If Donald Trump had tasked the team that faked the moon landing with staging his assassination attempt, they couldn’t have produced a film as spectacular as what actually happened. In America, truth is often stranger than fiction, including 9/11 and Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.
A series of consecutive coincidences produced a new image to add to America’s family album of “historical” and “iconic” photos that “cannot be forgotten”: another anonymous white American, in his first year after adolescence, armed witch a rifle and his own set of ideas, which we will soon understand. He decides, on his own, to write history in the most traditional manner of assassination: Lying on the roof of a building near the gathering, he waits for a former president and three-time candidate to appear before his followers. Despite what appears to be considerable skill with his automatic rifle, he grazes the former president’s ear, literally by a hair’s breadth.
He wounds him just enough to make him a saintly figure, causing a slow, elegant bleed that sends two threads of blood trickling from his temple to his right cheek without staining his white collar.
The red blood flows poetically, in a manner that can be described as romantically patriotic. Meanwhile, the young shooter is taken down by a few bullets, ending his short, unknown journey. During those final ten seconds, Trump is under the podium, looking for his shoe.
Of course, he wasn’t really looking for his shoe; he was protecting himself. But what happened to the shoe? Where does the shoe of a man who has just survived an assassination attempt go? Did he take it off, or did the Secret Service remove it to make running easier for the overweight, seventy-something man? The mystery of the shoe remains unsolved, but Trump wasn’t under the podium looking for it.
Beneath a small pyramid of bodyguards urging him to leave, Trump was having a brainstorming session with himself, deciding his next move to ensure a historic image. He needed to stage the perfect photo as the risen hero, the avenger, the savior, the Superman behind whom all Americans should unite. While being pulled away, he ordered the Secret Service to wait, formed a hard fist, raised it in the air, and mimed shouting, “Fight… Fight… Fight.” It wasn’t the rallying cry of a wounded leader on horseback leading his troops to war against the British; this was a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Who was he asking to fight? No one.
He wasn’t actually shouting. He mimed a shout without making a sound, posing for the cameras that would take hundreds of pictures of him. One of them was bound to be good enough to join America’s album of iconic images: the Hiroshima bomb, Martin Luther King Jr. dreaming on the Capitol steps, Marilyn Monroe’s white dress, Jacqueline Kennedy sprawled on the back of the convertible with her husband’s head slumped, muttering his last breaths, Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon dust, Richard Nixon waving presidency, his people, and his fate goodbye with a weird smile and overexaggerated hand gesture from the airplane steps, the first iPhone, Barack Obama as the first Black president, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. An endless album of images that Americans decide are iconic and world-changing.
Americans, with no building (or even a grave) older than five hundred years, are obsessed with immortalizing events and images that glorify their self-image as the greatest nation ever to walk the earth.
Trump’s entry into this album was supposed to be his well-rehearsed mugshot, but his and the US’s fate had other plans: Trump delivered his greatest cinematic performance after a real assassination attempt, raising his fist with a blood-stained cheek, surrounded by his bending bodyguards, with an American flag mysteriously appearing at the top of the frame.
Trump seemed a mix of two other images: the Statue of Liberty with its torch, and the six Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II, a photo turned into a massive monument near Washington, D.C., and which was likely staged. The resemblance is clear between that photo and Trump, whose loyal followers see as the savior and critics see as the most dangerous clown on earth.
Did Donald Trump settle the anticipated showdown early when photographers captured Joe Biden and his party’s worst nightmare? Not necessarily. There’s no room for boredom with America, as evidenced by the recent event reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s era in the 1980s. Assassinating a former or current president by sniper is theoretically impossible due to the exhaustive security measures. But again, there’s no room for boredom with America, especially with Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Biden is now more scrutinized than ever, as people wonder which personality will appear each time: Dr. Jekyll with his sensible remarks, or Mr. Hyde, who will surprise everyone with his unpredictability. Any world leader would turn in their grave at being awakened from eternal rest by a phone call from Biden, decades after their death.
As for Trump, nothing is ever final with him, even after the end of any match. He has an enviable fertility for surprises, turning him into more of a maternity ward than a complex figure that defies singular description.
Who is Donald Trump really? The deceitful tycoon and TV star who reached the White House with his sharp tongue, racism, and hatred? The ignorant politician who entranced an entire party, turning it into a massive sheep farm? Is he truly the prophet sent by God to save America from its sins, drain the swamp of corruption in Washington, and drive the Pharisees out of the temple?
Who is Donald Trump, who was under the podium looking for his shoe, and once he found it, stood up and delivered the greatest performance of his life for the greatest picture of his life?
A picture of his resurrection from death as a living martyr. It pictured him as a new saint, with the divine hand intervening gto divert the bullet from penetrating his skull. He knows this image of the assassination attempt will be immortalized by Americans, even if they forget the attempt itself before the scratch on his ear, which seldom hears anything but what pleases him, heals.
Who is Donald Trump really? No one knows for sure, but one thing is certain: Trump before the picture is not the same as Trump after the picture. As the cliché beloved by Americans goes, and which they likely invented and immortalized: nothing is the same after.
