It’s been one year since President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, an event that merits some reflection. For starters, we learned this week that the U.S. Secret Service took action against six of the agents who failed to prevent the shooting of Trump last July, sparking debate as to whether the discipline - brief suspensions without pay, but nobody lost their job - meted out was appropriate to the failure.
We still know almost nothing about the young man who shot the president, a fact certain to fuel theories for many years to come. Whether the would-be assassin acted alone or as part of a larger scheme is a question not likely to be answered any time soon.
What we know with certainty is that the sparing of Donald Trump’s life led to one of the most consequential six months in American presidential history. The man has brokered peace between Israel and Iran, and mediated an end to the fighting between Congo and Rwanda. He crippled Iran’s nuclear capabilities, setting back their ambitions for quite some time. He ended the flow of millions of illegal aliens into the country, undertook efforts to make global tariff policy more equitable for the United States and successfully shepherded one of the biggest tax and budget bills ever through Congress. He did all this and more, in the face of unrelenting and unprecedented lawfare, in less than 180 days.
Whether one loves Trump or hates him, the first six months of his presidency have been extraordinary by any measure. And while economic uncertainty lingers as tariff policy unfolds, along with questions of whether inflation will return, Americans are far more optimistic today than they were last year. Barely a quarter of Americans - 26.3% - thought the nation was heading in the right direction 72 hours before Election Day last year. As of July 5, that figure stood at 42.8%.
Many people, including President Trump himself, believe the attempt on his life failed because of one thing. It was the same thing our Founding Fathers relied on as they committed treason against the British Empire by signing the Declaration of Independence. In signing that document, those men pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, doing so “with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence.”
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Not everyone agrees that divine providence exists or what precisely it means, but many Christians believe firmly in it. It is the belief that God did not simply create the universe and walk away. It’s a belief well articulated by theologian Dr. R.C. Sproul who wrote, “Christians have had an acute sense that this is our Father’s world and that the affairs of men and nations, in the final analysis, are in His hands.”
Some say Trump is alive because he was lucky. The origin of luck as a concept is worthy of debate, and calling the president lucky isn’t necessarily wrong. Some may call it fate, others kismet, but those are just words people use when there’s no better explanation for events and their outcomes.
A belief in divine providence is not the product of a weak or naive mind. It reflects a worldview that accepts the fact that we can only see about 5% of our universe. The remaining 95% is pure mystery and whatever we believe that 95% is, we accept it on faith. Whether it’s faith in a loving God or the consensus of scientific theoreticians, we all have faith in something. Those who prefer science over God might consider the words of physicist and quantum mechanics pioneer Werner Heisenberg who observed, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Another of those learned men was Albert Einstein. There’s no definitive record of Einstein’s belief in God; he typically referred to himself as agnostic. But throughout his work in quantum physics, Einstein knew there was something out there, something holding sway over the cosmos, resulting in the kind of order we see every night in our galaxy and beyond. Einstein did not reflexively dismiss a supreme creator of the universe, saying instead, “God does not play dice.”
God was not playing dice with Donald Trump's life on July 13, 2024. He was not leaving to chance the life of a presidential candidate and, by extension, the fate of a nation. It was divine providence that spared Trump’s life and in turn, brought renewed hope to millions more Americans. One wonders what providence holds for the next three-and-a-half years.
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