Trump: the Shot Misses, the White House Awaits

The U.S. presidential election was decided last Saturday. Donald Trump will win the November election as long as his supporters and his publicists, between now and Election Day, display — over and over — his blood-stained face, right fist in the air with the proud Stars and Stripes flag behind him, while he charges his followers to continue the fight, a shout not visible in the photo.

It is an iconic image for the future, almost like the Iwo Jima sculpture at Arlington Cemetery, which, as we all know, was conceived as a tribute to American sailors from a photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal, photographer for the Associated Press, during the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi in the war in the Pacific.

Trump will continue to stand behind the Second Amendment as a guarantee of American domestic gun ownership.* He won’t waiver from this violent tradition (the foundation of American culture), not even after being a (superficial) firearm victim. After all, in the simple mindset of Americans, the frustrated and inept apprentice assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, got what he deserved. He was killed at the scene, which confirms a political axiom: Dead men don’t talk.

Indeed, the AP, the best news agency in the world, distributed this list of presidential victims: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy. And it added those who suffered attempted assassinations, including Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be assassinated. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865. Booth himself was shot dead on April 26, 1865.

Garfield was the second U.S. president to be assassinated on July 2, 1881, six months after taking office. He was killed by Charles Guiteau at a train station in Washington on his way to New England.

McKinley was shot after delivering a speech in Buffalo, New York, on Sept. 6, 1901. Leon F. Czolgosz shot him twice in the chest at point-blank range during a salutation.

Kennedy was assassinated by a man armed with a high-powered rifle while visiting Dallas, Texas in November 1963 with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. The shots rang out as the president’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Kennedy was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he died shortly thereafter.

Gerald Ford, a president who followed later, survived two assassination attempts within a span of a few weeks in 1975 and was not injured in either.

In the first attempt, Ford was on his way to a meeting with the governor of California in Sacramento when Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, pushed her way through a crowd in the street, pulled out a semiautomatic pistol and pointed it at Ford. The gun failed to fire.

Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore confronted Ford outside a San Francisco hotel, fired a shot at him and missed.

Reagan was leaving a speech in Washington and heading to his motorcade when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr., hiding in the crowd. Reagan recovered from the March 1981 attack.

Bush was attending a rally in Tbilisi in 2005 with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili when someone threw a hand grenade at him. The grenade failed to explode.

George Wallace was running for the Democratic presidential nomination when he was shot during a campaign parade in Maryland in 1972. The attack paralyzed him from the waist down.

Brief Hallmarks in a Horrible Tradition of American Violence

As the great writer Paul Auster, whose grandmother shot his grandfather to death, said, it is “[a] country bathed in blood.”

Like this one, then Moctezuma, Cuauhtémoc, Emilio Carranza, Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Agustín de Iturbide, Vicente Guerrero, etc., etc., etc.

*Editor’s note: The Second Amendment provides: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”