One year ago this month, Donald Trump got a second chance at life. As anyone reading this surely knows (though there certainly will be debate about coincidence vs. divine intervention) the former President made the history-altering decision to turn his head away from the stage at the perfect moment at a rally in Pennsylvania, and an assassin’s bullet ripped through his ear rather than between his eyes.
Immediately, comparisons came to mind of other incredible turns of fate that changed life on Earth in the past. The greatest global example has to be the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, when a driver making a wrong turn and stopping his car right in front of the wrong Bosnian radical plunged the world into the first great war of the 20th century. A famous American historical “what if” occurred in September of 1862, when a careless Confederate officer left detailed plans of Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland in a cigar box that was found by the Union Army, leading to Lee’s defeat at Antietam. It will be up to those that come after us to debate the full impact of Trump’s timely head tilt, but for the moment it seems very possible that his second chance is a fresh opportunity for our entire country.
How much trouble we were in or how bad things had really gotten, is of course subjective and a bit of a matter of taste. There are certainly those who really believed the old cliche that our recent election was the most important of their lifetime. The pop culture phenomenon of discussing how often men think of the Roman empire was an interesting side effect of the belief that many Americans held; that like Rome once had been, the United States was a nation in terminal decline. Others, of course, would point to previous examples of turbulent times in American history. If we made it through the Vietnam era, the War of 1812 and The Great Depression, surely this too would pass with or without the reelection of Donald Trump.
The aforementioned American Civil War would be the easiest example of America already having already received our “second chance.” This would make 2024, at best, America’s third chance, which seems a less catchy blog theme (second-second chance maybe?) There were certainly moments in the 1860s when the Army of Northern Virginia was racking up victories and Lincoln’s political future seemed in great doubt, when many would have predicted that the United States was about to fail in a permanent fashion. It is my belief however, that the crisis we have just gone through was, at least ideologically if not in a more concrete sense, a greater threat to the American experiment.
Essential to an understanding of the American Civil War, and indeed all of the previous great conflicts in our history, is the acceptance that most people involved were honest patriots who fundamentally believed in the ideals that made us the great proposition nation. Indeed, something you find over and over in writings from that turbulent period of our history is people on both sides trying to claim stewardship of Washington and Jefferson’s legacies for themselves. Many in the North truly believed that in order to live out the claim that all men are created equal, the practice of chattel slavery needed to be discontinued. Many in the South truly believed that the idea of self-government depended on the continued consent of the governed, meaning you must allow individual states to leave the Union if they choose. Coming to blows as it did was a great tragedy, and a failure to do what Christ commands us when he says to “take the log out of your own eye so you can see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” On both sides were Americans that saw too much of how the other side was in the wrong and not enough of their own side’s failures. But also on both sides were Americans that loved America and believed they were doing their patriotic duty. What exactly would have become of us if we had remained divided into two nations for more than those four years is hard to say, but it is reasonable to assume that both nations would have generally accepted most of the same moral and political principles and thought of themselves as proud Americans.
The American left, by the time of the Biden administration, could not be said to think highly of the founding principles of this nation nor our history. In academia, in politics, in the media are “liberals” whose views on America hovered around 1619 Project pseudohistory. These are people that at every turn espouse the belief that everything about America is racist, sexist, homophobic, *insert whatever identity politics-based grievance you like here*, etc. You can choose to agree with them and decide it is time to burn it all down and start over, but you cannot in good faith claim to do so out of a patriotic love for what the nation stood for in the first place. The central belief of one of the major political parties in this country had become that this country was a mistake from the beginning and should never have existed. Had Trump not turned his head at that moment in Butler, they likely would have won.
However, Trump survived and with him the nation, for now, also survives. There is a long way to go to heal the bitter ideological divide in America. Trump himself, one might argue, is not the best one to do it. His personality is combative; he likes the fighting. While it is fairer to consider him a symptom of our recent national disfunction than the cause, it is difficult to imagine him as the cure. While there has been some talk of a kinder, gentler Trump appearing after his near-death experience, at best it comes and goes. The hope at this point is likely that Trump has served as the bulwark against a radical left takeover, and whoever comes after him will need to be the Healer-in-Chief. If fate or God had not given him (and all of us) that second chance in Butler though, we would have never known.
America's Second Chance 