For those of a certain age, or with more than a woke education, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump brings back echoes of history.
Not exactly the history of the abysmal political year of 1968, which saw the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., 39, and Robert F. Kennedy, 42, riots in major cities across the nation—especially violent in Washington, D.C.—and violent demonstrations and a pitched battle during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
But just as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., noted when President Ronald Reagan was recovering from his gunshot wound in 1981, this time the nation could take heart because the assassin’s target survived.
The year 1968 saw an exhausted 59-year-old president, Lyndon Johnson, withdraw his candidacy for reelection, and conventional and (then) not widely disliked 55-year-old Richard Nixon win the election to succeed him. Neither President Joe Biden, 81, nor Trump, 78, fits into this script.
The more illuminating analogy to the two transcendental events of recent weeks—Biden’s debate performance June 27 and the attempted assassination of Trump on July 13—echo things that happened some 104 years ago, in the presidential campaign cycle of 1920.
That’s not a campaign cycle much remembered because of its politically incorrect result—the repudiation of President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and sentimental hero of liberals who applaud his scorn of constitutional limitations and conveniently forget his record as........