Friend,

This morning, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed I wrote about what I witnessed during the assassination attempt at Saturday’s rally in Butler, PA. Please take a minute to read it below.

Thanks,
Dave

America Was an Inch From Catastrophe, and I Was There
Dave McCormick
Wall Street Journal
Sunday, July 14, 2024

One inch. That’s how close America came to losing Donald Trump to an assassin’s bullet Saturday evening—and that inch may be a metaphor for how close we are to an internal breakdown in the greatest country the world has ever known.

The bullet that came within an inch of Mr. Trump’s skull, grazing his ear, whizzed over my own head, too. I was just offstage and moments away from joining him at the podium to talk about my campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

I am a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Gulf War; I’m familiar with the sound of gunfire. But it wasn’t apparent in the first millisecond that the staccato crack that interrupted our Butler County rally was gunfire. Why? Because I was surrounded by thousands of fellow Americans in a celebratory, patriotic, unifying mood. It was unthinkable.

Then I saw Mr. Trump duck and grab his ear. Someone in the bleachers behind me was knocked down, and it became clear we were under fire. In the military, I learned that you can’t predict how someone will respond under fire until it happens. Mr. Trump rose brilliantly to the occasion. In what will be an iconic image for the ages, he raised his fist in defiance, reassuring his countrymen, and showed true grace amid a lethal attack. He demonstrated the strength and resolve that the leader of the free world simply must have.

In the wake of the shooting, law-enforcement groups and Congress will dive into important questions about how this assassination attempt happened. How did the shooter get so close? Were Secret Service protections adequate to the threat level? Did anyone help the would-be assassin?

But these questions merely scratch the surface. What we really need to ask ourselves is how we can keep our free society from becoming a banana republic where political differences are resolved with ballistics.

Mr. Trump’s critics need to acknowledge that he isn’t Hitler or the devil. He’s a legitimate political candidate, and the contest for the presidency should be fought over ideas and leadership traits, not through calumny that can incite violence.

That Mr. Trump is about to be nominated after winning a contested GOP primary makes his candidacy the essence of democracy. The assassin was the real threat to democracy. Mr. Trump is democracy in action.

Too many critics didn’t accept Mr. Trump’s first election victory in 2016 as legitimate. And since it hasn’t been enough for them to disagree with Mr. Trump, they’ve painted him—and by extension his fellow Republicans—as a national threat that must be eliminated. The radical leftist who shot Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) on a baseball field in 2017 likely took this rhetoric to heart. The same may be true for the gunman who tried to assassinate Mr. Trump.

This recklessness extended beyond rhetoric to action from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party. In April, nine House Democrats, including the ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, introduced legislation that would have stripped Mr. Trump of all Secret Service protection.

In Trump v. U.S. this month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that a president could theoretically order the assassination of a political rival and be immune from criminal prosecution. “In every use of official power,” Ms. Sotomayor wrote, “the President is now a king above the law.”

Extreme rhetoric has also gained currency on the political right. It’s time to stop the unending ratchet of political polemic by extremists on either side who believe their opponents’ extinction is the only option. This is a political sickness, and it’s spreading. It isn’t manifest only in one party, and it can’t be fixed by one party alone.

We need to put the engine of our republic in a constructive gear. We have consequential differences; we should debate them robustly. The left and right have vastly different visions, and both fear the consequences of losing. So let’s have that conflict—but let’s commit to keep it inside the context of elections, civil debate and policymaking.

As my wife, Dina, and I tell our six daughters (who until Saturday never imagined they’d have to worry about my safety), our nation’s founders faced an equally fragile future. Benjamin Franklin was once asked what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had produced. Franklin’s reply: “A republic, if you can keep it.” His words should ring in our ears today. We may have only an inch to spare.