I have been wanting to comment on the two assassination attempts on President Trump for a while now, but finishing the manuscript for the book version of my PhD thesis has gobbled up all my time. In the slightest of windows on a “day off”, I wanted to get something down, as things certainly need to be said. First off, as the saying goes, “I have no skin the game”, I am not an American and I live in the UK. There is no partisan motivation or reciprocal benefit with respect to the upcoming US-election for me personally. I write what I write because it was deeply disturbing, and remains so, observing not just the assassination attempts but more importantly and significantly, the reactions to it.
The first and most dramatic attempt on Trump was on July 13th 2024 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in which a bullet struck Trump in the ear – this was only because he turned his head at the last moment to look at the jumbotron behind him. There is a good animated technical reconstruction at https://twitter.com/i/status/1813320723475353762 which shows just how close it was. This attempt generated one of the most iconic photographs ever taken by the NYT official photographer, but the real message of the photograph was what Trump was trying to achieve with his now legendary fist pump and “Fight” cry.
As many commentators have noted, when there are shots fired at an event, the immediate instinct of people is to panic and to flee. It is these “stampedes” that often cause more death and are sometimes the strategy of the shooter(s) who then wants to cause a mass casualty event by shooting into the running crowd. The amount of ammunition the shooter had and the type of weapon, strongly suggest he was interested in just this kind of “mass casualty” event. How close we came to that mass casualty event is often unappreciated in the reporting, the counter-sniper took what was described as a “one in a million” shot to take him out before he could execute. When Trump insisted on standing back up and raising his fist in the air with his “Fight” shout, the crowd was instantly calmed and broke out in their “USA” chant. It was an act of incredible bravery on any measure.
Regardless of all the arguments and conspiracies regarding the precise sequence of events, just who the shooter was working with, whether it was a state actor and even an internal CIA op (his social media was scrubbed, he seemed to have unusual skills in the fabrication of explosive devices, he used encrypted communication on multiple foreign platforms, had undertaken extensive surveillance in advance of the event, he was expeditiously cremated outside of the normal channels and his family hired a high-powered lawyer immediately after the event); additional questions as to how many shots there were, was there a second shooter, what was the explanation for the catastrophic and multilayered intelligence and operational failures on the ground (i.e., were they deliberate) and the like, it needs to be remembered that two attendees exercising their constitutional freedoms lost their lives and five Secret Service personnel were injured. This was the first attempt on a president since Reagen in 1981 which had reflected a calming in the American political temperature after the multiple political assassinations of the 1960s, the turmoil of the 1970s and the attempt on President Ford in 1975.
So, this attempted assassination followed by the second on September 15th 2024 at the Trump International Golf Club, close to his Mar-e-Lago estate, reflect the upward trajectory of the American political temperature and the reemergence of political violence, and more disturbingly its effective endorsement by media and politicians. Since Trump’s election in 2016, there has been no doubt the direction of travel of that temperature has been upward. Just five days before the shooting, one of the most respectable and intellectual of Left-wing magazines, the New Republic, had a cover that merged Trump’s visage with that of Hitler with the headline “American fascism – what would it look like”. More generally since the emergence of Trump, many on the Left have followed the Marxist playbook making it their business to attempt to divide the American population on multiple grounds, particularly on race, class and gender with Trump as the focus of all that is wrong with the American story. There was clearly no desire to “cool” the political temperature and the result was a second assassination attempt.
Thus, it has continued to be par for the course throughout this election cycle to equate Trump with the “Nazis” and “Hitler”. Trump represents an existential threat to “democracy” and was accused of being a “Russian asset” continuing the characterisation during his first presidency (despite Putin now publicly endorsing his primary opponent). He was labelled a neo-Nazi for supporting the “White Supremacists” in Charlotte where it was alleged, he stated “there were good people on both sides”. Similarly, there was going to be a “bloodbath” in the country if he was not elected president. Here we have the “proof” of his anti-democratic and Nazi credentials. Most notably, the Democratic Party elites have been amongst those most vociferous in articulating these now discredited stories. Even the ultra-Left Scopes fact checking site had to label the Charlottesville story “false” earlier this year, years after the event but in a telling admission. The “Russia Gate” story is now confirmed as a hoax by a similar process of time and justice, the letter signed by the “fifty former intelligence officers” alleging that the Hunter Biden laptop story bore all the marks of a “Russian disinformation campaign” is now confirmed as false – the FBI used the very same laptop as evidence in their criminal prosecution. Yet, what remained more remarkable was that despite these claims being debunked, they were repeated in the most recent debate between VP Harris and Trump. Truth seems to have no value; it is rather the rhetorical value or psychological effect of even a falsehood in pursuit of the “greatest good” of “eliminating Trump” that is the ultimate value. The media, which in a democracy would be tasked with exposing the bad faith of politicians attempting to propagate falsehoods in such a manner, have instead become eager purveyors of them.
Just how hot it has become was made evident in the response to the first shooting. Although there were short-lived calls to “cool the political rhetoric”, that lasted for the legacy (once called the “mainstream”) media just through the week of the RNC conference. However, that cooling only applied to those legacy outlets – the Lincoln Project doubled down on the “Hitler” trope releasing a new video just after the shooting. Similarly, there were numerous high profile celebrity stumbles over the shooting with one of the most infamous being the “next time do not miss” comment by the member of a famous band on national TV, the leader of which had to defer the tour understanding that at least 50% of the population could be very upset with such a comment.
The second assassination attempt was notable in that there was not even a pause in the invective, rather than reflecting on what had happened and that Trump was somehow the “victim” of violence, those major media outlets immediately began blaming him for “bringing it on himself” because of his “inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail”. Any brief period of self-reflection and temperance was skipped, you went straight to the accusation: anyone who accuses immigrants of eating cats and dogs has only himself and his colleagues to blame if he gets shot at, and by inference, if he subsequently gets killed. The moral case for assassinating Trump is also clear in this case – just as Bonhoeffer felt a moral obligation to assassinate Hitler to save the world from eternal darkness and tyranny, so must every right-thinking patriot concerned for world peace work for the elimination of Trump. That certainly seemed to be the psychology of the second shooter.
Yet, there lies the utter contradiction – the Trump era was one in which Trump took enormous steps towards Middle East Peace, and which his “peace through strength” policy had silenced the Taliban, prevented Russia from direct intervention in Ukraine and had restrained China with regards to their imperialism both in Taiwan and around the world. His “America First” policies had brought capital and jobs back to the US – the US national debt had fallen for the first time since the 1990s. The contrast with the present administration could not be greater, there is a Middle East war, the Taliban evicted the US from Afghanistan in the most humiliating withdrawal that cost 13-US lives and far more amongst the allies left behind in the country, as well as the billions of military hardware left behind much of which has found its way onto the black-market such that Americans are finding themselves shot at with their own weapons or the ones they had sent to Ukraine; the US National Debt is rising at the fastest level for decades and there has been catastrophic inflation.
It is the why of this upward travel that I am interested in probing. There is what some sociologists and talking heads have taken to calling “Trump derangement syndrome” – an irrational hatred of Trump and anything connected with the MAGA movement. It is irrational because we know that politically and policy wise from his time in office, Trump is actually not that much to the Right and his instincts are more libertarian than conservative. Trump needed Pence as VP in 2016 to improve his acceptability to the conservative, Christian right but that is no longer the case as his movement is now the mainstream of the Republican Party. Thus, his present VP Vance is not a traditional conservative but has migrated from the technocratic Left, he was a critic of Trump in 2016, he is highly articulate and intelligent, happy to put himself in the most adversarial of media environments in stark contrast to his predecessors. Similarly, Trump’s overturning of “Roe v Wade” was on the basis of returning the abortion issue to be decided at State level, not the imposition of a federal anti-abortion mandate which has long been the goal of the pro-Life Right.
Rather the Trump-Vance political argument is with the neo-Marxism of the new American Left that has come to dominate the Democratic Party, seen most vividly in their coup to oust the sitting President from the democratic mandate he had obtained from the grassroots delegates of his party to the imposition of a candidate that had not received a single vote or endorsement from any within her own party. Similarly, Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard are traditional mainstream, old-school Democrats who have aligned themselves to Trump. These have aligned themselves to Trump because they perceive him as a supporter of the traditional conceptions of freedom and democracy – where the people choose their leaders and the First Amendment Right to speak freely is primary. Their opposition is to the categories of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation arbitrated by the State and enforced by the fellow travellers in Big Tech and social media.
We can only understand the hostility to Trump when we understand that his commitment to this traditional conception of the US as a democratic Republic governed by a Constitution, is what makes him such a threat. When his detractors accuse him of being a threat to “democracy”, they have redefined democracy to be the status quo of the institutions which have come to wield power in what is called the present America. These are what would be the administrative State, the government bureaucracies, the intelligence agencies (CIA, NSA and their NGO-splinter groups like the Atlantic Council), the military-industrial complex, the pharma-industrial complex (‘Big Pharma’), the Ag-Industrial complex and in some of the major “Blue” states, the intertwining of the judiciary and judges with the political elites, who will work with their political masters towards a common goal. To underscore that last point, it was a political first in the US that unleashed over 100 different litigations against a former President, attempting to remove him from the ballot and to bankrupt him. As many have noted, the attempt to pre-emptively remove Trump from the ballot where the people would be able to cast judgment upon him, was destroying democracy in the name of saving it.
The urgency and desperation to eliminate Trump this second time round is focussed even more acutely in the minds of his adversaries because there is no doubt whatsoever that Trump learnt from his first term as President just where the real power lies in America; just as Liz Truss, the shortest serving UK Primeminister learnt where the real power in the UK resided as she was unceremoniously ousted by the uniparty. In the modern Western “democracies”, the politicians are there to do the bidding of the captured institutions, and to further their interests, not those of the people. If they do well, they are rewarded with great prestige and riches, if they defer they are destroyed: “We the People” has been replaced with “We the Institutions of Democracy operating in the name of the Greatest Good”. Both Trump and VP Vance are committed to a return to a democracy where the locus of power lies with “the people” rather than those institutional power centres of the “democracy”. It is this new coalition formed with those that bridge the traditional partisan divide, but who value the constitutional foundations of the US, that represents such a threat to those who are attempting to fundamentally transform the US into a borderless entity that would join the wider globalist consensus for a new form of global government.
It is indeed so evident when neocon Bush staffers and the Cheneys, once described as “satanic” by the Left, have now joined hands with those that were supposed to be their political antithesis in opposition to Trump. We now understand where the real antithesis lies, and it is not on traditional partisan party lines but between the globalists and those that believe in sovereign nations. A strong, independent US that asserts its own independence and puts a priority on its national integrity and the rights of its own citizens to self-determination, is what has so publicly terrorised the global elites who are looking to evolve government worldwide into the global arena. When such thinkers, who have tried every subterfuge, ‘legal’ political and judicial route to “eliminate” Trump and have failed, more direct methods are necessary.
Thus, when someone shouts, “Next Time Do Not Miss”, they really mean that and that should be a warning to us all as we struggle to maintain the integrity of our nations in the face of the neo-Marxism that wants to censor what we say, where they are the sole arbiters of truth, and to use replacement immigration (there is an official UN document with this title) to create what is supposed to be a borderless utopia of our new world. Professor Skinner, the famous behaviourist of Harvard, wrote in the 1970s that concepts such as freedom, dignity, individual rights and autonomy were in the way of the scientific planning of society. Under his prescription, articulated most forcefully by the transhumanists of our present age, once you accept there is no God, there can be no concept such as natural rights granted outside the benevolence of the State. The State takes on the attributes of godhood and is the arbiter of all we can say or do, experts can at last organise the world in our best interests.
Thus, it is said by one of their own that many of the technocratic elite of Silicon Valley have the belief that communism failed because it did not have the technological tools to control information and the ability to intimately monitor the lives of their citizens. Now we have that ability. The control of information and the correct interpretation of information through the new category of “malinformation” – information that is factually correct but contra to the narrative and interests of those tasked with maintaining societal peace and harmony – combined with the technological ability to digitally sanction the dissenting citizen (as practiced by China with its social credit scoring), are the gateways to the new world. The visceral objection to Trump as one that stands utterly opposed so such a worldview and who is prepared to stand at the very cost of his life, is what has terrified his enemies and motivates the irrationality of the attacks against him.