It was too late to cook, so I stopped at Rocco’s on the way home from a Saturday afternoon interview to pick up a couple of subs for dinner.

As I sat with a beer to wait, my daughter texted me, then shared the TikTok video of the moment when the world, already spinning dangerously, seemed to teeter off into unreality.

“Trump was shot in the ear at a rally,” she wrote.

I wondered with the ugliest of speculation — for the briefest of instants — which way the bullet was traveling. Was it flying by his head or headed inward, toward his brain?

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Was the king of chaos dead?

And then, a tiny, shameful whisper came from the darkest chamber of my heart.

Do I want him to be?

I write about gun violence. Five of my friends were murdered by a man with a shotgun in Annapolis. I was at the top of his death list. That gives me front row perspective on the passion play of death, grief and recriminations that follows the moment when one man decides to kill someone with a firearm.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump gestures as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally Saturday in Pennsylvania. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Yet, here’s something I never thought I would confess. I have, in the years since Donald Trump came down that golden elevator and climbed atop our national psyche, wondered if it would be better for us all if someone were to rid us of this troublesome pest.

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Looking at the photo of blood on Trump’s grimacing face, his raised fist and the scrum of Secret Service agents pushing him to safety, I realized how close I am to being murderously angry.

I realized just how close I am to the brink. How close we all are.

The brink of what? Assassination? Riot? Civil war? Dissolution? Revolution?

I understand how easy it would be for us to start shooting at each other today, people who love Trump on one side and those who loathe him on the other. Those who see him as an instrument of retribution for grievances pitted in a contest of violence against those who recognize in him the American Rubicon — that existential border beyond which there is no republic.

Left, right and center. Top, middle and bottom. Black, white, brown. Rich, poor, urban, suburban, rural. Young, old.

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We certainly have enough guns for everyone.

All of us can feel the tremulous ground on which we stand, the sense that there is no bedrock from which we can steady our footing and move forward together. Those shots in Pennsylvania shook it even more.

I don’t know what happens next.

I’m glad Trump is alive. But, for an instant, I wasn’t sure how I felt.

Without him, would the path toward reconciliation and problem-solving be easier to tread? Alive or dead, is this our Archduke Ferdinand moment? Will historians look back to this day as a demarcation between one era and another?

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I suppose a lot depends on the next 24 to 48 hours.

The former president is very good at seeing people out to get him at every turn of events, regardless of his own responsibility for personal reckonings. His political brand is carved from the knotty pine of victimhood.

Bandaged and defiant, he could point a finger and shout j’accuse. He could denounce those he deems responsible and define his wound as a red badge of courage. See, he might say, they couldn’t get me with the courts, so they’ve come with guns.

And that might be it. Democracy paused. Revolution on. It’s a fight in the real sense of the word.

He could pause. He might wonder what role he played. I’m not going to blame the victim here, and that is Donald Trump.

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He could call for a pause. He could say violence is never the solution. We all need to take a breath, Donald John Trump could say, look at how close we just came and maybe we should all reflect on how we got here.

And I include myself in the need for that.

President Joe Biden speaks during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House last month. (Kirk McKoy/The Baltimore Banner)

People tried to connect the climate of hate toward journalists he fosters and the 2018 attack on Capital Gazette, my old newsroom in Annapolis. I never bought it.

But sitting by myself in my neighborhood pizza joint Saturday night, nursing a beer and looking at my phone, I know how angry he’s made me.

I have to let go of that because anger never makes anything better. I never want to look at another photo of a man with blood on his face and wonder, really wonder, if his death would make me feel better.

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It would not.

But, for a second on Saturday, a very long second in retrospect, I wasn’t sure.

Reporters caught President Joe Biden unaware of the shooting, and he turned around and got to work sorting out what was happening.

He’s never been a great orator, and his scary decline in eloquence at 81 makes it unlikely he’ll find the balm for this fever. His first remarks were the right thing to say.

“Look, there’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” Biden said in a nationally televised statement. “It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. We cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

I’ve said before I like Biden, and I hope he’s up to this moment.

As I write this, the pale blue sky turned purple and then black over Fishing Creek, the waterway outside my office window. When the light returns, I wonder what the day will bring.

The suspected gunman and a spectator in the crowd are apparently dead. Maybe it was inevitable that our discord brought us to the moment when blood was spilled.

A lot depends on what Trump says next.

Let’s hope it’s more than thoughts and prayers.