Trump shooting marks tense time

Donald Trump got a huge boost to his already substantial campaign for the White House with his near miss with death on Saturday evening from a would-be assassin’s bullet.

Bleeding from the ear grazed by a bullet, Trump raised his right first and shouted “Fight!”. But that is the last thing the United States needs now. Trump’s implication – amplified by Republican Party extremists across the country – was that he had been targeted by Joe Biden’s Democrats who “want him out of the way…”

Supporting those allegations are disturbing questions about the slow reaction of Trump’s Secret Service bodyguards.

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Why didn’t they immediately push him below the stage? Why did they allow him to stand up while they themselves ducked as bullets flew? Why did the security plan not encompass the nearby rooftop where the 20-year-old shooter was crawling along with his rifle?

Why didn’t they react immediately when this was pointed out by people in the crowd? And, of course, the conspiracy theorists are noting that the shooter, like all dead men, will tell no tales… Trump haters have their own theories, claiming the whole event was a “false flag” set up to blame “the Left”.

It is clear that, apart from America’s tradition of trying to take out its presidents or presidential candidates, this is a country where gun violence is commonplace and where society is divided more now than at any time since the bloody civil war of the 1860s.

Ironically, it was then president Abraham Lincoln – himself assassinated by John Wilkes Booth – who, in his famous Gettysburg Address, urged reconciliation and hoped that from the civil war would emerge a “new freedom” and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.

We hope Americans heed those words in this tense time.

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