Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
When I was kid, we used to be able to order paperback books in school from The Arrow Book Club, a division of Scholastic Books. I remember eagerly looking through the order form at titles like 13 Spooky Stories, A Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet, The Forgotten Door, or classics like Oliver Twist and Heidi, or informative books like The Story of Eleanor Roosevelt or Hurricanes and Twisters.
I vividly remember one title—Strange but True: 22 Amazing Stories by David Duncan, an anthology of true stories about the legend of Bigfoot, or how a girl survived a fall from a plane in mid-air, or when a woman lifted a tractor that had fallen on her husband barehanded. I loved reading these incredible narratives and wondering if they could really be true, which of course begged the question where one marked the line between belief and fact. Could Nessie really exist? Were aliens living among us? (See Chariots of the Gods by Erich Van Daniken).
Later, when I went to college—thanks to the convoluted world of literary theory—I was introduced to the concept of epistemology, the theory of the mind’s relation to reality and belief, and then—even later, when I became a novelist, I learned how to construct a fictional world that had to be (even in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction) believable to a reader. Mark Twain once said, “Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” In other words, our mutually constructed reality should—must—conform to reality. When it doesn’t, we are obliged to try and make sense of it. This is where religion—and conspiracy theories—come in.
The recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump was all too real. We saw it unfold on national television, and then were subjected to dozens, if not hundreds, of reruns of the footage, yet there are some who doubt if it really happened, that it was staged, not believing their own eyes.
A sniper fired rounds from an AR-15 type weapon (a term which, by the way, has become nearly as ubiquitous (and perversely related to) “hopes and prayers” in our national vocabulary). One bullet nicked the former president’s ear and struck an onlooker, killing him. Two other audience members were seriously wounded from the sniper’s gunfire. Trump hit the dirt and was immediately covered by secret service agents as the audience—remarkably—was slow to react. Some took cover, but many simply looked around, not really realizing what had happened as the bloodied ex-president was rushed to a waiting car. This is what happened.
It was undoubtedly real, but elements of the incident also bordered on the surreal. The bullet that grazed the president’s ear was mere inches away from killing him. As footage of the incident was played back over and over, shots of Mr. Trump pumping his fist and yelling, “Fight!” to the audience on his way to the car couldn’t have looked more staged had it been part of a Hollywood political thriller. Some of the photos that later emerged looked as if they had come straight from a political ad, particularly one that showed a defiant Trump, bloodied and defiant, passing directly under an American flag while gesturing to his followers.
Another photograph showed what seemed to be impossible—an image of the bullet itself milliseconds as it passed through Trump’s ear, which begged the question of whether it is even possible to catch the image of a speeding bullet on film.
The fact that a sniper could get within four hundred feet of the president also seemed to lie beyond the realm of possibility. How could the hordes of Secret Service and state and local police let a nearly fatal misstep like that happen, especially when spectators in the crowd had spotted the gunman and were trying to inform law enforcement when shots rang out.
Any one of these freak occurrences may have been explainable in itself—okay, the photographers were in the right place at right time, anyone—even the Secret Service—makes mistakes, but taken together, the confluence of coincidence, but together, in the entire gestalt, it looked like the intersection of events that either demonstrated God’s will or reinforced the narrative of Donald Trump’s destiny as an America’s hero.
Truth is stranger than fiction. Had these events appeared in a feature film as they did on national TV, critics would have condemned the film as being “unbelievable”, “formulaic”, and probably “ridiculous”. Yet there it is. It was real.
Flurries of conspiracy theories started crossing social media hours (or less) after events unfolded. “Joe Biden was behind this assassination attempt.” “This was staged by Trump’s campaign.” “The FBI was behind it.” The ridiculous patter went on and on, precisely because people were unwilling to believe their own eyes. The incident was so surreal that Americans felt the need to wrap the events in a narrative they could understand and believe. And, predictably, in this fractious political, narratives tended to fall along party lines.
Republicans lauded Trump as an American hero for not only surviving the attempt on his life, but emerging bloodied and defiant in the immediate aftermath, pumping his fist in the shadow of Old Glory. The Religious right proclaimed it was an act of God, proof that Trump was sent by God to bring America back to its deeply Christian roots, (itself a fiction promoted by Christian nationalists for decades). How else could he dodge death when a bullet missed its mark by mere millimeters? Surely, this was God’s will.
Those unwilling to believe the events, or more precisely the way they unfolded, cried out conspiracy theory, claiming the assassination attempt was engineered by (depending on who’s talking) Biden and the FBI or the Trump campaign.
As unwilling as people may be to accept it, what we saw was reality. The fact that the bullet barely missed the former president was sheer luck, either—as he has claimed—he moved his head at precisely the right moment—or the gunman flinched, we’ll never know, but God’s will is not (and never will be) a plausible explanation.
The photographers were lucky, too, happening to be in the right place at the right time. It’s not the first time that ever happened. Just ask Joe Rosenthal about his photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima or Dorothea Lange about her Migrant Mother photograph. Skill, yes, but being in the right place at the right time helped create these images. If an appropriate image to commemorate an historic event is not available, we construct it, along with the attendant mythology. Look at Emanuel Luetze’s painting of George Washington Crossing the Delaware or the entire catalog of Frederic Remington’ paintings mythologizing the Old West.
Truth was stranger than fiction on Saturday, July 11th, so much so that we felt the need to create a fiction—or fictions—in order to make sense of it. That there are multiple narratives trying to explain the surrealness of these events speaks to the great divisions in this country. Trump is no Bigfoot, nor is he an angel, nor is he a demon. He is just very, very lucky.