At the same time you were hearing about the second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, you can be sure that quite a few people were busy turning the first attempt into a screenplay. You can be equally sure that those same people are now back at their laptops turning what had originally been envisaged as a two-hour feature into a mini-series. Given America’s appetite for copycat crime and the three strikes rule, the smartest of those screenwriters will probably wait until November before they hit ‘print’.

And the best of these scripts won’t gather dust. Assassinations of leading political figures are as bankable as Batman in Tinseltown, and studios know that a hitman doesn’t need to succeed to be a success. Nobody who saw The Day of the Jackal when it came out thought it might end with (spoiler alert for readers under 40) the death of a French president, but it was still one of 1971’s most garlanded films, and it remains a popular pick on many streaming service menus. What makes it so watchable is what makes Frederick Forsyth’s eponymous novel so readable; the extraordinary efforts the gunman makes to stay one step ahead of the security services. The forged passports, the clandestine terrorist contacts, the murder of two people who might blow his cover, the crutch that converts to a rifle, and so on. Just as you know all the way through Titanic that it won’t swerve away from the iceberg at the last moment, at no point in The Day of The Jackal do you really believe a bullet will strike the unmissably large nose of Charles de Gaulle. But the ingenuity and complexity of Edward Fox’s character’s preparations are enough to suspend your disbelief.

Which presents the screenwriter and director of a putative Trump assassination movie with a rather obvious challenge. If it must be about a man of limited intelligence who drives his ute to a political rally wearing faux military fatigues, then strolls around the perimeter of the crowd for five minutes carrying a large hunting rifle, then climbs onto the roof of the only building within sight of the speaker platform and gets four or five shots off before any of the police and secret service personnel present notice him, how will they make The Day of the Jackass believable?

If they can’t, nobody will ever be asked where they were the day Trump was shot. It is both one of the best and worst things about digital technology that it has relieved us of the need to remember anything. Twenty years ago, visitors to the Louvre stood in front of the Mona Lisa for an average of just over three minutes. Now most people move on after 30 seconds, having taken a picture which they tell themselves they will look at later, but never do. The same sort of collective amnesia explains why the poll surge which the Butler assassination gave Trump had disappeared by the time Ryan Routh was hunkering down by that Mar-a-Lago fairway. And why Kamala Harris was prepared to contradict herself so brazenly on immigration, guns, abortion and fracking during the debate. Not very long ago a willingness to perform such spectacular U-turns on major policy issues would put a serious dent in an election campaign. It is generally accepted that what scuppered John Kerry’s 2004 bid for the White House was the Republican party ad which used home movie footage of Kerry tacking a windsurfer off a Nantucket beach to illustrate his shifting positions on the Iraq war.

It would be naive to believe that modern Australians would not tolerate such flip-floppery from our political leaders. We are no less susceptible than Americans to Digitally Induced Teflon Memory Syndrome, and just as Kamala Harris is hoping her televised policy reversals last month won’t hurt her on 5 November, I’m sure Anthony Albanese is hoping that all memories of his U-turns on the issuing of visas to Palestinians and the inclusion of a gender question in the 2026 Census will be wiped from our collective hard drive before our next federal election. In the meantime, it is to be hoped that he will not have second thoughts about the stand he has taken against the alleged shenanigans of trade unions whose demands previous ALP leaders have gone to shameful lengths to accommodate. If the polls are right, Australians are desperate for strong leadership on lots of issues. And they know that it’s a lot easier to bend over backwards if you don’t have a spine.