It is only by providence that Donald Trump is not dead.
For Millennials and Zoomers, this was our first time witnessing an attempted assassination of a US President, but there is a high probability that we will see Trump targeted again.
Such an attempt may be in the supposed safety of a government building, such as the White House or Capitol Building, or perhaps a courthouse.
It is not without precedent.
At the Rand Easter Show in Johannesburg, South Africa, on April 9, 1960, then-South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was shot twice at point-blank range by David Pratt.
Pratt was a 52-year-old Transvaal farmer who claimed he was angry with Apartheid, but was later found to lack legal capacity and died by suicide while in jail a year after the assassination attempt.
Verwoerd’s life was saved by millimetres, and he returned to work determined to sever all British links to South Africa.
In October 1960 he oversaw the success of the referendum to become a republic. The pro-republic side campaigned on the preservation of White rule, rejecting the British attitude of the inevitability of decolonisation, as put by UK Prime Minister Macmillan in his “Winds of Change” speech in Cape Town in early 1960.
Verwoerd is the only Prime Minister in the British Commonwealth to oversee a White electorate which voted in favour of a republic, and one has to consider whether the shock of the assassination attempt encouraged just enough undecided Afrikaner and British voters, particularly in the Cape Province, to get Verwoerd’s push for a republic over the line.
The Verwoerd era, while not free from ethnic uprisings, as shown by the Sharpeville Massacre, was largely a period of stability, economic growth and determination to see forth the grand vision of Apartheid.
Verwoerd’s vision of South Africa was a parallel society of “good neighbourliness” where different racial groups were to live in their own homelands where they could exercise self-determination.
For most South African Whites, their primary concern was stemming the influx of blacks into the cities and ensuring those who were present were there temporarily as “visitors”. Such concerns had been present since South Africa’s rapid industrialisation during World War Two, alongside the very high birth rates of blacks and expansion of the medical system.
Since becoming Prime Minister in September 1958 Verwoerd steadily built a reputation of being a “Man of Granite” and in March 1966 Verwoerd’s National Party won an impressive 126 seats out of 170.
But this all abruptly came to an end on September 6 that same year.
Shortly after 2pm, Verwoerd entered the Chamber of the House of Assembly having left his wife, Betsy Verwoerd, who was making her way upstairs to the observation bay.
Verwoerd’s two bodyguards remained outside the chamber as the Prime Minister entered, where soon after sitting down, parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas proceeded to lunge towards Verwoerd and stab him four times in the chest with a long, double-edged knife.
Verwoerd is said to have given a “half smile”, remained upright for a few seconds, and then collapsed on the bench in front of him.
Tsafendas, born in Portuguese Mozambique, was mixed race, Greek and black, but when he entered South Africa he was classified as White. Tasfendas had been notified that he was to be deported from South Africa, however this deportation was never carried out.
He was later found not guilty by reason of insanity and detained at the “South African State President’s pleasure”, eventually dying in jail in the new “Rainbow Nation” in 1999.
As for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, it will be a topic of speculation for decades to come as to why the US Secret Service failed to stop a gunman opening fire from an obvious location.
The United States Secret Service falls under the parent agency of the Department of Homeland Security which Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a man of Jewish-Cuban ancestry, is responsible for.
For anyone such a breach should not be surprising. Mayorkas has presided over the welcoming of an estimated 7.2 million illegal migrants entering via the US Mexico border since January 2021.
Like the assassination of JFK, and the strange connection between the Bush family and the family of John Hinckley Jr, the man who tried to kill President Reagan in March 1981, we will never know the complete details of the failed attempt on Trump’s life.
Joe Biden, a man notorious for poor mental cognition, put it remarkably straight at a meeting with donors on Monday, 8 July 2024 where he said, “so, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”.
One cannot help but think that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would have been thinking of “right wing extremism” or White identitarianism, rather than the recent remarks made by Biden to his donors, when he said in response to the Trump shooting that there was “no place for violence in the democratic process”.
Amidst this Fourth Turning, it is quite probable the historic and shocking events seen in this weekend in Pennsylvania may be superseded by an event even more extreme in the latter half of this year.
It was intended for Trump to die. Whether such intention was only by Thomas Matthew Crooks or shared by someone else, we may never know.
And while it is a blessing that Trump survived, I fear this is not the last time an attempt will be made on his life, and next time it may happen in a supposedly safe location.
As seen with Verwoerd, even where death has been averted by miracle, no matter how determined a leader is to continue, we are all mortal – the “Man of Granite” and “Father of Apartheid” survived an attempted assassination at an event in public, but it was in the Chamber of the House of Assembly where he endured a sudden, unexpected and violent death.
