Trump shrugs off assassination attempts, remarking 'only consequential presidents get shot'

That's a strange thing to say to Michael Cohen, of all people, but it's also very Trump. The man survived a bullet in Butler that came within a quarter inch of his skull, and he's turned it into a line at a dinner party rather than a moment of self-pity. Whatever you think of him, that's not nothing.

There's something almost old-fashioned about the sentiment, even if it's a little grandiose. Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy, Reagan. He's placing himself in that lineage, and the timing of two separate attempts on his life in one campaign season gives him more grounds for the comparison than most presidents ever get. It's the kind of remark that would get mocked as narcissism from anyone else, and honestly it probably deserves some of that here too. But it's also just true that the men who actually change the direction of a country tend to make enemies willing to do something about it.

The bigger story nobody wants to sit with is how casually the press has moved past two assassination attempts on a sitting president within months of each other. Imagine that sentence about any other administration. There'd be commissions, hearings, a national reckoning about political violence. Instead we get a Cohen anecdote treated as a punchline. Trump joking about it doesn't strike us as the scandal here. The scandal is how quickly everyone else decided it wasn't one.