NEW YORK – Jarring, chaotic and sudden, the bullet whizzed toward the stage where former President Donald Trump stood behind a podium speaking. In its wake: the potential for a horrifying and tragic chapter in American history.
But the Republican presidential candidate had a narrow escape — mere inches, possibly less — in Saturday's assassination attempt. The projectile from the shooter on a nearby rooftop left Trump with just a bloodied right ear, initially shaken but otherwise unharmed as he dropped down and Secret Service swarmed, his campaign continuing as the Republican National Convention got underway.
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A tiny margin for survival, with a 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 all about chance, about circumstances falling in one direction and not another, about interventions in the nick of time or missteps that allow for disruption.
Sometimes history can come down to inches.
Near misses and the hinge of history
It's a truth that often gets obscured as we look over dates, places, people and events with the perspective of hindsight and blanket media coverage. The past gets covered with a patina of inevitability — as if it could have only occurred the way it did.
But “what just happened to us is a kind of humbling lesson about how contingent all of this is,” says Susan Schulten, a history professor at the University of Denver. “And nothing’s foreordained.”
No matter what, of course, there will be fallout and an impact from the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday at a Pennsylvania rally, where an attendee was killed and two others wounded, and law enforcement killed the shooter. But what it will be, in this election year and in the years to come, will unfold differently than it would have in an America where events had gone differently.
History is filled with examples of chance, randomness or luck playing a part in how things turn 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 recounts an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when a submarine from what was then the Soviet Union came close to firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at U.S. forces out of a belief it was being attacked. But a circumstantial delay in getting the order carried out allowed enough time for another officer to recognize that wasn't the case.
There are plenty of other moments where there can be endless “what-if” discussions, from assassinations of figures like Abraham Lincoln and John and Robert Kennedy to other attempted killings such as the attack on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, two months after he assumed the presidency.
It's also events like the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Rank points out, when there were ordinary people who “missed their subway connection or were late or were early and just missed being killed in that disaster, whereas other folks were not as lucky.”
Trying to find meaning
Often, people respond to events like these by trying to make sense of them through a belief in coherence — to summon some kind of universal meaning, or divine plan.
That's because people want a sense of control, says Daryl Van Tongeren, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan. It's too unnerving, he says, to admit that life is random and chance-filled. “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 destinies — that we can pull ourselves up by our own efforts — the idea of randomness can land as particularly unnerving, Rank says.
“In the United States, we’re really steeped in the idea of rugged individualism and self-reliance and meritocracy and you do it on your own, and you’re in control, and you have agency,” he says. "And to some extent, we are in control. We do make decisions. But another aspect of life is that ... there are things that happen to you that you have no control over.
“That’s kind of unsettling,” he says. “But that’s the way life plays out. That’s the world.”