Another Weird White Guy Tried To Kill Trump Again
It's like there's a pattern.
Donald Trump survived another assassination attempt Sunday. This ties him with Gerald Ford, who was almost shot twice within two weeks. He was the sitting president and Trump is a former president but current cult leader.
Trump wasn’t actually shot at this time. The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, had camped out on the golf courses in West Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s club. He was lying in wait for Trump for about 12 hours with food and a rifle. Authorities spotted Routh’s weapon poking out of shrubbery between 400 to 500 yards from where Trump was whiling away his Sunday playing golf. A Secret Service agent saw the armed gunman while conducting a sweep of the sixth hole’s green. He fired at Routh who fled but was later apprehended in a neighboring county. Routh never had a line of sight on Trump. This is where people who aren’t me express their relief that Trump is safe. I honestly don’t care one way or the other. I don’t support violence and would never wish harm on my political enemies. However, I don’t want to wish Trump well because it’s always possible that a genie might’ve just gifted me three wishes. Even if I got the most out of the remaining two wishes, I’d always regret wasting one of them on Trump.
No, he’s still not a changed man. That’ll never happen.
Trump immediately started fundraising off this latest, half-assed assassination attempt. “There were gunshots in my vicinity, but before rumors start spiraling out of control, I wanted you to hear this first: I AM SAFE AND WELL!” he declared in a cash-grab email. “Nothing will slow me down. I will NEVER SURRENDER! I will always love you for supporting me.”
He later whined to Fox News that Democrats’ “rhetoric is causing me to be shot at” because he struggles with causation versus correlation. He said Democrats “use highly inflammatory language. I can use it too — far better than they can — but I don’t.” Trump is either lying or doesn’t know what “inflammatory” means. (It’s possibly both.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s own rhetoric has endangered the lives of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and he explicitly doesn’t care. When asked to disavow the bomb threats in the city, Trump said, “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” as if there are situations where bomb threats are appropriate, like before Labor Day. He then continued his attacks: “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was this beautiful town and now they’re going through hell. It’s a sad thing. Not gonna happen with me, I can tell you right now.”
Not long before the Secret Service chased away the would-be shooter, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, rejected the idea his dehumanizing rhetoric was responsible in any way for violence against immigrants. “Why is somebody calling in a bomb threat?” he told CBS’s Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan. “It’s because they want attention. I think that we should ignore these ridiculous psychopaths who are threatening violence on a small Ohio town and focus on the fact that we have a vice-president who is not doing her job in protecting that small Ohio town.” (It is not Vice President Kamala Harris’s job to protect a small Ohio town from Vance’s own stochastic terrorism.)
Monday, Trump urged for peace, which he defines as Democrats not saying mean things about him while he continues spewing Nazi-level bile on vulnerable immigrant groups and his political opponents, who he called “the enemy within.”
He posted on his jacklegged social media site:
“The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse! Allowing millions of people, from places unknown, to INVADE and take over our Country, is an unpardonable sin.”
He then shifted into an all-caps fascist rant: “OUR BORDERS MUST BE CLOSED, AND THE TERRORISTS, CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY INSANE, IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND TOWNS, DEPORTED BACK TO THEIR COUNTIES OF ORIGIN. WE WANT PEOPLE TO COME INTO OUR COUNTRY, BUT THEY MUST LOVE OUR NATION, AND COME IN LEGALLY AND THROUGH A SYSTEM OF MERIT. THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
This just goes to show how unhinged Trump has become since 2016. When he tried to present himself as a changed man in his awkward Access Hollywood “apology” video, he did at least get through his insincere remarks without once again boasting about sexually assaulting women.
The shooter
Republicans will insist that “they” (i.e. Democrats) tried to kill Trump. However, there’s still no evidence of this. The first shooter in Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, was a registered Republican and the FBI has still not determined an actual motive. According to the FBI, Trump was most likely a “target of opportunity,” as Crooks had researched campaign events for both Trump and President Joe Biden.
This latest loser, Ryan Wesley Routh, had voted for Trump in 2016 but had apparently soured on him. He opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supported Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 presidential campaign, when she’d convinced gullible people she was an actual Democrat. Much like Crooks, though, his actual political affiliation is more accurately defined as “Travis Bickle.”
Crooks and Routh do not appear to belong to any group that Trump has specifically targeted with his fascist policies — Black people, brown immigrants, the transgender community, or childless cat ladies like Taylor Swift. The people with the most reason to hate Trump aren’t the ones making him fear for his life. Crooks and Routh are both white (seemingly) heterosexual cis men. This is a group that overwhelmingly supports Trump politically. They are likely the only demo that Trump will carry (unless enough white women believe immigrants will eat their pets). If two crazy Black ladies had tried to kill Kamala Harris, no one would seriously consider this a MAGA problem.
Assassination attempts as a ‘fact of life’
When a deranged man brutally attacked and hospitalized Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Donald Trump and his useless namesake repeatedly joked about it. However, Donald Trump Jr. has made clear that he abhors Donald Trump-specific political violence. He lamented on social media, “You know what’s getting really old? Having to have conversations with my 5 young children about radical leftist trying to kill their grandfather. No person should ever have to do this in America or anywhere else and yet I had to have that conversation five times again yesterday.”
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all faced threats against them. A man who considered Obama the “anti-Christ” fired shots at the White House in 2011, but Obama didn’t tweet all-caps rants blaming Fox News and the Tea Party. A Trump “superfan” sent pipe bombs to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other Democrats in 2019. Political violence is hardly new. Trump just made everything worse, which is why I have so little sympathy for him. I suppose I do feel sorry for any of his grandchildren who’ve actually met him.
If Trump Jr. is tired of discussing assassination attempts with his kids, I generously offer him my most flippant “thoughts and prayers,” which is apparently the best that Republicans can do when normal American parents say they’re tired of having to discuss the latest regularly scheduled school shooting with their kids.
After the deadly school shooting in Georgia, JD Vance said, “I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. ... We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”
Republicans don’t seem to think we can pass any laws that might keep guns out of the hands of known felons like Ryan Wesley Routh. Their solution for school shootings is to educate children in veritable cell blocks. Vance argues that we must “harden” school security because students are “soft targets.” Well, there is probably no softer target than Donald Trump, so maybe he should accept some more “hardened” security in his life, just like an eight year old who unlike Trump never committed an actual crime.
Elon Musk, in a since deleted tweet, wondered why assassins haven’t targeted Biden or Harris. The answer to this dummy’s question is “they have, but the Secret Service prevented them.” Republicans complain that Trump doesn’t have the same security level as a sitting president. However, even now, Trump makes it difficult to keep him safe. Mar-a-Lago was a security nightmare even when Trump was president. The Secret Service has repeatedly warned Trump that his private golf clubs pose security challenges that put his life at risk. Trump ignored them because he’s always craved the power of the presidency but without the clear drawbacks.
We don’t know what was on Routh’s mind when he stalked Trump, but we do know that he somehow gained access to a gun. Guns are literally everywhere in this country. They’re so prevalent, in fact, that as Nicholas Grossman observed, Trump’s golf club is near Gun Club Estates, just off Gun Club Road, where the streets “are named after the famous entrepreneurs of America’s first guns. From North Browning Drive to Winchester Lane.”
The American idolization of guns is perhaps a greater threat to democracy than Trump himself.
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I don't buy the theory that Trump staged the first shooting because if he staged it I don't think he'd have let the shooter use live ammo or shoot anywhere close to him. But it does seem very weird that something hit his ear to cause all the blood, and his ear is magically better a week later without a scar, and the Secret Service decided to let him stand and do a fist pump before taking him off stage, while an active shooter was still out there. (To see the normal way Secret Service does things, watch footage of Reagan's shooting--they don't fuck around, they cover the target and whisk away quickly).
It'd be nice to have a real investigation of what went on there.
Gun Club Estates is apparently another crime hotspot in Palm Beach County, reputedly.
I'm just numb to the chaos that swirls around President Klan Robe...and it feels like others are too. I think I'm just laser-focused on the out and out ethnic cleansing that he and Shady Vance are peddling. That bullshit all caps rant is the kind of shit that spins up stochastic terrorists.
When you encourage people to have these arsenals of weapons of war, well some among them recognize that these instruments of death need using.
SER, you really just said it all to be honest. It's a fantastic article.