After Saturday’s failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, one could almost say Donald Trump has reached his apotheosis as a politician. Had the sniper’s bullet been better aimed by just a hair, Trump would have died a martyr. But Trump miraculously turned his head at just the right moment. His courageous reaction—one fist raised to the sky, with blood streaking his face like a Roman gladiator—will be remembered forever.

For what may be the first time in his political career, Trump now has the upper hand. He has something he hasn’t had since 2015: public sympathy. His enemies have been cowed into treating him with a degree of civility. Moreover, Trump has shown remarkable restraint and magnanimity in not blaming them for what transpired, when heaven knows he has every right to do so. Instead, he has talked about the grace of God.

If we were to apply the left’s standard narratives to the events of this weekend, what happened to Trump was an act of domestic terrorism inspired by the Biden campaign and its allies, including what today passes for journalists. The left has spent years comparing Trump to Hitler and calling him a threat to democracy. This dehumanizing rhetoric had escalated to a new extreme only days before the murder attempt. Now, Biden and the Democrats want to “lower the temperature.” They want to be acquitted without acknowledging their wrongs.

Trump is entitled to justice. No candidate in American political history has been more relentlessly persecuted. For nearly a decade, he has been dragged through an uninterrupted sequence of show trials and fake investigations. His enemies have repeatedly attempted to seize his property and to jail him on phony charges. But, to quote Shakespeare, mercy is “mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.”

Trump’s gestures toward reconciliation may prove ephemeral, however. Once the shock of the assassination passes, politics will return with a vengeance. The left has not taken responsibility for what happened in Pennsylvania. They still want to destroy him and they still hate the “deplorables.” The man Trump has appointed as his vice president, J.D. Vance, should put to rest any doubts that Trump is turning away from the “Make America Great Again” agenda that got him elected the first time.

Even before his apotheosis in Pennsylvania, Trump was moving toward a most unlikely triumph. He would be the first president in more than a century to serve two nonconsecutive terms, an accomplishment made all the more impressive by the formidable obstacles he has overcome.

His political journey has been amazing to witness. His 2016 victory was a seismic shock. He has survived every attempt since then to take him down, whether through defamation, prosecution, or assassination. There is nothing now that can stop him. One can be forgiven for thinking that Providence has had a hand in his career.

Like all great men, Trump has the amazing power of taking the world by surprise. Nobody knows what he will say or do next. But he will return to Washington covered in glory. He will have an unequivocal mandate to “make America great again.” Most importantly for him, his legacy is secure. He will not be remembered as his enemies wanted—a traitor and illegitimate president, a “convicted felon” whose time in the Oval Office was a mere mistake of history—but as an American legend destined for greatness.