The Assassination Attempt

A lot has been written about the way 9/11 was anticipated in Hollywood movies and comic books. I tend to go back farther in these cases, and think about Edgar Allan Poe in “The Oval Portrait” (1842), commenting on gothic’s ability to permeate the real:

THE chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe.

https://poestories.com/read/ovalportrait

I also think we’ll speculate in the future about the counterfactual, since the bullet was less than an inch away from Trump’s skull.