The most remarkable aspect of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is not his luck in the crosshairs of a mass-shooter—luck that failed so many others (from the 60 people at the 2017 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas to Corey Comperatore in the bleachers at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally). What’s remarkable is how this convicted felon, convicted rapist, insurrectionist, and serial liar has instantly gained an anointed, morally elevated status for the luck of being alive and unhurt save for a cut on his ear.

I’m glad he escaped serious injury, but why is he being treated as some kind of war hero because of a tragedy that killed an innocent man? As he basks in this runoff glory, how can you not think of his insults to the heroic servicemen and women who risked their lives for their country regardless of how many dead souls like Donald Trump it might contain? Whatever happened to karma?

I can’t think about karma without remembering the morning I heard on NPR that Idi Amin had died. He died on August 16, 2003, so this must have been the 17th. (To freshen your memory, Amin was a Ugandan dictator whose eight-year rule led to the slaughter of between 100,000 and 500,000 people.) His name reminded me of my Catholic grade school, when a nun talking about the importance of love and forgiveness once said that we cannot go through life hating people, even those as bad as “Hitler, Charles Manson, and Idi Amin.” I knew who Hitler and Charles Manson were, but all I knew about Idi Amin was that comedians made fun of his name. The nun also said that even the worst people sometimes do not get any punishment here on earth.

By the time I was in college, Idi Amin had been deposed and was old news, and I hadn’t thought of him until hearing of his death. What I hadn’t known was that after the overthrow of his regime in 1979, he went into exile, ultimately ending up with a comfortable life in Saudi Arabia until he died of kidney failure. Before this, I’d heard many stories about people who commit terrible crimes and suffer no retribution, but here was a man who had the blood of maybe a half million people on his hands, and for a couple decades coexistent with my own life, he had been living his quiet, bourgeois, fruit-based-diet life in Jeddah. Vito Corleone silently keeling over in his garden had nothing on this guy.

On that sunny morning in 2003, I had to admit that karma is at worst a quasi-religious fantasy and at best a literary convention. I remember thinking of the genteel karma that fans of Jane Austen’s novels gleefully buy into. In Sense and Sensibility, for instance, there’s the assurance that the heartbreaker John Willoughby will somehow suffer the loss of love from Marianne Dashwood that his philandering has caused him. He marries a fashionable young woman with a fortune, but we are told that he is unhappy having to spend the rest of his life as the husband to someone he doesn’t even like. The truth, however, resides somewhere else: I’m sure Idi Amin had many fine days eating his guavas in peace, just as I’m sure the rich, aging John Willoughby got over Marianne Dashwood to focus on his dyspepsia, his irritating tenant-farmers, his gouty leg.

Before karma’s quiet colonization of American thought, we had the high drama of Christian belief. Herman Melville’s moral universe could be summed up quite nicely in a line from the medieval morality play Everyman: “This is the day when no man living may ’scape away.” If you are a young reader of Moby-Dick, you probably believe that the crew of the Pequod save for Ishmael are the tragic collateral carnage of Captain Ahab’s selfish and single-minded pursuit of both revenge and a moral order of his own imposition. If you’re an older reader, you might see that the leniency extended to Ishmael is not because he is a compassionate character but because he is a device for telling the story, just as Queequeg’s coffin is a device for keeping alive the device for telling the story. You might also assume that the longer Ishmael lives, the more he becomes the tragedy’s primary victim. And the longer you live, you might see this enormous violent mammal not as a metaphor for God but as a horror story from the perspective of the whales. However you look at it, there is no justice.

No justice but great irony. When Moby-Dick causes the Pequod to sink, an enormous whirlpool makes survival seemingly impossible. Ishamel—who has admitted that “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me”—observes “the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle.” But then the “black bubble upward burst” to deliver the buoy/coffin. It is the black of sin and death that saves this single soul.

“Nothing good is incompatible with justice,” Charles Dickens said in an 1842 speech in Boston. But Americans came to learn that only in a godless society can you believe that justice will be served . . . reaping what you sow over raping what you steal. We can always try to make karma fit our democratic need for justice. Democracy’s desired end is neither the punishment of the aggressor, however late, nor the random turning of the wheel of fortune. It’s the equitable redistribution of agency. We see a blunt attempt at this in On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s 1954 film about corruption within a dockworkers’ union. In this transposition of morality from ship to shore, a powerful mobster makes a racket of the union until one worker’s standing up to him encourages them all to follow suit, diminishing the mobster’s power. Such dazzling karma was not real life, however. “Here one finds kickbacks, loansharking, petty extortion, theft and pilferage—and murder,” Daniel Bell wrote of the New York waterfront in 1959. “Many of the docks are controlled directly or indirectly by mobsters who dominate the pier union local, parcel out the jobs and run the rackets.” When one Johnny Friendly goes down, there’s always another to take his place.

Some people theorize that Donald Trump has no interior moral life, that he believes his own lies and is thereby unable to see the consequences of his actions. You wonder if he would ever be able to perceive personal hardship or punishment as a karmic force of nature and not just retribution at the hands of his enemies. In 2023, when four criminal indictments were filed against him, he added the “late great gangster Alphonse Capone!” routine to his rallies, likening himself to the self-avowedly “persecuted” celebrity gangster, a brutal murderer but also a folk hero and conduit of our collective id. It was an apt analogy on Trump’s part since Capone spun his own myths about being a self-made millionaire whose transgressions were exaggerated by corrupt public officials. Many of Trump’s opponents were hoping for a form of karma in Trump finally being taken down by white-collar crime, just like Capone, who, after beating every rap for a decade, was finally arrested for tax fraud in 1931.

But the optics of that blue-sky day in Pennsylvania have proved Trump the ultimate Teflon Don: even bullets don’t stick. Every imagined manifestation of karma was brutally shoved aside for Evan Vucci’s instantaneous re-creation of Iwo Jima in that photograph, the old man’s wreath of Secret Service agents strategically arranged by fate to place the short woman in front so as not to obstruct the cameras’ views of blood trickling into the wrinkles of his jowls and neck. And the flag—oh, yes, the flag—flapping in the background and enhanced by the camera angle to look five or six times larger than life size.

You could argue that with its Soviet-style rehabilitation of a man who’d just been rambling about Hannibal Lecter, the mainstream media is simply doing its job. That photo, after all, is a dramatic meme occurring not long after the Fourth of July. But something clicked for certain members of the press. It wasn’t a new awareness but more like the reactivation of a dormant virus. Forget the herpes flareup; this was a love bug. MSNBC’s Katy Tur definitely looked bitten by something. It was the tee-up for an Adelle anthem, the Disney scene where the spell-induced sleeping village awakens or the furniture is turned back into people, where everything in the black-and-white Oz suddenly erupts into lurid technicolor.

How did they all know to jump to? As fast as they smelled blood, their Spidey sense tapped into an undercurrent of excitement across the U.S. of A.—secret but palpable, like the stones the villagers in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” apprehensively turn in their hands. The longed-for narrative of rebirth and renewal had been met by the skin of our teeth by way of the sovereign’s ear. (And to think that nothing was sacrificed except for that guy who got shot in the bleachers!) The minds of the press and the populace were at one in interpreting raw luck atop more raw luck as some kind of “Team U.S.A.!” sacrament. They had channeled their primal penny press with all the brio of Walter Burns in Ben Hecht’s The Front Page: “Write me a story from the point of view of the escaped man. He hides, cowering, afraid of every light—and every sound! He hears footsteps. His heart going like that. And all the time they’re closing in. Get the sense of an animal at bay.”

“An experience like this changes a man” was the preemptive subtext. (But wait a minute: Trump’s followers don’t want their man to be changed! That’s not what they paid for!) The media-driven amnesia machine is always reframing what we already know to make us feel like we’ve never heard it before, rewriting the narrative of our own memory so that we don’t seem to remember what the Trump years were like. Hence we are back in full jingoism mode, with Trump snagging another Time cover for his collection. An yet despite all this—despite another reckoning with a universe that remains indifferent—I can’t stop bristling at this cosmic violation. Karma Police, if you are anywhere in the vicinity, arrest this meme on 34 counts of something. §