"The Toughest Man I've Ever Seen"

I have predicted several times in these pages that there would be many twists and turns in this Presidential race.

The last three weeks proves that.

Biden has a disastrous debate performance raising serious questions about his fitness to be President.

The mainstream media turns on Biden.

Large Democrat donors are refusing to donate to his campaign.

The Democrat party is in chaos trying to figure out what to do about Biden.

Donald Trump is the victim of an attempted assassination.

If you wrote a political thriller with these story lines it would undoubtedly be rejected for being too far-fetched.

Unfortunately, it is all too real...for all of us.

There has been almost nonstop news coverage of the events surrounding the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania over the last 36 hours.

Out of everything I have seen and heard relating to the attack on Trump, I have to say that the words of South Dakota Governor Krisit Noem responding to the attack resonated above everything else I have heard.

"He is the toughest man I've ever met."

Noem posted this about 20 minutes after the assassination attempt and not long after we saw this iconic image that will undoubtedly be remembered many, many years after we are all gone.

There will never be an image that so completely captures the essence of Donald Trump.

What makes it even more impactful is that it revealed the authenticity of Trump in the most trying of times.

Credit: Evan Vucci / AP

Donald Trump was not my first choice for the GOP nomination in 2016.

I was not confident that his brash style and his sparse record as a Republican would give the GOP the best chance to beat Hillary Clinton. 

When Trump won the nomination I could not help but be amazed at what he had done. I had never seen anything like it in a life that has seen a lot of politicians.

The turnout and enthusiasm Trump  brought out in voters was impossible to dismiss. It was clear he had tapped into something that no Republican candidate in my lifetime had done.

When he was elected I was prepared to be disappointed. However, no President in my lifetime was as consistent between what he said he would do and what he actually  did as President. There was no bait and switch with Trump.

This made the Democats even angrier. They told us his term would be a disaster. The economy would crater. Trump would start a World War. The United States would be a laughingstock around the world. Nothing remotely close to what they predicted came true. 

In fact, I stated at that time that Democrats (and even establishment Republicans) said what they did about Trump not because they feared he would be a failure. Their biggest fear was that he would be a success.

In 2024, I supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries because I believed that it was time to turn the page. Trump was carrying a lot of unnecessary baggage and the record of DeSantis in Florida and his younger age argued that he was a better candidate to take on Joe Biden.

Trump defied his critics and proved me wrong once again.

Quite frankly, I have never seen anything like it.

This man has endured an unbelievable barrage of attacks and vitriol the likes of which no one in American history has had to endure.

It started shortly after he came down that escalator to announce his candidacy for President and it has never stopped.

In fact, the intensity has increased.

It was claimed he was a Russian agent when he was running for President.

Hillary Clinton claimed that he stole the 2016 election with Russian interference.

He was spied and wiretapped on by the FBI.

The media attacked him endlessly for four years as President.

He was impeached twice on bogus charges.

He had to endure a pandemic that appears to have resulted from a virus that was funded by bureaucrats within the federal government that undoubtedly caused his defeat in the 2020 election.

Democrats and the media said he was only in office to enrich himself but he ended up losing half his fortune while he was in office due to boycotts and attacks on the Trump brand.

Despite this, he was winning the 2020 election until 3 am the night of the election when all of the vote counts in the swing states miraculously swung toward Biden.

After he announced he was running for President in 2024, he was indicted and charged in criminal trials in New York, Georgia and Florida.

He was also tried in two sham civil trials in New York that were both meant to bankrupt him (one involving a bank loan fully repaid and another involving a woman who claimed Trump sexually assaulted her 30+ years ago who could not even remember the year it allegedly occurred. 

The total judgments levied against Trump were over $350 million in the loan case and $83 million in the E. Jean Carroll case.

What other person in the world has had to endure this much?

Now he comes within a few centimeters of his life?

I have never met Trump but I might have to go further than Krisit Noem and say,

"He is the toughest man I have ever seen."

Who else could endure what Trump has and still be standing let alone running for President?

Like him or not, this is a man who is tough and strong.

However, even those words do not begin to describe Donald J. Trump.

I wrote a blog post in 2019 when he was President in which I referred to Trump as INDEFATIGABLE.

There is no word that better describes the man.

There is no quit in him. He will work tirelessly until his goals are achieved.

This is what I wrote in 2019 in that blog post, "The Indefatigable Donald Trump".

Say what you want about Donald Trump but the thing that sets him apart is that he is not afraid to take action. He is not afraid to face criticism. He is unrelenting. He persistently works to achieve his objectives. There is no quit in him.

There has been no politician like him in my lifetime. Perhaps that is because he did not spend a lifetime as a politician. Perhaps that is because he doesn't really need the job. Perhaps that is because he is an arrogant egomaniac. I don't know why he does what he does.

What I do know it that he is indefatigable. He relentlessly pushes his agenda forward. That, more than anything, defines who he is and why he should never be underestimated. That is also why the Democrats and liberal media despise and fear him so much.

We have now seen Trump in the most trying and terrifying of situations.

He did not freeze. He did not cower. He got up and said "Fight, fight, fight" to the crowd not completely knowing whether he would be speaking to them again. Showing that kind of courage under literal fire is not something many are capable of.

Although his Secret Service body detail has received a lot of praise for their quick reaction in getting to Trump in order to cover him, the fact is that Trump's reflexes are what saved him. It was not the Secret Service. Trump reacted faster than they did and they might have had some notice in their earpieces that a threat had been identified on the rooftop.

Trump showed remarkable situational awareness and understood rapidly that he had been fired on and quickly ducked under the podium before the Secret Service got to him.

I shudder to think what the result would have been if Joe Biden had been behind that podium. Trump was no deer in the headlights. The reaction time he showed for a 78 year old man was remarkable.

What do I see going forward?

A few observations.

1.  Winston Churchill once said 'Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." My hope is that Trump becomes more humble and God-centered as a result of this narrow miss, It is hard to not believe that Providence is involved and Trump has a much larger agenda ahead than he ever imagined.  Going forward with a new humility and servant's heart could be transformative to the nation in these trying times.

2. The Secret Service is going to be put under an enormous amount of well deserved scrutiny for how a sniper on a building could get within 500 feet of Trump. Were the Secret Service snipers told to stand down when apparently they had the assailant in their sights before he fired? Did the Biden administration deny additional resources to the Trump security detail that were requested? It should also go without saying that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. should immediately be given Secret Service protection which heretofore has been denied by the Biden administration.

3. This event puts even more importance on the VP selection by Trump. He needs to select someone who is unquestionably prepared to be President and he needs someone who the Establishment fears as much as Trump. In my mind, there is only one person who unquestionably meets both of those requirements---Ron DeSantis. I laid out the case for DeSantis in an earlier blog post. J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tucker Carlson would all be considered to meet the later standard but all are short on experience. 

It will be interesting to see who Trump chooses. I believe that Glenn Youngkin might make the most sense right now in that he is not a career D.C. politician, he has executive experience and it appears that Virginia might be a swing state that is now in play.

4. The effort to replace Biden is likely to stall due to the events of the last few days. Every day that Biden remains as the candidate the odds get longer that he can be replaced. There is also a question now as to whether any possible replacement would want to step in against Trump. Are we at a place that the Democrats decide to just go with Joe and see what happens and put more emphasis and money into House and Senate races?

5.A further problem the Democrats now have is what major theme do they run on? Before Saturday they were all in on "Trump is a threat to democracy" and an "existential threat " to everything else that is important to you. 

 

Trump also could be a dictator, take out his opponents and lead a coup.

In sum, he was portrayed by the Democrats as pure evil.

Democrats have said that if Trump was elected it could be the last election to ever be held in the United States.

This is the messaging that Biden was primarily running on until Saturday evening.

Now that there are calls to lower the temperature and reduce the political vitriol what do Biden and the Democrats run on? Do they actually have to run on their record and the issues?

6. Throughout most of the last nine years there was a social taboo among many people of expressing outward support for Trump. I have found it interesting how that has dissipated this year despite all of Trump's legal problems and everything else. It may be totally gone right now if this report from San Francisco is accurate.. 

People had been told that Trump was only in it for himself. He was a coward. He didn't care about anyone but himself. Seeing Trump on that stage Saturday night and Biden on the debate stage a couple weeks ago let a lot of people see with their own eyers that what they have been told about the two men was completely false. And as I have stated before, what is seen cannot be unseen.

Continued prayers of protection for Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

In addition, let us remember Corey Comperatore who lost his life by merely attending a political rally for his favored Presidential candidate. 

Thoughts and prayers also go out to David Dutch and James Copenhaver who were critically wounded while attending the rally.

Trump is a threat to democracy but it is Trump and these three men who are victims while they are participating in a fundamental part of democracy?

How does any of this make sense?

May God Bless America!