One year ago Sunday, presidential candidate Donald Trump turned his head to point to a graphic at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Milliseconds later, gunshots — or, if you’re MSNBC, “popping noises” — rang out. Trump recoiled and was immediately buried by a pile of Secret Service agents.

For 59 seconds, Americans watching the livestreamed rally wondered if the former president was hurt or even alive. Screams from rallygoers punctuated the televised audio feed; as we would later learn, three attendees had been shot. A beloved wife and daughter were realizing that Corey Comperatore, a firefighter from Buffalo Township, had been fatally shot while shielding them from the gunfire.

You know what happened next. Despite the best efforts of the Secret Service, Trump stood up and pumped his fist, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It was immediately clear the image of the bloodied, defiant president would be the single most iconic moment of his political career.

Within hours, Trump would arrive at the Republican National Convention, where his announcement of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate would cement the tone of the third Trump campaign. This was no compromising choice designed to appease the old guard of the Republican Party; Trump was all in.

Meanwhile, Democrat strategists scrambled. Things had never looked good for the doddering, confused, and unpopular incumbent. Now that the entire country had watched his opponent tangle with death and win, things had never looked worse. The following weekend, Biden’s Twitter account announced his retreat from the presidential race.

For the next 107 days, Americans would be inundated with PR to convince them that Biden’s vice president and heir apparent, Kamala Harris, was “joyful” and “brat.” She washes her collard greens in her bathtub, just like the rest of us!

Leading up to November, Trump World projected nothing but confidence. His voters looked around at polls predicting a statistical tie, and wondered how such a lopsided matchup could be so close. They all remembered 2020, when Democrat jurisdictions changed voting procedures to allow an unprecedented flood of low-security mail ballots and Big Tech companies censored bombshell news to shield the Biden campaign.

In four years, the Democrat campaign strategy had evolved from rigging election processes to publicly waging a legal battle to throw the opposition and his allies in prison. During those same four years, a weaponized Department of Justice threw peaceful pro-life advocates in prison, raided their homes, and terrorized their families. The president of the United States promised a “winter of severe illness and death” to Americans who made their own cost-benefit analysis about the Covid-19 virus and an experimental shot. People who chose not to take it for medical or religious reasons were unceremoniously fired. In many Democrat-run areas, churchgoers were forbidden to gather together for worship or the taking of communion. Schoolchildren lost years of learning, and teachers taped useless masks to their faces in the name of compliance.

Tens of millions of illegal aliens poured across the southern border, tacitly blessed by the White House, and innocent Americans were raped and murdered as a result.

Nameless aides propped up a Potemkin president. Everyone in America knew it was happening, but talking heads on television dutifully repeated the lies they would later cash in on. The Biden administration tried to launch a “disinformation governance board” to police Americans’ speech. What the administration deemed “an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories,” including dissenting opinions about Covid-19 and the 2020 election, was characterized as a “terrorism threat” by the Department of Homeland Security.

Public schools deluged kids with pornographic and racist curricula. When parents protested, the secretary of the Education Department secretly colluded with a school boards group to smear those parents as domestic terrorists, too.

It’s worth remembering how bad we let things get. Who knows what would have happened if the assassination attempt in Butler had succeeded? Now is a good time to thank God it didn’t.

Events of massive political import are governed by the same hand of divine providence as the millions of personal events — the conversations, acts of love, happy accidents, or silent miracles — that happen every day. Sparing Trump’s life last July was no exception. Nor was the election four months later, in which the worst excesses of the Biden years were repudiated.

It’s an ancient mistake to make messiahs out of politics. But likewise, it’s foolish to believe a God who clothes lilies and feeds sparrows is neglectful of the earthly authorities He commands His people to respect. To do either is to think too little of the sovereignty of God. It is the God of Heaven, the prophet Daniel says, who “changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings.” When doing so spares us from evil, we ought to thank Him.

The great theologian Charles Spurgeon thought his listeners’ forgetfulness of God’s providence in their lives was likely “the greatest stronghold of our natural Atheism.” He warned them, in an 1858 sermon, not to harbor “a doubt of God’s dealings with us in the arrangements of outward affairs.”

The umbrella of God’s loving providence makes our political developments both more significant and less consequential. When we look at earthly rulers, we can recognize their significance as instruments of His divine will, and we can happily trust that they will not ruin it. Spurgeon continues:

God hath not arbitrarily marked out the world’s history; he had an eye to the great architecture of perfection, when he marked all the aisles of history, and placed all the pillars of events in the building of time.

Sometimes those events happen quietly. On occasion, they happen on live TV.

Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women's Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.