We’re at another fulcrum, a wormhole of history repeating itself that we have the power to change, but avoid because it’s too hard.

Here We Go Again
Jack Ohman / San Francisco Chronicle

(July 13, 2024) — Here we are again:
November 22, 1963. April 4, 1968, June 5, 1968, March 30, 1981.
July 13, 2024.

Former president Donald Trump flinches, grabs his head, falls. Secret Service agents jump on the victim, the car speeds off to the hospital. A would-be assassin, it seems, fired a shot through the former president’s right ear. The video is hauntingly reminiscent of the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie.

Horror.

Again.

Trump was not killed, but we appear to have been millimeters from yet another public political execution — one that the nation would have experienced collectively. Shocked, traumatized, changed forever.

Again.

At this writing, we know who — Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa. — but don’t know why. We do know that the alleged shooter was killed, another person in the crowd was killed, and other people were seriously injured.

For his part, Trump, his face bloodied, raised his fist through the tangle of Secret Service agents, and appeared to yell, “Fight! Fight!”

Fight what? I will forgive the man for this reaction, for it appears he had been shot seconds prior to this.

In these initial hours — during this fraught moment in the 2024 election where President Joe Biden, whose hero, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was a victim of an assassination, whose bust sits behind the president in the Oval Office — facts are garbled.

Was the shooter in the stands? Is he a lone nut? A part of an organized conspiracy?

Was Trump seriously wounded and we couldn’t see it, like the attempt on President Ronald Reagan? Not obviously hit, Reagan was shoved into the car, taken to George Washington University Hospital, where he collapsed from dangerous wound in his lung, missing his aorta by a hair’s breadth.

Memories of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C. Hilton are front and center in our collective national consciousness.

Again.

We do not know the motive. We do not know a lot, other that Trump survived.

We do know this, however, and this is painfully obvious: We live in country where violence, guns, and mentally ill people roam freely with military grade weaponry, looking for innocent victims.

More death. More destruction. More shattered lives, hopes, dreams, and families lie in the wreckage of our nation’s obsession with guns.

Again.

Mass shootings of children in schools, concertgoers are wounded and killed by the hundreds, clubs are sprayed with bullets, dozens fall.

Again.

It doesn’t take a great leap to blame this on the superheated rhetoric in American politics, the comically ridiculous access to pistols, rifles, tactical gear, you name it, they’re all part of the problem.

The Democrats have been crying out for years about stemming this rising tide of blood, spilled because there are millions of guns. The GOP?

Silence.

Maybe this near-tragedy will shock them in a way that dead children piled up in classrooms, their little backpacks covered in gore, did not. Let’s hope.

Sure, have the thoughts and have the prayers. But thoughts and prayers don’t cut it anymore. Not at all.

Would the death of President Trump have changed the Second Amendment’s amen choir’s tune? I don’t expect any rational thought coming out of this.

Again.

The conspiracy people will point the finger toward phantoms. Joe Biden and the Deep State did it!

The Secret Service’s reputation has been called into question, because they apparently didn’t see a sniper on a nearby roof.

Neither did the Secret Service see Lee Harvey Oswald, cowering behind school book boxes, with a $21 Italian rifle, as President John F. Kennedy’s  Lincoln Continental turned from Houston onto Elm Street.

Robert F. Kennedy had no Secret Service or Los Angeles Police protection when a mentally ill terrorist and Jordanian fanatic fired shots into the back of his head and shoulder.

RFK was in the middle of a heated presidential race in 1968 as well, and, two months prior, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a right-wing racist with a rifle fired from a boardinghouse across the street.

The Vietnam War was raging on June 5, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the race on March, after being humiliated by Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. Rioting paralyzed the nation’s cities after King’s death.

We’re not in 1968, anymore.

But we are in dreadful new territory that makes the recent president debate performance controversy look, well, silly.

The country has far more things to consider today, July 13, 2024.

We need to think about what we advocate and how we advocate it. We need to step back from the vehicle. We have to look at those who encourage vengeance, violence, and retribution with a fresh perspective.

Do you want to live in country where this kind of political violence is rampant, and that people who want to lead the country have to don flak jackets instead of political buttons?

We’re at another fulcrum, a wormhole of history repeating itself, a déjà vu moment we have the power to change, but avoid because it’s too hard.

Again.

Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and columnist who also writes at jackohman.substack.