Trump’s Raised Fist

What Trump always knew and what so many in his party did not was crystallized in fire and blood on a July evening forty miles outside Pittsburgh.

After the shooting, FBI agents, reporters, and a million social media voices descended physically and virtually on the Butler Farm Show Grounds in search of answers. The shooter’s pictures and phone have been pored over, CNN talking heads have analyzed the impact on the election and scrutinized the performance of the former and likely future president’s security detail. And while these things matter, they are not the thing that truly matters.

When Trump rode down the escalator on another summer day nine years ago, he was riding into history and into danger. He did not see the bullet coming, but he did see the crisis. The journey that took him from Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to a Pennsylvania field where livestock usually march around in pens was aimed at confronting the threat to the country.

What Trump understood, and so many did not, was that the crisis is the way forward.

Some are stricken by a crisis while others are energized by it, and that has been true of the initial reaction among many Republicans and conservatives to the Trump assassination attempt, but what everyone is coming to understand is that no problem can be solved without confronting the crisis. The GOP has far too long evaded the crises, seeking compromises and easy answers, and the Trump decade during which it began confronting them has often been messy and ugly.

Some may think that the messiness and ugliness came to a head near Butler, PA, but it did not. If history tells us anything, it’s that we have not seen the worst of what human nature offers. But, even in the face of a former fire chief giving his life for his family and Trump’s raised fist, we have also not seen the best. If there may be worse times ahead, there are better ones too.

And we cannot arrive at the reaches of that ‘promised land’ without dealing with the worse ones.

That is the difficult lesson Trump has been teaching Republicans by example. Sometimes the example has been bloody. And at the Butler grounds, there was actual blood. But while it may have been the first time there was presidential blood on the floor, it’s not the first time there was peril. When the BLM race riots came to D.C.,Trump and his family had to be taken to a bunker underneath the White House because there were fears the mob would invade the grounds.

And Corey Comperatore was far from the first to die in the radical rage over Trump. It would be nice if he were to be the last.

9 years ago, a Manhattan real estate tycoon poked a bear which was unused to being poked. The bear, tending to furious rages over not only pointed criticism, but the simple existence of things that offended it, like the middle class, the nuclear family and organized religion, went mad. And despite the efforts by the Democrat political establishment and the media which pretend to control the bear (when it’s actually the bear that controls them), it is madder than ever. That is why everyone, Republicans and Democrats, used to refrain from annoying it.

Trump did the opposite. From the beginning of his political life to his raised fist, he took the fight to the radicals. He didn’t worry about offending them or enraging them, and he did it not only because it was fun, but because he knew that solutions only come through confrontations.

His response to the crisis is also a lesson for everyone in every walk of life.

A crisis is not a sign that something is going wrong, but that it’s going right. It’s only human to get caught up in the moment of the crisis, to linger in the bloody aftermath or to wonder what might have happened if the target hadn’t moved at just the right time, but Trump has always understood what the Left has, that a crisis is really an opportunity to go to the next level.

Rather than slowing down, Trump sped up, revising his speech, picking a VP and kicking his campaign into gear. The raised fist after the shooting was more than a symbol of defiance, but the act of a man who reacts best and lives the most in the ultimate moment of crisis.

And that is as it should be.

American history has been shaped by our reactions to crises. Despite our best efforts, we were not able to avoid the American Revolution or the Civil War, but we came to see them as crises that were for the best and that made us who we are. The Trump years are doing the same thing.

The problems are too big and the challenges too grave for us to do anything else.

There are rifles aimed and bullets flying at our country every single day. Governments and politicians have failed to deal with these threats because they have worked to evade them. In a historic moment on a field where cows once traipsed, Trump showed us and all of history how not only to fearlessly meet a crisis, but how to rise from it and be strengthened by it.

Trump’s raised fist symbolizes that what you do when the bullets are flying is crucial, but what you do afterward changes it all. The crisis is not the thing to be afraid of, it’s the way forward.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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