It was the most successful of history’s countless assassinations.
Having delivered Israel’s tribute to its occupier, Eglon the King of Moab, the left-handed Ehud, son of Gera, told him: “I have a message for you from God.” And after the intrigued monarch ordered his aides to leave them alone, Ehud drew from his right hip a double-edged dagger and “drove it into Eglon’s belly” so fiercely that “the fat closed over the blade and the hilt went in after the blade.” (Judges 3:17-22)
Eglon died instantaneously and the assassin, who apparently knew the palace corridors, sneaked out undetected. Not only was the assassination flawless, but so were its results. Politically, it sparked a revolt, militarily the rebels won, and strategically “the land was tranquil for 80 years.”
That was the perfect assassination. The future would see countless others, but few would match its success.
John Hinckley’s bullet wounded Ronald Reagan severely, but he recovered and proceeded to a pair of widely applauded presidential terms. Even more crucially, from the failed assassin’s viewpoint, actress Jody Foster, whom the assault was meant to impress, was unimpressed.
Assassins with more conventional aims – like transforming nations, empires, or mankind – were no less failed. Anwar Sadat’s five assassins killed their target, but besides being caught and executed – three by hanging, two by firing squad – the Islamist revolution they hoped to spark never began. Instead, Sadat’s successor cracked down on his country’s Islamists throughout his 29-year reign.
The same was true of Abraham Lincoln’s murderer, who reversed none of the reality he refused to accept and achieved nothing other than martyrize its architect. The same is true of the other three American presidents’ assassinations as well as those of former Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Italy’s king Umberto I, and the attempt on David Ben-Gurion’s life in 1957 when a hand grenade exploded in the Knesset plenary.
In all these and many other attacks on leaders the countries they led recovered quickly and their future was unaffected.
Even so, some assassinations were followed by major mayhem, and that is also what now seems ready to happen in the United States, and well beyond it, following this week’s failed attempt at Donald Trump’s life.
Changing the course of history
THREE ASSASSINATIONS changed history. The first was the murder of Julius Caesar, which sparked nearly 15 years of multiple civil wars that ultimately put an end to the Roman Republic and replaced it with the Roman Empire, where power shifted from the senate to the emperor, a transition that the assassins, ironically, hoped to prevent.
Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 was even more fateful. The only reformist leader Russia had throughout the 19th century, Alexander abolished serfdom, created an independent court system, multiplied the number of high school graduates, let the universities govern themselves, established a central bank, introduced a modern budget, developed the coal, iron, and oil industries, and extended the railway system from 660 to 14,000 miles.
The assassination brought this reformist drive to an abrupt end. Russia’s effort to modernize its society and harmonize with the outer world gave way to the political rigidity and social restlessness that gradually provoked the Bolshevik Revolution that killed millions, enslaved nations, and inspired the Cold War that threatened mankind with a nuclear war.
Equally cataclysmic was Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie’s assassination, which triggered the Great War that buried four empires and killed more than 15 million people.
Now, some elements of all these reactions are ready to happen in the United States as the failed attempt on Donald Trump’s life puts him on course for a grand return.
A campaign miracle
THE SCENE at the rally outside Butler, Pennsylvania, was a godsend for the Trump campaign. The lucky streak that began with Biden’s disastrous debate and continued with a Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal of anti-Trump charges, culminated with the image of Trump ducking a bullet, rising on his feet with blood on his face, and waving his fist defiantly to an ecstatic multitude’s ovation.
If a contest were launched for the design of the ultimate bait with which to hook the impressionable, angry, uninformed, know-nothing electorate – this image would win.
No deed Joe Biden might now do, no phrase he might utter, and no scene he may conceivably concoct can match the effect of what will surely be recalled as one of the most politically potent photos a camera ever captured.
Yes, things might yet change if Biden steps aside before next month’s Democratic convention, but chances of that happening are slim at best, and even if it can still happen procedurally, politically it now seems too late for any Democrat to turn the tide.
The bullet consolidated the martyr’s image that Trump has cultivated all along, but unlike all other martyrs, whose resurrection is only a hope, his second coming will be real: a political fact, a biographical drama, and an epic tragedy wrapped in telegenic farce.
Like Rome, as it parted with its republic, America’s leader will divide its society, turn on its institutions, and impose on its senate a king. Like the tsars who drove Russia to catastrophe, he will be self-absorbed while neglecting the people, their livelihood, and enlightenment. And like the emperors who produced World War I, he will be a reckless statesman eager to tinker with an explosive world he does not understand, and refuses to learn.
There will be no Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, or any other of the knowledgeable, balanced, and opinionated officials that the old Trump hired and fired. Instead, there will be a new Trump, a Trump on steroids surrounded by sycophants, ignoramuses, cheerleaders, and court clowns who will tell the naked king that his clothes are beautiful, the people are happy, and the world was never so safe
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.