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Carlos Lozada

By Carlos Lozada

Opinion Columnist

The words poured out, instinctively, each one punctuated with a pump of Donald Trump’s fist and a grimace of his blood-streaked face, an answer to the staccato of rifle shots that had been fired his way barely a minute earlier.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!”

The image of Trump in that moment — the American flag behind him, the Secret Service around him, the piercing blue sky above him — has become an indelible piece of our political iconography, on home pages today and in history books forever. But those few words, delivered to the thousands of rally goers in Butler, Pa., and to the millions more who watched the scene looping on their screens, are no less emblematic, no less essential to grasping Trump’s meaning and message.

With that terse, defiant refrain, Trump accomplished many things at once. He offered reassurance that he remained both safe and himself; he issued a directive for how supporters should react to those who attack him; and he captured the emotional state of a nation that was on edge well before the horror of an attempted assassination. Trump’s social-media posts and interviews since the shooting have stressed the need for national unity, but unity was not his first impulse.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” is the sound of Donald Trump returning fire.

In the canon of Trump books and speeches, “fight” is a constant byword, but it has meant radically different things in different contexts. In scripted moments meant to convey suitably presidential sensibilities, Trump is fighting for others — whether the American people or those the nation has forgotten. In moments of political or legal crisis, when Trump feels besieged, his call to “fight” becomes personal. It is not a fight for others, but a battle for himself, one in which the people are enlisted in Trump’s wars, persuaded that his causes are their own. Eventually, the causes fall away, and the leader becomes all there is to fight for.

“When people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard,” Trump writes in “The Art of the Deal,” published in 1987 and still the foundational document of Trump studies. He also complains that attorneys are too quick to settle disputes. “I’d rather fight than fold,” he says later in the book. Fold once, he argues, and soon you’ll be known for it.

Those early fights in “The Art of the Deal” focus on winning tax breaks and fending off lawsuits. But in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump calls for loftier confrontations. The American dream is dying because of excessive regulation, onerous taxes, racism and discrimination, Trump writes, and while the United States sends troops around the world, it can’t seem to look after its own kids at home. “What about their........

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