As of Saturday, the world knows definitively how President Donald Trump reacts under real fire. With blood dripping down his face and a tattered ear, the former and maybe future president raised his defiant fist into the air and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The moment, memorialized in awe-inspiring photos, reminds me of a scene from 2007, when Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Mitchell Burghardt was called to the scene of a bombing that had killed four U.S. troops. As he tried to disarm another explosive device, a watching enemy fighter detonated it, blowing Burghardt high into the air before depositing him into the dirt. As he lay there, all he could think of was that he did not want to wind up like his father, who was a three-Purple Heart Vietnam veteran who was paralyzed from the waist down. He described what happened next:
They started to cut away my pants and I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down. Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, ‘Good, I’m in business.’ ‘As a stretcher was brought over, adrenaline and anger kicked in. ‘I decided to walk to the helicopter. I wasn’t going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher.’ He stood and gave the insurgents who had blown him up a one-fingered salute. ‘I flipped them one. It was like, ‘OK, I lost that round, but I’ll be back next week’.
Now there is a man not to be messed with.
Much like Burghardt’s one-fingered symbol and promise to “be back next week,” Trump’s fighting fist and resilience were unmistakable. Trump was back the next day when he landed in Milwaukee for the GOP convention.
Another man not to be messed with.
A combat soldier who talked to me this week made a good point: “You see what a person is made of and how they will perform when they come under fire. We have both seen people who freeze up or can’t perform when that happens. Others rise to the occasion. But you can’t fake it.”
He’s right. You can’t fake it. When Trump came up, face bloodied, fist in the air, and snarling, “Fight!” people knew they were seeing the real man, not a fake persona.
Trump’s was the sort of instinctive response that could never be scripted after polling or testing with focus groups. No speech writer gave him a script. No adviser suggested he should react forcefully and with undisguised anger, before allowing himself to be pushed off the stage by his Secret Service detail. That came from the core of the man.
What Do Americans Want in Our President?
A Fox News guest this week shared her immediate reaction to how Trump responded to the shooting — and summed up what many Americans are thinking: We have a warrior who is going to keep fighting for us.
Presidential leadership is important to all Americans, regardless of their party affiliation or preference, and to people across the globe who value liberty and seek security. Toughness and the ability to confront risk and even life-threatening danger without shrinking from the fight are especially important when our president is dealing with foreign leaders. We want our allies to see this character in our president, but even more, we want our adversaries and enemies to understand that they are not dealing with some lightweight, that the president is not a man to be messed with.
Some other presidents have shown similar strength. Teddy Roosevelt demonstrated it when he was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin, but then continued with his address to the audience. Here is how The New York Times described it:
‘I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,’ Roosevelt told the astonished crowd as he got started. ‘But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!’
He apologized that as a result, he might not be able to speak as long as normal — and then proceeded to give a 90-minute stemwinder. Only at that point did he agree to be taken to the hospital. The bullet had been headed straight for his heart before stopping, lodged against a rib four inches from the sternum.
After that, there could be no doubt — if there ever had been any — that Roosevelt was a man to be reckoned with. Or, as Charles DeGaulle would say, he was “a serious man.”
Until the assassination attempt on Saturday, my favorite recent example of presidential strength was still about Trump. On “The Sage Steele Show,” Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, described a meeting between President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the leaders of the Taliban. In Hunt’s telling, Trump told them he wanted American troops out of Afghanistan but that it was going to be a phased withdrawal, “with conditions.” He then told the Taliban leader that if, during the withdrawal, they “harmed a single hair on the head of an American,” he would kill him.
When the stunned translator hesitated, Trump said, “Tell him. Just tell him what I said.” After the translation, Trump then pulled out a satellite photo of the Taliban leader’s house, handed it to him, and walked out of the room. It worked.
A serious man, indeed.
Can anyone — anyone — conceive of Joe Biden, or any member of his cabinet for that matter, being wounded at a rally and then getting to his feet, maintaining his awareness, and reacting the way that Trump did? Choose your fighter.
John A. Lucas is a retired attorney who has tried and argued a variety of cases, including before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man, later graduating from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger who fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. He is married with five children. He and his wife now live in Virginia. John also is published at johnalucas6.substack.com.
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