In all probability, Donald Trump has just won the 2024 US presidential election. He was the favourite yesterday — as voters were still giggling about President Biden calling Zelensky “Putin” — but now he is the clear favourite.

There is a precedent for this. Back in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was campaigning to become the president of Brazil when he was stabbed at a rally. His support rose as he lay in the hospital. 

Why is this? Perhaps because people assume that the side being targeted with blatantly unfair and illegal methods is a righteous one. Perhaps because they think that if somebody can survive an assassination attempt, nothing can stop them.

This could apply doubly to Donald Trump, who had the courage and wherewithal to stand up and raise a fist after surviving the assassination attempt. Evan Vucci’s photo of Trump standing defiantly, surrounded by security personnel, has already secured a place in the history books. 

It’s easy to say bad things about Donald Trump. No, really — it is. You can call him a liar, and an egotist, and a philistine, and a boor, and an alleged sex criminal.

But what cannot be denied is that Trump is an exceptional personality — a man who seems to bend the arc of history to his will. He went from being a candidate whose campaign seemed quixotic enough to bring talk show audiences to tears of laughter to President of the United States. He cracked fat jokes in front of Kim Jong-un. He has weathered about 4879 attempts to put him in jail. Now, he has turned an assassination attempt to his advantage.

What were the chances that a gunman’s bullet would graze his ear instead of taking out of brain? What must it have taken for him to rise his feet chanting “fight, fight, fight” instead of screaming “GET ME OUT OF HERE!” 

I don’t endorse the people claiming that the event was staged — if nothing else, it seems eccentric to suggest that Trump would feel the need to draw attention away from Biden’s cognitive decline — but you can understand their struggle to appreciate who they are up against.

The history of the world, said Thomas Carlyle, is the history of Great Men:

They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

To the extent that this is true — and there is only some extent to which it can be true — it can depend less on their thoughts than on their energy. What were Julius Caesar’s big ideas? What were Napoleon’s? What are Trump’s? Their thoughts have been less important than the vigour and determination with which they pursue them.

The irony of Donald Trump’s first four years in power were that they seemed anticlimactic. I know this might sound preposterous given the nervous breakdown that the media had between 2016 and 2020. But what substantial lasting changes were achieved? The Trump peace plan seemed weighty at the time but, well — so much for that. The border wall remained unfinished. Operation Warp Speed is the kind of thing that Trump’s supporters are liable to recall with horror. Trump’s ability to conjure up, or simply find himself in, iconic moments never seemed to be translated into major change.

We shall see, for better or worse, if a world-historical personality has more success in writing history in his second term. It would be presumptuous to hold forth on how this gunman’s bullet might affect Trump, but it seems improbable — especially given his instinctive defiance — that it will moderate his ambitions.

Meanwhile, the shooter, whatever his background is and whatever he was thinking, will be a footnote in history. Republicans hate him for attacking Trump. Moderate Democrats hate him for assisting Trump. Radical leftists hate him for being a poor shot. If you come at the king, as they say, you’d better not miss.