July 13, 2024: An Oral History

There are certain moments in American history that have become iconic, whether they are triumphs or tragedies. This is not unique to the United States, of course. But given the United States’ role as a cultural superpower, even plenty of people who’ve never been to the country remember precisely where they were when these events occurred.

September 11, 2001 was such a day. Hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing about three thousand people immediately and twice that number later through health effects such as cancer. My mother remembers exactly where she was that day - taking my brother and I, who were both toddlers at the time, to buy shoes. 

Another such day was December 14, 2012. It was not the first school shooting in the United States, but as horrific and tragic as all such events are, Sandy Hook was even worse. The majority of the victims were six years old. My mother tells me she was Christmas shopping at the mall that day when news broke of the violence in Connecticut, and her thoughts turned to the families who wouldn’t get to see their children open their Christmas presents.

I was not old enough to remember 9/11, nor did they tell us about Sandy Hook as it was happening. I guess my school was far enough away to not be put on lockdown. It’s sickening that students go to school in this country worried about anything other than their GPA, but that’s the country we live in. And if Sandy Hook didn’t change things, it’s doubtful anything will.

In any case, for me, the day on which I remember exactly where I was happens to be one year ago today. July 13, 2024, the day later immortalized by MAGA musicians Hadas Levy and Forgiato Blow as “J13.”

On this hot, hazy summer evening, I was on vacation in a small Massachusetts town. My brother and I had agreed that we’d eat dinner together at a nearby restaurant, and we were getting dressed for it. I had donned the appropriate attire and was waiting for my brother to do the same. While waiting for him, I was looking at my phone, just the way people tended to do in 2024 (and even more people tend to do today).

It was then that I scrolled onto a political forum and saw the news that there had been an apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump. He’d been speaking at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania when shots were fired, injuring him. It was the closest a President or former President had come to being murdered since the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.

When my brother came downstairs, our conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, bro. Guess what?

Brother: What?

Me: Trump got shot.

Brother: Are you serious?

Me: Yes.

Brother: Holy shit.

We then proceeded to dinner, a restaurant in a beautiful location with even better food. We ate indoors, my brother urging me to resist the temptation to look at my phone. The restaurant’s employees, or whoever decides what channel the TV will be tuned to, made a very wise decision to show sports as opposed to news. If the TV had been on a news channel, the patrons would not have been able to focus on anything else.

Details emerged later. Trump had been shot in the ear from a distant range. The would-be assassin was a twenty-year-old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, who’d been shot dead by a team of snipers seconds after he’d fired the shot heard around the world. Trump was treated at a nearby hospital, then flown out of Pittsburgh to attend the RNC at which Hulk Hogan et al would speak.

In all probability, we’ll never know precisely why Crooks tried to kill Trump. He was a registered Republican, but had made a small donation to a progressive cause. He’d only voted once, in the 2022 midterm elections. (Whether you voted in a given election is public record in this country, but who you voted for is not). We don’t know if he backed, for instance, John Fetterman or Mehmet Oz in that year’s US Senate race.

Now, look: I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. I never have been, and I never will be. But I don’t think we should discount the significance of “J13” from a historical perspective. I mean, the bullet grazed Trump’s ear; if he had not turned his head ever so slightly, he would have been dead. One inch. That’s all it would have taken to fundamentally change the course of history.

Immediately after the shooting, Evan Vucci, a photojournalist with the Associated Press, took some of the most famous photos of the year. And say what you will about Trump, but that image of him raising his fist with a giant American flag hanging against the sky has become iconic. We all saw the pictures. 

One of the most famous photographs of 2024 depicting a bloodied Donald Trump raising his fist after being shot in Butler County, Pennsylvania. There’s a giant American flag behind him.

This all occurred amidst the weeks of speculation over whether or not Joe Biden would drop out of the presidential race following the infamous “we finally beat Medicare” debate. The assassination attempt and resulting sympathy votes, coupled with those badass photos (as much as I hate Trump, they were badass) gave me a sinking feeling that Trump had the election in the bag. Biden’s ultimate withdrawal from the election, after which Kamala Harris announced she would run in his place, gave me false hope that we could avoid a second Trump term, but it was ultimately just that: False hope.

I do not know definitively how much this act of political violence, which I condemn in the clearest possible terms, contributed to Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. I simply don’t, and we should be honest about that. But it’s certainly a major moment in American history.

Relative to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, or the September 11 attacks in 2001, the news landscape has shifted massively. Digitally, we are far more divided into our own echo chambers - when Donald Trump says something completely demented that makes him sound just as far gone mentally as Joe Biden, many media outlets, particularly Fox News, don’t cover it. Neither do the social media circles that push QAnon, which is basically what the average Republican voter believes at this point. And those “social media circles” have become the main news source for many as the legacy media digs its own grave.

My point is that in today’s fragmented era of information, it’s a lot harder for there to be one Giant News Story™ that will Make The World Stand Still™. That’s especially true considering how quickly the news cycle has moved during the Trump era, particularly in the last few months. Perhaps Signalgate could have been that moment in a different world. (On a side note, the saying if a Democrat had done this is basically beating a dead horse by now. If Grandma had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. But the point is still valid.)

Despite the systemic factors hastening the news cycle, and despite the increasing atomization of American society, the events of “J13” managed to defy those trends. They have become an iconic American moment, whether we like it or not. 

Furthermore, it’s a sobering reminder that history isn’t just something that happened in the past. We’re all living through it. The guy who wrote that book about “the end of history” following the breakup of the Soviet Union was full of horseshit.

It’s not over until it’s over, and it’s never over.