Trump, the Wind, and the Thin Line Between Reality and Madness

One inch.

That’s the difference between this moment and plunging to the depths of America’s violent nihilism. One inch is all that separates us from Trump the candidate and Trump the martyr. Mind-blowing is one of modernity’s most overused phrases, but that’s exactly how I feel right now. I’m having a hard time processing what I saw when I first picked up my phone coming in from doing yardwork on Saturday.

**Gunshots**

“Of course, another mass shooting in America…wait, did he just grab his ear?”

The following moments took on a surreal unreality from which I have still been unable to escape from. Someone almost assassinated Donald Trump. It really happened.

One inch. Less than that, really. Two-thirds of one from my right ear to my head. That’s the difference between life and likely not.

It’s enough to make you believe in the concept of alternate timelines. How else can you rationally explain coming that close to a full-blown 1968 moment prophesized by Tucker freaking Carlson?

To be clear, this fixation on the centimeters between us and a dark path is not wishful thinking. I thank God that Trump was not killed. That is not a door that our heavily armed country wants to open. This is a real opportunity to tone it down.

Trump is not going to become a different person like so many pundits are still somehow deluding themselves into believing, but it wouldn’t be that surprising if the world’s most vain man heard a bullet whizz by his head and had a change of heart about the volume he was broadcasting at. Besides, he’s smart enough to know he has a layup in front of a feckless party already admitting defeat, he can talk like a normal politician from here on out and probably cruise to victory against the Democratic Party as currently constituted.

The right-wingers who are convinced this is the deep state trying to assassinate Trump are believing a completely incoherent story where this shadowy cabal enlisted a 20 year-old kid to take out a president. Yet somehow he couldn’t hit a pretty standard target most Army sniper school graduates could nail from admittedly, a bafflingly close distance from an elevated perch that does make it much more difficult to rebut accusations that this was not some kind of inside job. The anti-Trump folks who insist that Trump staged it in a Reichstag Fire-style moment are reaching for an explanation that makes even less sense.

But this is where I sympathize with both groups trafficking in John Grisham fantasies in their desperate search to find some kind of objective reason. I am having an extremely difficult time accepting reality too. I know it happened. I accept what I saw when I first reached for my phone, but I literally cannot believe it.

So here I am, obsessing over the wind.

The Wind Saved His Life

I think it’s because my brain is searching for anything tangible to help process this event. It occurred outside a reality I am prepared to accept, and I can feel myself grabbing whatever I can hold on to in order to try to pull myself out of the abyss.

The wind wasn’t blowing. Then it was. That’s why he’s here, so I tell myself, over and over.

At first, I wanted to dive into the data and try to calculate the effect the wind had on 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks’ bullet. I figured there had to be a formula I could use to measure the path of the bullet both with and without the wind and prove that it saved Trump’s life, and I could build my path back to reality through the safety and logic of math. I spent a good chunk of Sunday diving through gun blogs, learning how little I knew.

Turns out there are endless complications to calculating the equation I hoped could be my salvation. The shooter was firing mostly south, and the wind was traveling west-northwest. If it was blowing directly behind or against him, there are fewer obstacles and a number may be ascertainable, but with the crosswind at the barrel, the effect it had on the bullet’s path is apparently anyone’s guess outside of the FBI. Realizing my salvation was going to remain theoretical, I felt my brain floating out my head, desperately searching for something familiar.

I still can’t stop thinking about the wind, because even though I cannot put a number to its effect, I know that the difference between zero miles per hour and eight miles per hour is more than an inch of movement at 430 feet. To those who I have brought this fixation to, they have countered with something like “well they were always going to have the rally later in the day anyway when it was cooler,” but that’s not true! The shooting happened at 6:10 local time, when it was 93 degrees and the wind was blowing between seven and eight miles per hour.

It was 90 degrees at 1:51, when there was no wind.

The mid-afternoon of July 13th, 2024, in Bethel, Pennsylvania is my trapdoor into madness. I do not quite know the path back to reality yet, but I am confident in how to get to an alternate universe that isn’t so lucky. A universe where that bullet isn’t pushed off course by the wind. A universe teeming with violence.

A chill goes down my spine when I think about that world. I’m extremely thankful we don’t live in it, and ultimately that’s what tethers me most to this one following a moment you can still feel reverberating throughout history.