential pension and play golf for the rest of his days. While there is no doubt some truth to the allegation that Trump’s ego just couldn’t countenance going out as an election loser, he also had to know that he was inviting a world of pain by choosing to run again. Americans have seen that play out in the relentless attacks, the show trials… and now, a would-be assassin’s bullet.
Regardless of doubts about his courage during the Vietnam War (and it should be borne in mind that every American president for the last 30 years, with the sole exception of George Bush Sr, actively avoided war service), Trump’s personal courage in Pennsylvania was on display for all to see. His defiant reaction recalls, for many, the near-legendary Teddy Roosevelt.
At the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt displayed a level of defiance that is taught in history lessons nationwide. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he said to his audience. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” As the crowd gasped, the former president began unbuttoning his shirt, revealing his blood-filled undershirt. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” he exclaimed.
Roosevelt then pulled out a shot-through 50-paged speech from his coat’s pocket. “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet – there is where the bullet went through – and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” And so he did […]
The difference here is that Roosevelt didn’t have a group of Secret Service officers jumping onto him, pushing him off the stage. The similarity is that they both stood up. They both showed courage, not mere bravery – staring fear in its face.
Spectator Australia
Things just got better in the following days.
A US judge has dismissed the criminal case against Donald Trump that accused him of illegally retaining classified documents after leaving the White House.
The indictment was obviously never anything other than a show trial, especially in the wake of another prosecutor declining to indict President Joe Biden for doing exactly the same thing. The Democrats’ self-serving narrative that “no one is above the law” was busted.
It is a major legal victory for Mr Trump as he prepares to be officially endorsed as presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention this week.
It follows the US Supreme Court’s ruling in July that as a former president, he is broadly immune from prosecution for many of his actions in office.
ABC Australia
Which, despite the left-media’s histrionics, was nothing more than the Court reaffirming what was already well-established by case law since 1867.
Trump’s septem mirabilis continued at the Republican National Convention.
Donald Trump, with a bandage on his right ear, made his first major public appearance since Saturday’s shooting, walking on to an in-person version of “God Bless the USA” (also known as “Proud to Be an American”) by singer Lee Greenwood.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the 45th president of the United States and soon to be the 47th President of the United States,” Greenwood said […]
Chants of “USA” filled the arena. Then “fight, fight, fight” – the words Trump used after the assassination attempt Saturday in Butler, Pa. “We love Trump,” the audience then chanted.
And still the media don’t get it. Trump’s announcement of JD Vance as his running mate is furrowing the brows of the commentariat: Vance is young, politically inexperienced and “does not do a lot of the things a candidate normally wants a running mate to do”.
Which is the whole point.
This is what the Washington establishment and their lickspittle chatterers just don’t get: voters have had decades of ‘normal politics’, and they’re fed up to the back teeth with it. While the media were tut-tutting at the choice of Vance, Americans sent his Hillbilly Elegy soaring straight back to the top of the bestseller lists.
The media are also perplexed that Vance once trenchantly criticised Trump, but had the same road-to-Damascus experience as many American voters.
Mr Vance, when presented with his quotes in 2016 calling Mr Trump a “cynical a-hole” and “America’s Hitler”, told Fox News that he doesn’t “hide from that”.
“I was certainly sceptical of Donald Trump in 2016 but President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind,” he said. “I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans because again he delivered that peace and prosperity.
“If you go back to what I thought in 2016 … I bought into the media’s lies and distortions, I bought into the idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy. It was a joke.”
The Australian
Like so many other Americans, Vance came to realise that it’s the media-left who are a sick, sick joke.
