ArcaMax

PARIS — Between the mugshot and the assassination survival fist-pump, Trump now has more bad boy anti-establishment iconic images than Che Guevara. That’s always bad news for the elites trying to destroy an ideology.

It’s when under extreme pressure or threat that one finds out what they’re really made of, behind the facade of marketing and posturing. Everyone just discovered the real Donald Trump in the moment an assassin attempted to take his life.

In the immediate aftermath of a rooftop gunman firing at the former president at a Pennsylvania rally last Saturday, and while bleeding from his ear as a result of being grazed by a bullet, the former U.S. President and current Republican presidential candidate instinctively raised his fist in the air against a flying American flag backdrop, repeatedly shouting to his supporters: “Fight!”

It’s virtually impossible to fake a reaction to an imminent threat on your life. As someone who was mugged several years ago on the Paris subway, chasing down and catching the perpetrators through the city’s streets despite being threatened with a bullet to the head, I can tell you that, in such a moment, auto-pilot kicks in and takes over your entire system. You don’t think – you just react. And that uncontrollable reaction goes to the very heart of who you are — your innate character — not what you think you should be doing.

In Trump’s fateful moment, all his endless self-flagellation about how strong and tough he is consolidated into a single iconic image that goes far beyond capturing everything that he’s ever said about his own courage. But it means this particular moment in Western civilization speaks even greater volumes.

What does Trump believe he’s fighting if not the establishment system whose ideology he opposes on everything from forever wars to indulging special interests that tip the scales in its own favor to the detriment of the average citizen? The same system that used its prosecutorial discretion to charge him with dozens of felonies when his opponents were let off the hook for similar offenses. His former Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton got off with a fine for campaign finance violations, while Special Counsel Robert Hur deemed current US President Joe Biden too out of it to be charged with mishandling classified documents, calling him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

Is it any wonder that Trump feels that he’s fighting an entire system? And that system doesn’t begin and end inside America’s borders. The Western establishment has become radical in labeling domestic opponents as enemies of humanity and democracy. And now they’re shocked that nut jobs have started answering their clarion call in the most extreme way possible.

“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it,” Biden said after the attack. But just last month, he called Trump a threat to democracy for daring to challenge the results and encouraging his supporters to demand the same – not exactly as crazy an idea as it might first seem, considering how the establishment here in France just openly colluded with the anti-establishment left to steal victory from the anti-establishment right in parliamentary elections earlier this month, despite the right overwhelmingly winning the popular vote.

There have now been two serious attacks on Western populist leaders in as many months. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot five times in the stomach coming out of a meeting in Handlová in May, allegedly by an individual described in court documents as wanting “military assistance to be given to Ukraine” – something to which Fico openly objected – and “regards the current government as a Judas toward the European Union.”

Everyone who doesn’t march in lock-step with the Western establishment’s dominant narrative is branded a traitor, a Kremlin stooge, or a threat to democracy. Apparently, you can’t just have a different view from the increasingly socially and economically radical, warmongering agenda that they peddle. They’ve acted repeatedly to quash dissidence through top-down censorship, effectively protecting their own lies and manipulations from any threat of what they conveniently dismiss as “disinformation.”

Trump and Fico are the embodiment of the opposition to the establishment’s growing radicalism. Another is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who dropped in to see Trump last week as part of his global peace mission in his role as the six-month rotating EU p resident, after first visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, then Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping. Orban was captured on camera at the recent NATO summit in Washington looking totally marginalized and alone while the other attendees buzzed and back-slapped all around him. At a meeting of the world’s largest weapons sales lobby – which is what NATO is – a man of peace is clearly the odd one out.

Recent parliamentary elections across Europe have confirmed the rise of a populist opposition to an establishment whose interests are increasingly divorced from those of the average person. Trump, fist in the air, has just become an icon for that global movement. Instead of acting shocked that Western democracy has become so uncivilized and violent, perhaps establishment leaders should take a closer look in the mirror at their own role in unleashing radicalism and inspiring their supporters in defending it.