Trump was brave
Former president showed Hollywood-style grit after assassination attempt
Who before it happened would have predicted that immediately after being shot the planet’s foremost sybarite President Donald J Trump would have the mettle even as the blood gushed down his neck to raise a defiant fist in the air and to invoke those watching to ‘fight, fight, fight’?
It was a culturally transcendent moment: a rebel yell conforming to the heroic ideals of Hollywood issued in a time of grave personal danger by the very man America’s powerful liberal elite - Tinseltown’s most influential personalities included - seeks to crush.
Would George Clooney have acted similarly? Would Robert De Niro or Mark Ruffalo? Perhaps. Certainly, these leading men who have been so vocal in their denunciations of Trump – ‘I’d like to punch him in the face’, De Niro once said – have each made many millions pretending to be heroic types impervious to fear. Fake tough guys, in other words.
But now we have proof that when it matters Trump, whose entire political credo is predicated on being the antihero’s antihero – ‘they’re after you. I’m in the way’, goes his famous message to America’s beleaguered working class – possesses the steely grit Hollywood, and indeed all Western culture, celebrates.
His critics have long argued Trump is out only for himself: that he is a manipulative billionaire huckster able to wear the concerns of the little guy as they relate to globalism, immigration and national decline in order to hold the world’s highest office solely for the satiation of personal vanity.
But that ‘fight, fight, fight’ gives lie to this accusation, with its implication that the political movement of which he is figurehead is not just something in which he believes deeply, but also a struggle for which even the ultimate sacrifice is worth paying.
Of course, like all the best political oratory, it was an open-ended statement and therefore subject to interpretation. Who was the former president saying should be fought? America’s enemies? The corporate overlords? All those who pose a threat to freedom? Perhaps his concern was closer to home: he was exhorting the crowd to fight the person unseen who had just shot him in the ear.
Whatever. The fact is Trump showed that thing so important to any would-be Commander in Chief: grace under fire. Should America choose him as its next president, then his would be the responsibility of asking uniformed men and women when the time came to put themselves in harm’s way, and to show courage while doing so.
It’s hardly a stretch to imagine those same men and women will have watched how Trump responded to being shot and found much to admire in his apparently immediate concern not for himself but for those who look to him for leadership.
Like him or loathe him, Trump’s defiance in the face of an assassination attempt was unarguably brave. That’s not a bad quality to exhibit when attempting for a second time to become leader of America, the land of the brave.
