Jack of Harts

The image an AP reporter captured of Trump raising his fist with the American flag in the background after getting up from a failed assassination attempt is one of those iconic images that I believe will become a part of the national cultural zeitgeist along side images of George Washington crossing the Delaware and the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The first time I saw it I actually dismissed it as an obvious photoshop. It was too perfect. Nobody could have taken a photo that clean. But the image has spread through social media like wildfire, and I researched it to find that it appears to be an accredited AP photo. And if the recreations of it from around the world are any indication, the whole world has seen it and is going with it. In the words of Trump, “this is huge.” Now when I went to go find the original, I ran into a very curious case of webrot. I’ve read reports that some news agencies are editing out the flag. USA Today chose a picture from a slightly different angle that didn’t include the flag. I’ve SEEN many articles that USED to use the image have a different image NOW. It was loaded onto wikipedia and now when I go there wikipedia says it doesn’t know what it is. Some Internet search engines don’t find anything related to it. My googlefu is pretty good, but the number of false leads running down this image is way above normal, especially for a six-day old AP photo. AP photos are usually WAY easier to track down than this. “Curiouser and curiouser” as Alice would say.

We all know that Trump was shot in the ear during the assassination attempt. And many others had minor injuries. Children were bawling at the sudden violence. A Texas representative reported that his nephew was grazed by a bullet in his neck for instance. Another injury that was maybe an inch from being fatal. Two rally goers were critically injured and Life Flighted to the hospital for treatment. And then there was the fifty-year old former Chief Firefighter who threw his family down when the bullets started flying. He covered them and protected them from the bullet that killed him right there. Never forget the victims of this assassination and never forget the rhetoric that incited it.