When the twitter timeline had something about “BREAKING” and Trump shot – or whatever – I cocked my head about 5 degrees or so and ran my eyes over it again as you do when examining something sceptically. It was just one sentence and included a couple of emojis – a flashing light or a siren or something. It had been posted only a few minutes ago – less than ten minutes, it was single digits. I didn’t recognise the source and after a second or two kept scrolling. There wasn’t anything more about it in the next swipe of the phone screen, so I thought nothing more of it, just a random piece of click bait bullshit littering the platform after Elon Musk made it a free-for-all hatescape of algorithmic loathing (that we are nevertheless addicted to).
I put the phone down where it was charging and went about my any given Sunday morning of plunger coffee and pondering toast. Where was the bread from last night anyway? It took a few minutes to figure out the puzzle – I had made scrambled eggs late last night and used up the last four slices of Vogel’s – aha, of course. I had been on the phone to the editor of The Daily Blog about half an hour before this about a new project that had been delayed a week and I was mulling that over as the coffee ritual unfolded. The day could not be any more ordinary.
And how to finish an already overdue column? I had abandoned it the night before. Here’s how it began:
Joe Biden’s death wish is increasingly public and the media increasingly conscious of it, even if he is increasingly unconscious of it and, look – no joke – increasingly unconscious of everything, and, oh anyway. Each time he puts that loaded microphone to his mouth it might be the last time. The political obituary and the actual obituary are going to be simultaneous if he has his way – or will his demise be as painfully meandering as his now legendary Alzheimer’s wander as he shuffles off stage?
I ask this because the US Government’s Social Security Administration actuarial life table says a US male aged 81 has a 7% chance of dying before turning 82 and can expect to live another 7.43 years. At 85, if he makes it that far, (Biden’s age in the last year of the next term of the presidency) he will have a 10.5% chance of dying that year and should only live another 5 ½ years. And if you like those odds I’ve got more…
The mundanities accumulated as I waited for the coffee to brew. There was the fencing to do and it was a fine day so there would be no excuses for dodging that. The lower Western fence was 45 metres long and I had prepared two strands of wire the day before so at least a head start with that chore. Back to the phone to compulsively scroll. Trump/shooting/assassination/rally/gunman. Oh FFS. Everywhere, every outlet.
It is said you remember distinctly where you were and what you were doing when you first hear the news of a major, shocking event. I can recall being in Mr Coyne’s 5th Form class when someone listening to 1ZB put down his earphones and said Lange had just resigned, I remember the extraordinary live news of things like the Queen Street riot and watching 9/11 on BBC World from the beginning breaking pictures from New York as it happened; but as explained above the first news of Trump’s assassination attempt was cursorily examined and dismissed as misinformation by me in under five seconds.
We are at a stage in respect to social media (and to a growing extent news media) where the boy has cried wolf so often we figure it’s a Greenpeace stunt to save the canine species from human encroachment on their natural environment and all the dead sheep are Greta and her friends play acting, and when the video comes out of the boy being rag dolled about in the jaws of the wolf we will assume it’s all AI-generated and flick through to the next item. We need multiple points of verification before even bothering to click on a story – well, obviously I do – and the wilder the headline the more inclined we are to disbelieve. I have been caught out perhaps two or three times by phoney news I have reposted and it does tend to make you circumspect. If there was a nuclear war we wouldn’t look up to see the mushroom clouds until the electro-magnetic pulse fried our phones as we scroll past all these tedious nuke memes that had suddenly appeared on the TL.
It is a scramble once it is clear it is fact not fiction. What are the true parts, what are false in the maelstrom of reports? Things can get crazy. Remember the car bombing of the State Department on 9/11 – no, because it didn’t happen – and yet that was being reported for over an hour amid all the other incredible events of that attack with no way for the audience to assess its validity. Fortunately the Trump assassination bid was not a complex affair, it was straight forward in the result – he lived. That was clear from the outset. The Dems best chance of victory in the Presidential ballot only grazed his ear and scored a direct head shot on some poor (as yet unnamed) schlub in the bleachers behind him.
The pictures came out rapidly. If they were available just a little quicker I would have taken the initial report seriously – the stills were conclusive, Trump was bleeding from the ear with a couple of streams of blood across the right side of his face. What struck me though was the photo of the fist pump, blood on his face, defiant, from the middle of a security scrum, the red, white and blue in the background. Powerful would be to understate the significance of that image. It was just so America. It was so evocative. And then it I realised exactly what it was evocative of. I googled up Iwo Jima image – and there it was! The famous one of the US soldiers together erecting the pole with the American flag after they had captured the island from the Japanese – oh that was what the memory trigger was alright. That symbolism is a deep well. That son of a bitch had managed to recreate the defining moment of American victory whilst surviving an assassin’s bullet. That’s a home run, that is the ball game.
The video of the shooting was circulating as a two minute clip. I watched it on twitter, gobsmacked. Extraordinary performance all round. Firstly: from the shooter who came within a lesson or two and a sight adjustment click of blowing that guys brains out across that dais in Buttfuck Pennsylvania in front of thousands of MAGA oiks and on live TV. He probably has a suicide note somewhere because there is no way he would have expected to live. Secondly: from the security staff who rushed that stage in two seconds flat. Thirdly, and most importantly: by Trump. The video and the audio show that once security got him to his feet to get him off the stage he told them, firmly “wait, wait, wait” and then so quick it could be missed he checks his hair (yes, as he would), pushes the security down with his free hand so he can be seen, balls that tiny hand of his into a fist, raises it and pumps it aggressively while saying “fight, fight, fight” – incredible! And fourthly, and finally: the MAGA crowd who respond spontaneously with a chant of “USA, USA”.
On the negative side of the performance was what I observed in the video that came out about an hour later which showed the two police snipers on the roof who took their shots at what appeared to be the same time as the shooter was firing on Trump. Way too late. Clearly visible on the top corner of the stand behind Trump is a section of the audience watching (some of them filming on their mobile phones) these police snipers and – something was up before the attempt was made. The BBC and other interviews later with witnesses reveal the shooter was spotted and reported at least five minutes beforehand. It seems unfathomable that the building he was on was not part of the security area and that Trump was not taken off as a precaution in that period. However if he had been stopped beforehand we would not have these iconic images and Trump maybe wouldn’t have won the election – which seems to be the outcome if the betting markets are to be believed. Luck of the devil?
