spectator.org
Trump, Reagan, and God’s Divine Plan
The American Spectator’s own Paul Kengor, our editor as well as a professor of political science at Grove City College, is the author of a number of notable books, including A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.
The book, and its tale of Reagan’s response after being shot by would-be assassin John Hinckley on March 30, 1981, shortly after taking office in 1981, is a vivid tale, not simply of the shooting attempt itself, but also of Reagan’s response after he began his recovery.
In Reagan’s case, the attempt on his life occurred after he had delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton hotel and was emerging from a special exit made for VIP visits. As he appeared into public view, Reagan raised his left arm to wave at the crowd of press and onlookers. Burrowed into the press scrum was Hinkley, who quickly pulled out his handgun and fired several shots. In addition to Reagan, three others were hit — White House Press Secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and Washington D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty.
Reagan was shoved into the back seat of the presidential limousine. While it was first directed back to the White House, when the president began coughing up blood, his Secret Service agents redirected the limousine to George Washington University Hospital. Collapsing on entering the hospital, Reagan was quickly taken to an operating room.
Kengor recounts how, once on the operating table, “the surgical team eventually found the bullet in Reagan’s lung, mere centimeters from his heart and close to rupturing a valve.” Reagan was “perilously close” to death.
Forty-three years later, on July 13, 2024, another assassin scrambled onto a warehouse rooftop to target another president — former President Donald J. Trump. As the world knows from the decidedly vivid live television coverage, Trump was speaking at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when one Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20 years old, fired his rifle, killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, who died as he threw himself on his family, saving their lives. Crooks also injured rallygoers James Copenhaver and David Dutch.
Trump, by the sheerest of accidents, turned his head momentarily — and the bullet intended for him grazed his right ear instead of plowing into his head and killing him instantly.
What attracts considerable thought now is just how the two presidents responded in the wake of their almost assassinations.
In Reagan’s case, he would later meet Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. And eerily, after Reagan’s recovery, the pope too was subjected to an assassination attempt that, as with Reagan, came close to succeeding but did not.
Kengor’s book is remarkable in many ways. But, without question, it is the stirring story of how surviving an assassin’s bullet focused the American president on what he, along with the post-assassination-attempt pope, had come to call the “DP,” as in the Divine Plan to take down communism.
Kengor writes in the flyleaf of the book of the “inside story of the 1982 meeting where the president and the pope confided their conviction that God had spared their lives for the purpose of defeating communism.”
In the case of Trump, in the aftermath of the attempt on his own life, Trump said the event had been a “very surreal experience.” He added:
I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead…. The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.… By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.
Full stop.
Think of this.
There is President Ronald Reagan, in the aftermath of the attempt on his own life, meeting with the similarly targeted pope and the two believing their lives had been spared by God — in their case to carry out God’s “Divine Plan.”
And there is former President Donald Trump saying in the aftermath of the near-miss of his own assassination that the “doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.…By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.”
All of which raises the question: What is the “Divine Plan” for former President Trump? Only in retrospect does the reality of what Reagan and the pope accomplished strike home. In the day, Reagan in particular was called just about every slur in the book for his hardline stance against the Soviets and Communism.
Reagan’s strategy in dealing with the Cold War that had been ongoing since the end of World War II, as expressed to his national security adviser, was simple: “We win. They lose.”
As noted years later in The Hill:
In his first presidential press conference, Reagan stunned official Washington by denouncing the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to “world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state.” As he wrote in his official autobiography, “I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments.”
After the attempt on his life, this view of “we win, they lose” became especially vivid, a driving force in Reagan’s dealings with the Soviets for the rest of his presidency.
There can be little question now with former President Trump that, as with President Reagan, the attempt on his own life by a would-be assassin has provoked Trump to think about just why he survived the assassination attempt.
Again, post-assassination attempt, Trump has said:
I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead…. The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.… By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.
Those words are the Trump version of Reagan’s thought that he himself, along with the pope, had been spared assassination because of God’s “DP” — a Divine Plan.
Kengor mentions that as Reagan was in the hospital and had “slipped into anesthesia,” the longtime pastor of the nearby National Presbyterian Church — where the Reagans were members — happened to be making his rounds when he heard that his president/parishioner had been shot and was taken to the George Washington University Hospital.
In the inevitable chaos at the hospital, he managed to get close enough to the president’s location but was turned away by the Secret Service. Kengor writes:
Just then, Evans was taken aback by a profound thought, which he felt that God had placed on him. The reverend could distinctly hear these words: “Mr. President, God has a plan for your life. And you’re going to be healed.”
It was only later that Evans learned that, at that moment, there was a team of surgeons at work saving Reagan’s life.
Kengor ends his book on Reagan and the pope by saying:
Reagan, always his mother’s son, believed that “all things were part of God’s plan.”
It takes no imagination to believe that after the assassination attempt on his own life — an attempt that barely missed killing him outright — former President Trump believes in his heart and soul that, as with President Ronald Reagan, he too has been selected in another “Divine Plan” that is, in today’s world, designed to bring peace to the world.
It takes no imagination to believe that President Trump, he who authored the Abraham Accords, the bilateral peace agreements between Arab states and Israel that many considered impossible, has before him more to achieve.
With a little over two months to go before the election, of which many polls say Trump is leading, it takes no imagination to believe that, as with Ronald Reagan, another Divine Plan is not yet finished with Donald Trump.
Stay tuned.
READ MORE:
Hunting Where the Ducks Are
Behold, Tampon Tim
The Second (Rate?) Gentleman
The post Trump, Reagan, and God’s Divine Plan appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
