Winston Churchill and King Canute

The Campaign Unfurls

“Trump was just elected today, folks,” I heard a man shout. “He is a martyr.”

—The New York Times

Well, I don’t know about that. There is nothing to celebrate here. People died. The sickness of our gun culture was once again demonstrated. But the shooting does have a primal, almost mythic quality to it. Trump is now the warrior bloodied, girded for the battle to come. He will ascend the podium in Milwaukee, triumphant—not merely in the traditional nominated way, but as the embattled leader of an army. “We stand at Armageddon and are fighting for the Lord,” Teddy Roosevelt said when he accepted the Progressive Party nomination in 1912. This feels something like that. Trump’s campaign has been courting apocalyptic quasi-religious symbolism from the start. In 2024, it has become a crusade against the infidel, against a feminized polyglot Democratic Party that exudes weakness, from its nominee on down.

Churchill said there was nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without effect—but to be shot at and wounded slightly ain’t bad, either. Trump now has the equivalent of a Prussian fencing scar, his courage validated by his defiant fist pump. His energy will be torqued by this; his vice presidential pick will add to the momentum, unless he blows it in a Palinesque sort of way. I wouldn’t be surprised—and this is a grisly thought—that the assassination attempt plus the convention will move the polls in a way that Biden’s debate performance did not. Trump goes from strength to strength.

The Republican Convention will provide the Democrats an opportunity to proceed quietly with the task at hand: Convincing Joe Biden to stand down. From what I’m hearing, the process has gone subterranean but is increasing in its intensity. There is a sense that Democrats want this to be a surgical procedure—Biden gone, Kamala installed, no blitz primary. They will, after the quasi-martyrdom and the GOP convention, need something, to bring them back to life. If the Dems had a Trumpian sense of drama, Biden would choose the night of Agent Orange’s convention speech to announce his withdrawal from the race.

Biden’s campaign, since the debate, has been inept and awful. The lashing out against the “elites,” the “I alone” solipsism, are about the last things I would have expected from the guy. He is not normally a man of insults, but he has allowed his campaign to insult his supporters. The image of King Lear, stubborn and stupid and mad on the moors has been summoned by other writers this week. But a better lesson may be King Canute, pretending to hold back the tides. As recounted by David Hume, Canute was a beloved king of England, Norway and Denmark, surrounded by fawning courtiers and desirous of teaching them a lesson in humility:

{The] monarch, it is said, ordered his chair to be set on the sea-shore, while the tide was rising, and as the waters approached, he commanded them to retire, and to obey the voice who was lord of the ocean. He feigned to sit some time in expectation of their submission; but when the sea still advanced towards him, and began to wash him with its billows, he turned to his courtiers, and remarked to them, that every creature in the universe was feeble and impotent, and that power resided with one Being alone, in whose hands were all the elements of nature; who could say to ocean, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther’; and who could level with his nod the most towering piles of human pride and ambition.

Perhaps Biden, a lover of poetry, might prefer the Canute legend in the hands of William Makepeace Thackeray:

KING CANUTE was weary hearted; he had reigned for years a score,
Battling, struggling, pushing, fighting, killing much and robbing more;
And he thought upon his actions, walking by the wild sea-shore…

[I’ve edited out several wonderful verses to cut to the chase:]

"Might I stay the sun above us, good sir Bishop?" Canute cried;
"Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride?
If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide.

"Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?"
Said the Bishop, bowing lowly, "Land and sea, my lord, are thine."
Canute turned towards the ocean—"Back!" he said, "thou foaming brine.

"From the sacred shore I stand on, I command thee to retreat;
Venture not, thou stormy rebel, to approach thy master's seat:
Ocean, be thou still! I bid thee come not nearer to my feet!"

But the sullen ocean answered with a louder, deeper roar,
And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling sounding on the shore;
Back the Keeper and the Bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.

And he sternly bade them never more to kneel to human clay,
But alone to praise and worship That which earth and seas obey:
And his golden crown of empire never wore he from that day.
King Canute is dead and gone: Parasites exist alway.

The presidential campaign languished in a vast, unusual stasis for the past year. That is highly irregular in American politics. And now, with the debate and the shooting, the curtain rises on the ultimate drama. The next weeks will be amazing, perhaps horrible, perhaps Biblical.