AN ICONIC IMAGE:

I don’t need to explain what has just happened to you. We will be talking about it for a long time to come. The assassination attempt on Trump is of such enormity — a man is dead, and others are injured — that we will be dealing with its ramifications for months if not years. It is frankly a miracle that Trump survived — a bullet grazed him, taking a piece of his right ear with it — and questions will immediately turn to how on earth the Secret Service could have allowed this to happen. . . .

But for now I want to offer a prayer for the dead and wounded, a sigh of relief that we have narrowly avoided a catastrophe that would have carried us full-scale into a grotesque replay of the worst of 1968, and . . . a genuinely heartfelt tip of the cap to Donald Trump, a man who actually rose to a truly terrible moment. Eight to ten shots ring out; Trump feels the upper lobe of his right ear get torn away by a bullet, the Secret Service rushes him as he gets down. There is chaos. There is terror. The immediate need is to get the former president — already wounded and bleeding — off the stage.

And then Donald Trump says “Wait, wait, wait.” And Trump reaches up over their protective shield to throw a set of fierce, proud fist-pumps in the air. Blood is streaking down the side of his head and on his arms. But he wants you to know he’s unbowed. Unintimidated. You come at the Don, you best not miss. The images are already iconic, from multiple angles. Trump, with his bloody fist raised in proud defiance of the Reaper and anyone else crazy enough to try and take him down, is going to become one of the most famous photographs in modern American political history — if you’re uncomfortable with that you best start adjusting to it.

Or maybe, like the “Falling Man” photo from 9/11, the media will disappear it.

JIM TREACHER: Maybe the Secret Service Isn’t a Vehicle for Female Empowerment.

“Well, you wouldn’t do any better under fire, Mr. Blogger!” You’re exactly right. Which is why I shouldn’t be in the Secret Service any more than they should.

Kimberly Cheatle, head of the Secret Service, got the publicity she wanted for hiring a bunch of women. Now she’s got a bunch of questions to answer.

How did this happen?

How did a guy with a rifle access a rooftop that close to his target?

Why didn’t agents listen to the attendees who spotted him first?

Why was one female agent heard screaming, “What are we doing? Where are we going?”

Why haven’t you cleaned out your desk yet?

That last question is the most important one. I sure wouldn’t want to trade places with Cheatle right now. Republicans hate her for letting this happen to Trump, and Democrats hate her for handing him the election.

The Secret Service has no plans to beef up security at the RNC in Milwaukee, saying: “We are confident in the plans we have.”

They shouldn’t be confident in anything right now. They’re not filming a promotional video with women in Kevlar vests walking in slow motion while contemporary R&B plays. They’re supposed to be protecting a presidential candidate, and they just failed utterly.

Yep.

PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY: ‘Perceived’ racism in medicine isn’t the same as real bias, scholar says.

LOL: Pima Community College language guide says terms like ‘peanut gallery,’ ‘tipping point,’ and ‘whitelist’ have ‘racist roots.’

CDR SALAMANDER: 0.63 MOA Away – That’s it: The two take aways from the 13 July assassination attempt.

STANDING UP AGAINST RACISM AND BIGOTRY: Sullivan & Cromwell Will Use Background Checks To Weed Out Antisemitic Prospective Hires.

SALENA ZITO: Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden.

Former President Donald Trump has completely rewritten his convention speech in light of the assassination attempt against him on Saturday and will call on Thursday for a new effort at national unity.

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner a day after being hit by a sniper’s bullet, Trump said he wanted to take advantage of a historic moment and draw the country together.

“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he said, “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

He has switched, he said, from planning to excite his voter base to one that demonstrates his belief that the attack on him at a rally in Pennsylvania had changed the election campaign entirely. Both Republicans and Democrats have acknowledged this in the aftermath of Saturday’s shocking incident.

Stay tuned.

Related (From Ed): ‘I Was Four Feet Away When I Heard the Bullets.’ A gunman tried to assassinate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Salena Zito was there.

MATT TAIBBI: The Slow-Motion Assassination: Self-described guardians of democracy spent years creating a lethal atmosphere around Donald Trump.

Before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, while questions raged about the health of President Joe Biden, officials downplayed the importance of the physical leader. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters to look at the administration, not the man. “What we are saying,” she said, “is there are results, his record.” As my podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote, we were “being introduced to the idea that the presidency is a diffuse impersonal ‘office,’ and the bucks stops nowhere that is… conventionally identifiable.”

But we live in a physical world, and individuals still matter. Official actions betray this more than anything else. When a populist movement built on frustration over decades of misrule began having electoral success, they created a legend that the backlash was irrational and the fault of one Donald Trump, building him into a figure of colossal art, a super-Hitler. It became cliché that he was the embodiment of all evil and needed to be stopped “at all costs.” By late last year, mainstream press organizations were saying legal means had failed, and more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.

Now he’s been shot, in an incident that’s left two dead. . . .

After the 2016 election, Trump began to be described as a new kind of American villain, someone not quite entitled to normal rights — the political equivalent of an “enemy combatant.” Weeks after inauguration, California congresswoman Maxine Waters blithely said Trump was guilty of “sex actions” and “collusion” described in the Steele dossier, and as for evidence, “We just have to… do the investigation and find it.”

Waters has always been on the edge of the credibility spectrum, but this chucking of the presumption of innocence raised few eyebrows, for that new reason: Because Trump. Fellow Californian Adam Schiff, held hearings on the Steele accusations without even attempting to verify them. There were widespread hysterical accusations of a capital crime — TREASON — after an anodyne meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The office of Trump’s lawyer was raided on a dubious pretext (leading to this year’s criminal prosecution), news that the FBI deployed informants in Trump’s 2016 campaign drew yawns, and no one fretted over lunatic character attacks on former Trump aide Carter Page, or the jailing of figures like George Papadopoulos who committed no real crime. Even Schiff’s attempt to resurrect the McCarthyite concept of “disloyalty to country” as a means of unseating Trump was received politely by media arbiters like Chuck Todd.

Most of the early madness surrounding Trump expressed itself as religious worship of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his investigation. Solemn readings of the Mueller report by actors like John Lithgow and Annette Bening really happened. The failure of that Great Deliverance to come to pass seems to be when officials shifted their tone toward the current posture that Trump needs to be stopped “at all costs.”

Even at the cost of the government’s legitimacy. Maybe it’s not democracy they’re guarding. Maybe it never was.

ROGER KIMBALL: Who’s the real threat to democracy? I can help those claiming to be in the dark about the shooter’s motive. His motive was to kill Donald Trump.

In some ways, the surprising thing is that it has taken until July 2024, four months before the election, for someone to try to assassinate the once and probably future president. After all, since before Trump was elected in 2016, the Democrats and their poodles in the media, Hollywood and fetid corners of celebrity sweepstakes have been baying for Trump’s blood. Remember Kathy Griffin holding up a fake bloodied head of Trump in 2017? Remember the staging of Julius Caesar in which the title character, cut down by Brutus and the other assassins, is clearly a stand-in for Trump?

Perhaps the most pathetic element in the regime response to the attempt on Trump’s life has been the declaration, repeated ad nauseam, that the authorities were still searching for a motive. An FBI field agent in Pennsylvania parroted that stupidity. “We do not currently have a motive,” he said. Ditto the housebroken media. The shooter’s “motivations remain unknown,” bleated a characteristically malicious column in MSNBC.

I can help those claiming to be in the dark about the shooter’s motive. His motive was to kill Donald Trump. And why not? Leviathan has been waging war against Trump since before he was elected in 2016. Remember the Russian Collusion Hoax? That $40 million entertainment was fabricated by Hillary Clinton and her pals in the FBI and the intelligence services.

Remember the fake impeachments of Trump towards the end of his first term? They too were groundless. So are the multiple indictments that have been brought by the odiferous Merrick Garland and minions like Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg, not to mention swivel-eyed judges like Juan Merchan, Arthur Engoron and Tanya Chutkan.

That violent and ongoing tsunami of lawfare against Trump was meant to destroy him. Possibly it would bankrupt him — remember Engoron’s preposterous fine of nearly half a billion dollars? Maybe it would simply put him away in jail for a few decades. Or possibly the judges’ machinations and gag orders would simply prevent Trump from campaigning.

Is it any wonder that that the “woke” forces arrayed against Trump have moved on to something more kinetic?

I doubt we’ll hear the term “stochastic terrorism” from the left for a while.

The funny thing is that Republicans want Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to stay alive and running.

ICYMI:

Party That Called Trump 'Hitler' For 8 Years Shocked As Someone Tries To Assassinate Him https://t.co/9zTv1SsnMc pic.twitter.com/Wr5BNapizb

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 13, 2024

CUI BONO? VANTAGGI BIDEN. CBS’s Nancy Cordes Echoes White House ‘Whew, Sure Glad the Focus Shifted Away.’ “CBS’s coverage of the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has been awful throughout, but Chief White Correspondent Nancy Cordes may have just plumbed a new low. Today, there was a brief pause in the media’s ongoing lecture about ‘tone’ and ‘rhetoric’. Watch as CBS’s Nancy Cordes channeled the Biden campaign’s relief at the shift in campaign focus- away from discussions about Biden’s cognitive decline and questions of his continued viability, either as a candidate or as president.”

MARK STEYN: What They Wanted. “Just a decade ago, Trump was an amiable bipartisan non-ideological telly-celeb schmoozing with Bill and Hill and doing cameos in Home Alone sequels. The Democrats chose to upgrade him to Hitler – complete with moustache. . . . And, just for the record, Saturday night was not an assassination attempt: One Republican voter was killed, and at least two others are injured. That’s to say, an American family has had a great big hole blown in its heart – because on a summer afternoon they went to a campaign rally. Just another day in the United States’ uniquely unique ‘peaceful transfer of power’ – and on to next week.”

Milwaukee approved every RNC protest request—without vetting or checking identities. And they gave protest groups no limits on the number of people allowed. @nypost's @amysikma: https://t.co/BwokKoGkKd

— Kelly Jane Torrance (@KJTorrance) July 12, 2024

Flashback:

🚨Flashback to Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson in 2023:

"They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump." pic.twitter.com/FqMFty7SlO

— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) July 14, 2024

#JOURNALISM: Compare the NY Times’ Front Page to the NY Post’s for the Starkest of ‘Journalism’ Contrasts.

JOHN LUCAS: Some Further Thoughts on the Attempted Assassination of President Trump, Including Some About What Was Behind it. I think that every soldier who is facing fire for the first time thinks, ‘How will I perform? Will I acquit myself with honor?’ Trump showed the world how he reacts under fire. After being shot, he got on his feet and launched a figurative counter-attack, fist in the air and exhorting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ CNN’s Jamie Gangel took great exception to Trump’s response to his attempted assassination.”

Well, of course. They don’t want you to fight back, they want you to give up.

OPEN THREAD: Discuss the events of the weekend. Did anything happen?

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Japanese venture seeks to develop commercial space station module.

HMM: The US Still Doesn’t Test For This Common Harmful Parasite During Pregnancy.

MICHAEL MCCONNELL ON CHEVRON’S DEMISE: The Courts Strike Back Against the Bureaucracy.

CHANNELING TEDDY ROOSEVELT:

Trump’s sense of the moment, his instinct to reassure his supporters and show strength just seconds after getting wounded in an assassination attempt, was simply epic and will live through American political history https://t.co/PMcT41oRSO

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 13, 2024

R.I.P. DR. RUTH: Sex Therapist and Israeli Sniper.

MYTH, BUSTED: The Coral Endures.

JEFFREY CARTER: Wading Into The Fray.“There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.”

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Spectacular Auroras Signal Potential Danger to Earth’s Critical Infrastructure.

SKYNET SCREAMS AND LEAPS: New framework enables animal-like agile movements in four-legged robots.

SCIENCE FAILS: Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken. There’s no incentive to fix the system, which was never designed to catch fraud anyway.

Related: Is science becoming a cartel? Good science thrives on individual honesty. Bad science thrives on cabals of mendacity. Let’s discuss.