When the shots rang out, the Secret Service detail guarding Donald Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, threw themselves on top of him.
The next move was to hustle him off the stage while they continued to shield him with their bodies.
But that would have blocked him from the news cameras as well as any more bullets. And in the words of one former law enforcement official who had protected Trump in the past against just such an attack, “He’s a TV guy before he’s anything else.”
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“He is thinking fast,” the former official suggested. “He is realizing he’s got to create an image there.”
On Tuesday, America decided that image was what they wanted in the Oval Office.
During the 14 seasons of the reality show The Apprentice, the power of image had transformed Trump in the public mind from a nepo baby with multiple bankruptcies who headed what was jokingly called the Trump Disorganization into a brilliant billionaire businessman with a supposed golden touch.
His time-worn office in Trump Tower with its chipped furniture and worn carpeting and musty smell had been supplanted by a stage set made to look like a gleaming boardroom. The episodes had been contrived and heavily edited, but Trump had demonstrated a flash of actual genius as a showman when he channeled the authoritarian New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner by pointing a finger at a disfavored contestant and improvising the show’s most famous line.
“You’re fired!!”
Just enough people had confused the TV image with the actual Trump that he narrowly beat Hillary Clinton when he ran against her for president in 2016. But then just enough people came to see the truth, despite Trump’s unending lies he had not been narrowly beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.
Not that Trump saw the truth. For Trump to have accepted defeat would have been for him to suffer what psychiatrists term narcissistic collapse, where a grandiose self-image collides with actuality. His efforts to overturn the result led his followers to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he was still insisting the election had been stolen as he ran this year for a second term. A hard core MAGA base continued to believe him, imagining that he tells it like it is when he is actually telling it like they want it to be. His base’s voting strength, at least in primaries, caused a significant number of otherwise sensible Republican leaders to go along even though they know better.
In the meantime, post pandemic inflation had raised the price of groceries and seemingly everything else. The TV-born illusion of Trump as a genius businessman gained renewed luster.
By contrast, 81-year-old President Joe Biden was increasingly seen as failing and too old to serve another term. His supporters had hoped he would prove himself otherwise during the debate with Trump in June. He was so over-prepared that he seemed to lose himself when attempting to remember what he was supposed to say.
After that, there were increasing calls in the Democratic Party for Biden to bow out. Biden’s refusal to give a younger deserving Democrat a chance seemed to guarantee a Trump victory.
Over the years, Biden had made much of his supposed working class roots in Scranton. But Pennsylvania’s 8.2 percent inflation rate in 2023 was the highest of any state. And that no doubt contributed to the considerable crowd that Trump drew when he came to Butler on July 13 this year.
Joe Biden listens as Donald Trump speaks during their debate in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., June 27, 2024.
Brian Snyder/ReutersAt 78, Trump is only three years younger than Biden, yet he strode onto the stage with a steadier and more energetic stride than his incumbent opponent had been showing in recent months. Age was one reason that even many Trump haters did not cite when declaring him unfit. He seemed to become all the more energized by the cheering supporters in Butler.
His primary method for firing up his base was with fear, and in this instance, he said Biden was allowing crazed murderers and rapists to invade America from the southern border. He was turning his head toward an oversized chart of the increase in migrants since Biden became president when gunfire erupted. A bullet that might have otherwise struck his skull instead of grazing his right ear.
In the moments after he literally came within an inch of being killed, Trump responded to his actual near death with the same showman’s genius he had shown in reality television. He rose up into camera view and hoisted a clenched fist. He gave a cry that would almost instantly become as famous as his best known line from The Apprentice.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The resulting still image could not have been more powerful if it had been composed by Hollywood’s best. The elevation of the stage resulted in a camera angle that made Trump look more heroic and the full tableau more iconic. His ear was bloodied and there were bright red rivulets on his defiant face. And a big American flag was suspended behind him. Reality seemed to have far outdone reality TV.
There remained the question of who and what exactly he was calling on his followers to fight. The FBI had quickly identified the would-be assassin as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, but it was unable to establish a clear motive. A search of his phone indicated he had searched for Biden’s schedule as well as Trump’s and a friend told the agents that he did not so much hate either candidate as politicians in general. It seemed Trump was likely chosen as what the FBI termed a “target of opportunity” simply because he was speaking near Crooks’ home outside Pittsburgh.
But that did not stop Trump from saying that “they” had tried to kill him after failing to stop him with investigations and indictments and other “lawfare.” He spoke of a dark and vicious “enemy within” that was a greater threat to national security than Russia or China.
Eight days after the shooting, Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him. The Democratic Party went from resigned to hopeful, and became all the more so after she chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. He seemed perfect: a school teacher, football coach, longtime sergeant with the national guard.
Among other possibles she could have picked was Gov. Josh Shapiro of all-important Pennsylvania. He had beaten GOP election denier Doug Mastriano in 2022 by 15 percentage points, breaking a state record number of votes. He had managed to stay popular among a surprising number of MAGA folks. Harris instead went for the folksy narrative, addressing Walz as “coach.”
On Sept. 10, Harris rattled Trump in the first and only presidential debate. He raised the issue of illegal immigration and she ducked the question, instead baiting him about people leaving his rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.” His reflexive response was disproportionately defensive, as would be expected of a narcissist. He ended up raving about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people’s pet cats and dogs.
The influx of migrants at the southern border remained Harris’ weak spot and when she tried to answer continuing questions about it she devolved into what was called “word salad.” She could have quickly and succinctly responded without placing blame on Biden with an approach that is too novel in politics: candor.
Harris would have needed only to say that she and Biden had not wanted to perpetrate Trump’s cruelties at the border, but when they realized they had gone too far the other way, they sought to address the crisis by joining a bipartisan coalition that included the most conservative of Republicans, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford. The resulting legislation had seemed likely to pass when Trump ordered GOP lawmakers to kill it because he wanted the border to remain a political liability for the Democrats.
But instead of offering the simple truth, Harris kept blathering when queried about the border. And, having squashed the fix, Trump declared, “I alone can fix it.”
Then came the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate. JD Vance, had been first to spread the falsehood about Haitians eating pets and some Republicans had come to view him as a poor choice by Trump. But his standing rose after he reduced Walz to a bumbling, self-described “knucklehead.” To make it worse, Walz was proving to have told minor, but disturbing lies in the past. People who were still getting to know Harris were left to think THIS is who she chose?
On Oct. 15, four days after the Walz disaster, Trump returned to the scene of the attempted assassination and the now iconic image. Elon Musk joined him on the stage wearing a black MAGA hat and an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt; The richest man on earth literally leapt for joy, the post shooting image having provided him with a pretext to support Trump despite the former president’s history of racism, fraud, sex abuse, and 34 felony counts.
“The true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire,” Musk said. “We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs and another who was fist pumping after getting shot.”
He went on, “America is the home of the brave, and there’s no truer test than courage under fire, so who do you want representing America?”
Since he was not born in America, the one thing Musk cannot do with all his wealth is become president. But he could try to buy one.
After initially insisting in the spring that he was not donating to either candidate, Musk was now all in with Trump, using the free speech he had purchased for $44 billion. He spread falsehood after falsehood to tens of millions of users on what had been Twitter. The conspiracy theories he pushed included a groundless contention that the Democrats were deliberately importing huge numbers of migrants so they could vote.
“If Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election,” Musk contended in a September 29 post that got more than 100 million views.
Musk also started petition drives in swing states, offering between $49 and $100 to registered voters who pledged to support free speech and the right to bear arms. He commenced a supposed lottery of questionable legality that awarded $1 million every day to folks who had signed the petition.
On top of that, Musk bankrolled a door-to-door ground game with a stated goal of fielding 5,500 canvassers toward the end of the campaign. He was of course among those who spoke at the big MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden, which began with a comic making a joke about Blacks and watermelons and then calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage. “
The Garden filled with cries of “Fight! Fight! Fight” when Trump took the stage.
“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party,” he said.
But the comic’s Puerto Rico joke was what went viral. Trump’s spokesman actually issued a disavowal, if not quite an apology.
Biden then again proved that an octogenarian can behave like a child. He said Trump supporters were the ones who are garbage. The Trump folks howled with fake outrage that this was like Hillary Clinton calling them “deplorables” in 2016.
Once again, Trump sought the power of image, donning a reflective vest and attempting to board a garbage truck that he arranged to pull up to his plane on the tarmac. But when he had difficulty climbing up into the cab, he suddenly looked like an overweight rich guy. His followers appeared to be delighted nonetheless, and a number of them wore reflective vests at the ensuing rallies.
In rally after rally, he complained that the Democrats “tell so many lies,” which was itself a lie. He would repeat his usual other falsehoods and called Jan. 6 a “love fest.” But he came to seem increasingly unhinged. He may have been suffering from PTSD, which affects the great majority of gunshot victims, including those who say they were not affected as all, as he had repeatedly insisted.
And the uncertainty of the election’s outcome likely kept him at the verge of narcissistic collapse, which often turns the person angry and vindictive, as he increasingly was. He suggested that maybe he should have simply refused to leave the White House in 2020, which suggests he was afraid of losing his bid to return.
In shoring up self-image, he went so far as to proclaim he is a “protector for women,” adding whether they like it or not.
Meanwhile, thanks to TikTok, some young women were for the first time hearing the Access Hollywood Tape in which Trump brags that when you’re a star, you can grab women by the p---y. Older women should have needed no reminding.
The Trump campaign’s big worry was apparent in who it chose to be sitting directly behind him within camera view during his speech. The usual human backdrop changed from the classic MAGA types at earlier rallies to young women holding signs reading ”Women for Trump.”
Vance went ahead and called Harris “trash” at a rally in Atlanta on Monday.
Trump was at a Wisconsin rally early Tuesday morning when he spoke of Nancy Pelosi as “evil, sick, crazy.” He has blamed her for pressuring Biden to drop out, thereby depriving him of an easy win. He now mouthed a curse.
“It starts with a B, but I won’t say it,” he told the crowd.
Trump and Vance were apparently banking on countering any woke courage against their supporters' continued delight in them just saying whatever they want. The Trump campaign continued to rely on the power of that image in moments after he was shot. It appears in one of the campaign ads along with the words, “President Trump Fights for You.”
Back on the afternoon of Oct. 1, a pickup truck with New York license plates was seen driving down Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with the “Fight! Fight Fight!” image on the tailgate. Not even that ultra-liberal neighborhood was untouched by MAGA, the movement that Trump likes to call the biggest in American history.
But Trump ignores a movement that drew more than 500,000 to Washington. D.C. on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after his inauguration. The speakers that day included Harris, then the senator from California.
“We are a force that cannot be dismissed,” she told the Women’s March. “There is nothing more powerful than a group of determined sisters... standing up for what we know is right.”
Eight years later, Harris was facing Trump in a nearly even race that promised to ultimately come down to which of the two movements can edge out the other; women or MAGA.
As Election Day finally arrived, nobody could confidently predict the outcome. Democrats in the ground game in South Philadelphia reported that they were big in numbers and enthusiasm.
Multiple people were saying that the big bucks Musk effort appeared to have fizzled.
And while there was no immediate evidence of cheating at the polls by either side it turned out Musk’s supposed $1 million lottery was no more a lottery than Trump’s Apprentice boardroom was real.
But in the end, the image prevailed.
And the TV guy Won! Won! Won!
Find the Daily Beast’s coverage of the 2024 election here. Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
