NEW YORK — Shocking, chaotic and sudden, the bullet zoomed toward the podium where former President Donald Trump stood behind a podium speaking. In its wake: the potential for a horrific and tragic chapter in American history.
But the Republican presidential candidate narrowly escaped victory – by inches, perhaps even less. Saturday’s assassination attemptThe projectile of the shooter on a nearby rooftop, Trump was left with only a bleeding right ear, initially shocked but otherwise unharmed as he fell and the Secret Service raided him, his campaign continuing as the Republican National Convention has begun.
A slim margin for survival, with potentially seismic impact. And an unforgettable example of something many were talking about Monday — a hard truth about the events that shape us, our daily lives, and our society:
Sometimes it’s just coincidence, circumstances going one way and not the other, just-in-time interventions or missteps that cause disruption.
Sometimes history can be divided into inches.
It’s a truth that is often obscured when we view dates, places, people, and events with the perspective of hindsight and mainstream media attention. The past becomes coated with a patina of inevitability — as if it could only have happened the way it did.
But “what just happened to us is a kind of humbling lesson in how contingent all of this is,” says Susan Schulten, a professor of history at the University of Denver. “And nothing is predetermined.”
Whatever happens, there will of course be consequences and impact from the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday at a rally in Pennsylvania, in which one attendee was killed, two others wounded, and the gunman was killed by police. But what will be, in this election year and in the years to come, will play out differently than it would have in an America where events had unfolded differently.
History is replete with examples of chance, randomness or luck playing a role in how things turned out, says Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us.”
In his book, he describes an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when a submarine from what was then the Soviet Union nearly fired a torpedo with a nuclear warhead at American troops, thinking it was under attack. But a lengthy delay in carrying out the order gave another officer enough time to realize that this was not the case.
There are plenty of other moments where there can be endless “what if” discussions, from the assassinations of figures like Abraham Lincoln and John and Robert Kennedy to other attempted assassinations, such as the attack on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, two months after he assumed the presidency.
They are also events like the September 11, 2001 attacks, Rank points out, where ordinary people “missed their subway connection or were late or early and just missed being killed in that disaster, while others were less fortunate.”
Often people respond to these kinds of events by trying to make sense of them, out of a belief in coherence: by invoking some kind of universal meaning or divine plan.
That’s because people want a sense of control, says Daryl Van Tongeren, a psychology professor at Hope College in Michigan. It’s too unnerving, he says, to admit that life is random and full of chance. “It’s safer for us to think that we can just control everything that happens.”
And in the United States of America, where part of the national mythology is the idea that we are masters of our own destiny – that we can pull ourselves up through our own efforts – the idea of arbitrariness can seem particularly troubling, Rank says.
“In the United States, we’re really steeped in this idea of rugged individualism and self-reliance and meritocracy and you’re out there on your own, and you have control, and you have agency,” he says. “And to some extent, we do have control. We make decisions. But the other aspect of life is that … there are things that happen to you that you have no control over.
“That’s a little disturbing,” he says. “But that’s life. That’s the world.”