From Butler to the 250th: Trump’s art of the comeback

The bullet is said to have missed his head by “less than a quarter of an inch.” That is the whole of it, really — history, for a moment, decided by margin rather than by meaning.

On July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania: a rally, a rifle, eight shots. Trump came up off the stage with blood on his ear, fist in the air, shouting, “Fight, fight, fight.” The photograph — flag flying behind him, crowd frozen mid-scream — held the one second death didn’t win, long enough to mean something before anyone decided what.

‘We have thrived and flourished because our founders were great, our cause was just, our people are brave, our culture is exceptional, and our destiny is written by God.’

Trump ducked first, then Secret Service agents covered him. Some feared he had been killed until he rose, fist raised, and was moved toward the waiting SUV. He was treated at the scene, then at Butler Memorial Hospital, before flying home to New Jersey that night.

The rally grounds sat empty for hours, the gunman’s body still on the rooftop, where snipers had killed 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks within 15 seconds.

Corey Comperatore, 50, a former volunteer fire chief, dove on top of his family when the shooting started. He did not get a photograph — just a flag-draped casket. Two others were wounded but survived: David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74.

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Just shy of two years after Butler, Trump stood on the National Mall as the 47th president, watching fireworks over a country marking its 250th year.

He spoke past midnight into the wet dark, working through two and a half centuries of American history before declaring, “At 250 years old, we may be the oldest constitutional republic on earth, but our country is just getting started because the best is yet to come. This is only the dawn of the golden age of America.”

Not everyone reads the ledger the same way. By June, Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 36% in the Marist poll, the lowest of his second term, with just a third of Americans approving of his handling of the economy. Despite the low poll ratings, the second Trump term has featured promise after promise kept.

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Over the same stretch, southwest border apprehensions hit their lowest level since 1970 — a central pledge kept. “No tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” became law. A raid under 30 minutes hauled Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, blindfolded in a grey tracksuit, onto a plane bound for the U.S. to face narco-terrorism charges. Pricing deals with drugmakers cut the list price of several medications, and tariffs pushed companies to pledge new American factories, even after the Supreme Court struck down the authority he used to impose them.

Trump won that November on exactly that defiance and has governed since like a man still living out the title of his own book, “The Art of the Comeback” — written almost 30 years before anyone could have imagined what the ultimate comeback would actually look like.

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