Home A year ago today, God, ahem, spared Trump: The other guy, not so much
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A year ago today, God, ahem, spared Trump: The other guy, not so much

Chris Graham
ben cline
Ben Cline. Photo: © lev radin/Shutterstock

It was “by God’s grace,” MAGA congressman Ben Cline wrote today on social media, that “President Trump’s life was spared in Butler, Pennsylvania.”

The reason this is coming up: the shooting that nicked Trump in the ear, supposedly, was a year ago today.

Question for you, Bennie: what about the guy sitting behind the president who died that day?

No grace from the supposed Supreme Being for the dead firefighter, eh?


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The president, we’ve been told, was grazed, ever so slightly, which seems unlikely, that he’d be grazed by one from among a hail of bullets from an assault rifle a couple of hundred yards away, which, with that kind of weapon, and that kind of clearance, man, that’s shooting fish in a barrel, but that’s the, ahem, official word.

It’s been quiet on the official word front pretty much from Day 1, and it’s long since past being obvious that we’ll never know what actually happened.

This is where you get some people wanting to believe divine intervention was at play, which, the dead guy on the bleachers makes that one problematic.

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Photo: © Johnny Silvercloud/Shutterstock

Question for the God’s grace people: if this God being that we’ve conjured up was really all-powerful, and intent on sparing lives, wouldn’t he, she, whatever, have just prevented the Butler, Pa., shooting from happening in the first place?

I mean, why let a kid two months out of community college go to the trouble of researching the rally site on the interwebs, get his hands on an assault rifle and buy enough bullets to defend Fallujah, sneak around the perimeter of the campaign rally with his weapons of war slung on his shoulder, climb up on top of an unprotected building with a clear view of the stage that the president was speaking from, then have one of his shots miss his target by a fraction of an inch and kill an innocent guy sitting in the crowd?

Nip it in the bud, amirite?

Surely an all-powerful God could stop a 20-year-old dietary aide in a nursing home from playing Rambo, if the Secret Service couldn’t, which, it didn’t.

Easy solution: God fakes a call from the nursing home.

Hey, kid, need you in today, it’s a big day, we’ve got Bingo going on for the residents.

At least the Secret Service reacted to its part in the breach with the resignation of the agency’s director and the move to put a bunch of its agents on unpaid leave.


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This entity that we call God effed up, a guy died, and the likes of Ben Cline are still singing the praises.

I get it: if you’re an evangelical reading this, you’re fixin’ to write me a nasty hellfire and damnation email to tell me that God let the shooting happen to demonstrate his power.

Look, before you hit send, you and I can agree on that point.

A nerdy kid coming thisclose to shooting a once-and-future president does demonstrate God’s power.

The measure of that power rhymes with the word zilcho.

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Donald Trump. Image: © Shutterstock AI – Shutterstock

Which gets us to how Bennie finished up his supplication to the Fatted Calf today:

“We remain grateful for God’s protection and continue to pray for the President’s strength and the future of our great nation.”

Grateful for God’s protection.

A guy died, Trump had to wear a tampon on his ear for a couple of days, and here some folks are, acting like we all witnessed something divine.

Best-case scenario here: dumb luck.

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Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, TikTok, BlueSky, or subscribe to Substack or his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].