Many of us knew the superheated rhetoric of the last few years would eventually lead to violence. We’ve covered the assassination attempt from several angles now, noting that we were less than an inch from having to bury a president.

In the hours of uncertainty, as the nation questioned how the incident could have happened, we had two different patterns of reaction. To his credit, that evening, Joe Biden appealed for calm in the immediate wake of the horror in Pennsylvania, and America mourned when we learned an innocent bystander was killed while shielding his family from the gunfire, with two others gravely wounded.

On the other hand, early media reports that initially dismissed the attempt on Trump’s life as an “incident” or that he “fell down” quickly turned into accounts of the “shooting” or “attack,” as the Sunday papers termed it.

But what upset the media most was Trump’s defiantly calling on the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as he was being whisked away by the Secret Service. “I think what we’re hearing, people, is that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now,” whined CNN’s Jamie Gangel. “We want to tamp it down.”

Maybe you people in the media should have thought of that about eight years ago.

Never mind — you’ve already switched this incident to one establishing a “narrative of persecution.” What a take by NPR. And then we have the TDS shrillness of David Frum, who wrote in The Atlantic that same message about how Trump had it coming and will now play the victim: “Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election. … Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.”

As political pundit Ben Shapiro noted, “When you keep saying that ‘America will be literally destroyed, this will be the last election, Donald Trump is the worst person who has ever lived, and he must be stopped,’ someone is going to take that seriously and think to themselves, ‘Shouldn’t I do something to stop Hitler?’” One young man made that twisted decision. It cost him his life, and it nearly cost our nation its soul. Frum didn’t get the hint about cooling it.

Meanwhile, much to the chagrin of many MSNBC viewers, yesterday morning’s episode of “Morning Joe” was bumped off the schedule. A CNN report gleefully intoned that the show was pulled “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.” In other words, a typical day on MSNBC.

If the idea was for both sides to turn down the rhetorical heat, it’s not working. For his part, Trump has moved on from the incident, announcing J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential selection yesterday. We’ll still be questioning the actions of the Secret Service — although, notably, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was finally granted Secret Service protection by the same Biden administration that had been denying his requests for months. Time will tell, though, if any meaningful reforms come from this attempt on Trump’s life. And surely, after the Republican National Convention this week, the Democrat rhetoric will ramp back up like it always has, with the inclusion of the martyrdom angle because they just can’t resist.

Whether it was divine intervention or just luck, it’s been calculated that the bullet that struck Donald Trump’s ear was less than one minute (a surveying term for 1/60 of a degree) offline from being fatal. Whatever it was that saved the former president, let us not forget the need to pray for those affected families, including that of the would-be assassin. Prayer is a good spiritual counter to words said in anger, and we all need to step back from the edge.