I put together a piece yesterday (not yet up) about Donald Trump’s providential survival of an assassin’s bullet. A close shave indeed. In the course of writing, I noted that Paul Kelly (July 17) was true to dismal form in bucketing Trump. I queried why the Murdoch-owned national broadsheet gave so much space to anti-Trump diatribes. This, before I read Chris Uhlman in today’s Weekend Australian (“Hope of redemption after this uncivil war”).

He wrote this drivel: “five police who held the line against the mob that day [January 6, 2021] died in the wake of the storming of the congress.”

He goes on to say that “police officer Brian Sicknick had pepper spray shot in his face by a rioter and died of a stroke the next day.”

Let’s get the story straight. Then he wasn’t hit on the head with a fire extinguisher as first misreported. Now, apparently, he was pepper sprayed. Okay, presumably this is right because the perpetrator was sent to prison for seven years. But how in the world can his death from a stroke brought on by a blood clot be attributed to the pepper spray the day before. The blood clot would have likely formed weeks before. Did Sicknick have some prior underlying health problems? We don’t know. If pepper spray causes incipient strokes, police forces in Australia should be informed of that because right now they categorise it as a non-lethal weapon.

It is of course ridiculous to claim that being pepper sprayed led to a stroke next day. The medical examiner concluded that Sicknick died of natural causes. Uhlman tells us the examiner added “that all that transpired played a role in his condition.” As if that is meaningful, which it isn’t. He doesn’t tell us that the medical examiner also said that there was no evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to a chemical spray. That would be letting the pertinent facts interfere with the tall tale.

Uhlman, already without credibility in my eyes, goes on to say that four Capitol police officers committed suicide between four days after January 6 and August 2021; as though the January 6 event was determinative . This is just crazy talk. A well-known symptom of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

We’ve all seen pictures of what happened on January 6. A lot of it consists of Capitol police officers escorting trespassers around. There was some violence. The most violent act consisted of the killing by a Capitol policer officer Michael Byrd of an unarmed young woman who was offering no threat; Ashli Babbitt aged 35. The killing was deemed lawful. The shooter is black, Babbitt was white. Imagine the reverse. Enough said.

But what exactly is Uhlmann saying. That the police were so frail that having experienced a fracas they sunk into fatal depressions. You would have to ask about the recruitment policies. Join the police for a serene, peaceful, uneventful working life. Nervy, hate violence, peacenik, pacifist, susceptible to PTSD? This is the job for you.

The bottom line. Trump asked for a peaceful protest. It turned out not to be. Could he have parachuted in and calmed the crowd? Perhaps. But he was sorely aggrieved at having been cheated out of victory and presumably was sulking. I would have been. Biden getting more than 81 million votes; fifteen million+ more than Obama in 2012. Pull the other one, he would have thought – as do I.

In any event, you can’t attribute one natural-cause death and four subsequent suicides to Trump. Unless, that is, you want to rob our civilisation of perhaps the only person who can save it. I wonder what kind of people fit that particular bill?