‘I’m supposed to be dead’: Trump’s brush with death will change him

Already we have seen signs that Donald Trump’s brush with death may have changed him.

How could it not?

Trump is now convinced that his slight turn of the head to read a chart at his rally in Butler, Pa. foiled the headshot that would have killed him.

Instead, the bullet clipped and bloodied his ear.

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” he told the New York Post. “I’m supposed to be dead."

One Trump supporter is dead and two others have been in critical condition after the sniper opened up on the podium with his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle.

'Winds of change' from shooting include Trump himself

The shooting occurred only days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. When a Post reporter asked Trump if the incident had changed his outlook, Trump said he is writing a new speech for Milwaukee.

“I want to try to unite our country,” he said, “but I don’t know if that’s possible. People are very divided.”

His wife and sometimes adviser Melania wrote an open letter to Americans of all political stripes affirming that the “the winds of change have arrived.”

“We all want a world where respect is paramount, family is first, and love transcends. We can realize this world again. Each of us must demand to get it back.” 

Trump posted on Truth Social that he had planned to delay his Milwaukee trip and the convention by two days, but decided “I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change.”

Perhaps not. But Trump is going to change.

How do we know? Because even the Iron Lady changed.

The day Maggie Thatcher escaped a big bomb

In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher arrived in Brighton, England for the Conservative Party Conference, where she prepared to drop the anvil on striking coal miners and the Labor movement that encouraged them.

Labor was working to prevent the government from closing state-run mines that were no longer efficient or feasible, and Thatcher was fed up with their rebellion.

ELVIA DIAZ: I’ve been watching Mexico’s political violence. Trump’s rally shooting scares me

She had written a scathing speech in which she described labor militancy as “an acid rain that eats into liberty.” She also described those miners and parts of the Labor Party as “the enemy within,” an expression she had only before used in a speech to the Conservatives Private Member Committee, not the public.

The so-called “Acid Rain speech” was never delivered, wrote David Sanderson in the Times of London.

History intervened.

At 2:54 a.m. on Oct. 12, 1984 a bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel where Thatcher and other Conservative Party dignitaries were staying.

The blast ripped through several floors of the hotel, killing five people and injuring 31 others. It badly damaged the bathroom in the Napolean Suite, where Thatcher and her husband Denis were staying. A close call, yes, but they were unharmed.

The Iron Lady's response: 'Life must go on as usual'

A 32-year-old IRA bombmaker had planted a device weeks in advance. Patrick Magee had checked into the hotel about a month before Conservative conference and packed high explosives into one of the side panels of the bath in his hotel room. The bomb had a 24-day-delay timing device, recounted The Times.

Thatcher was the Iron Lady. The Irish Republican Army wasn’t going to thwart her.

Whisked to a nearby police station, she said, “Life must go on as usual.”

And, so it did. Above the surface.

Behind the scenes at the police college in Brighton, Thatcher and her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford were given a twin room to stay the rest of the night.

Thatcher said, “There will be some casualties, I think it would be nice if we said a prayer.’ She immediately kneeled down by the bed and she said a silent prayer. She put her head back and went almost fast asleep for about an hour,” recalled Crawford.

She wanted to show 'terrorism can't defeat democracy'

When she awoke, she alerted Conservative Party colleagues to say the conference and her speech would go on as scheduled.

“You can’t be serious,” said Thatcher’s principal private secretary, Lord Butler of Brockwell. “This terrible thing has happened and some of your closest colleagues have been killed and badly injured, you’re not just (going) to go on with the party conference as if nothing has happened, are you?”

Yes, said Thatcher. “This is our opportunity to show that terrorism can’t defeat democracy.”

Many of the Conservative Party delegates had been locked out of their hotel rooms after the blast and were wearing only their pajamas. No matter. The local Marks & Spencer clothier opened its doors earlier than usual that morning and outfitted them with suits, dresses and shoes on the party tab.

The prime minister’s husband, Denis, had gone and purchased his wife a new watch, gave it to her and said, “This is to tell you that every minute counts,” recalled her personal assistant.

“I think deep down she knew she had been lucky that night, very lucky,” Crawford said.

But Thatcher also dialed down her fury against nemeses

In fact, that’s what she told reporters, “We were very lucky.”

That provoked an ominous response from the IRA. “Today, we were unlucky. But remember, we only have to be lucky once — you have to be lucky always."

If you think the IRA was going to unnerve Margaret Thatcher, you need only know this fact from The Times. In the bombing aftermath, Thatcher found a quick moment to write an apology to Ruffles Hair Salon for missing her appointment that morning, adding, “I was very pleased with the way you did my hair (the last time), and the fact (that) it lasted so well through Friday was the real test.”

At some point, however, Thatcher decided she could not give the fiery speech she had planned for that day and tore it up. She toned down her attacks on the miners and Labor and that party’s leader, Neil Kinnock.

When fragments of the speech were released taped back together in 2014, The Guardian newspaper in London reported it “would have been the most divisive speech of her premiership.”

LAURIE ROBERTS: Official behind 'lynching' comment casts Arizona GOP's vote for Donald Trump

Some have theorized that she tempered her words so the terrorists would not think they had provoked her heated rhetoric.

But Thatcher not only struck out the words “the enemy within,” from that speech, she would never say the phrase in public thereafter, The Times pointed out.

A leader who survived assassination attempt calls Thatcher

On that day, another world leader who had survived an assassination attempt rang Maggie Thatcher on the phone.

“I just wanted to call you myself to ... tell you how happy and grateful we are that you were not personally injured,” said U.S. President Ronald Reagan from a train rolling through Ohio.

“I think this just demonstrates, once again, that we must do all we can to stop terrorism. They will always have some successes but we can make their job a little tougher.”

On March 30, 1981, Reagan made their job a little tougher with his ferocious good health.

Seventy years old and in the seventieth day of his presidency, Reagan was exiting the Washington Hilton after a speech when John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots with a .22-caliber revolver trying to kill him. He missed the president with all six shots.

He hit press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty. They would survive, but Brady suffered serious brain trauma that disabled him the rest of his life.

Reagan Secret Service agents rushed him into a car, and drove toward the White House. They felt for blood where he felt some pain, but found none. "Rawhide is OK...we're going to Crown," they radioed —“Rawhide” being code for Reagan and “Crown” for the White House.

They were wrong. Reagan was dying. He was bleeding profusely, but internally. One of Hinkley’s bullets had hit the rear panel of the limo, “flattened like a dime and ricocheted,” recounted Dallas Morning News writer Alan Peppard. “(It) pierced his left side, punctured a lung and stopped an inch from his heart.”

On the verge of death, President Reagan makes jokes

After blood emerged from Reagan’s mouth, his agents quickly changed course and got him to a hospital where surgeons saved his life, but with the president making jokes through it all, many Americans did not appreciate how close he came to death.

When they wheeled him into surgery and he saw all the bright lights and medical personnel, he quipped, “Please tell me you're Republicans."

The lead surgeon, who was a Democrat, answered, "Today, Mr. President, we're all Republicans."

Reagan would recover, but events had changed him. After that day, Reagan saw a divine hand in his presidency. “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can,” he wrote in his diary.

He also had become a “mythic figure” in the eyes of Americans, wrote Washington Post columnist David Broder. “He was politically untouchable from that point on.”

First lady Nancy Reagan, however, was changed in darker ways. The assassination attempt had terrified her and would haunt her the rest of her life. She began to assert herself more with aides on how they protect the president.

“They saw to it he never walked across an airport tarmac,” said former TV newsman Sam Donaldson to the Dallas Morning News. “He never worked a fence line. He never got out of his limousine on a public sidewalk. But it began to close down the presidency.”

Martin Luther King Jr., too, experienced a near-death event

Ronald Reagan was not the only major American figure who saw God’s hand in his narrow escape from assassination.

On Sept. 20, 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr. was signing books in a New York department store when a well-attired African American woman approached him. 

“Are you Martin Luther King?” she asked. When he replied, “Yes,” she said, “Luther King, I’ve been after you for five years.”

MLK biographer Stephen B. Oates in his book “Let the Trumpet Sound” described what happened next. “As in a dream, she was running away, a man chasing after her.”

“King sat there in a daze, staring at an instrument stuck in his chest, near his heart. The woman had stabbed him with a razor-sharp Japanese letter opener. There was great commotion about him: voices, a tattoo of footsteps. He knew he could be dying, yet was calm and felt no pain. At one point he accidentally touched the blade and cut his finger.” 

The knife was so deeply embedded, doctors needed to remove one of King’s ribs and part of his breastbone to remove it, wrote Oates. The blade had touched his aorta, the body’s main artery.

King, who was then 29, was told “not to move an inch, not to speak,” that “so much as a sneeze — could have cost him his life,” the New York Times recalled.

As King recovered from his wound, he contemplated what it meant. “He decided that God was teaching him a lesson here, and that was personal redemption through suffering,” wrote Oates. “It seemed to him that the stabbing had been for a purpose, that it was part of God’s plan to prepare him for some larger work in the bastion of segregation that was the American South.”

In the mail came inspiration from a youngster

He was inundated with mail, including letters from the president, the vice president and the governor of New York, recalled Oates. But one letter stood out and made him cry.

Dear Dr. King,

I am a ninth grade student at the White Plains High School. While it shouldn’t matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed you would have died. I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.

So moved by the letter, King would talk about it and its inspiration up until his very last speech, April 3, 1968 in Memphis.

He too, was so glad he didn’t sneeze, he said. Had he, he would have missed so many of the heroic events of the Civil Rights movement, he said. Events that told him “it doesn’t matter now” what happens to him.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

The next day, a gunman shot and killed him.

* * *

On Monday, ABC News' correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Donald Trump if the near-miss in Pennsylvania had changed him.

"I don’t like to think about that, but, yes," he said. “(It) has had an impact.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: A brush with death will change you. Trump is no exception