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Five Quick Things: A Most Expected Assassination Attempt

The American Spectator 

Shocking, but not surprising.

That’s the reaction of most of the people I interacted with Saturday afternoon following a near-miss assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

We’ve all seen this coming. We’ve all known that the political temperature in this country is and has been on a level recognizable from the 1960’s and early 1970’s, or the 1910’s, or even the 1860’s. It seems like roughly every 50 years or so America frays at the seams, and there is little question we’re fraying.

The difference, at least compared to the last couple of flare-ups in which a president or presidential candidate could be shot without it seeming to come out of nowhere, is that while radical politics leading to assassinations have always been with us, they’ve never been truly mainstream.

To the Left: shut up. We are not interested in anything you have to say.

Consider the 1960’s. One could argue that decade boasted the most radical, destructive political winds of any in modern American history, the fact is that none of that radicalism really made its way into big-time politics. The major national political players — John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey — were quite conventional in their beliefs. Goldwater was sold as a radical, but he was a member of the Urban League for crying out loud.

And in the 1910’s, when radical communists and anarchists spent a great deal of time making bombs and attempting to kill people in power, which ultimately led to the Palmer raids and some mass deportations of undesirable immigrants with unpalatable revolutionary tendencies, almost nobody was a “radical.”

We on the Right would look at Woodrow Wilson as one of the most destructive presidents in American history, and his views on race and the Constitution were certainly radical by our standard, but Wilson was emblematic of the progressive movement at the time. It was stupid, and it was shameful, and so was Wilson, but he wasn’t “radical” in the sense that he was for political violence. Wilson had some 175,000 political prisoners at one point in his presidency; most of them were too far left even for the progressives.

But now?

Radical-left politics produces national political figures. One could argue that Barack Obama, who recent events have strongly suggested if not proved is the driving force behind both the Democrat Party and the Biden administration, is the most radical political figure ever to occupy the White House. Obama certainly hasn’t gone away.

The Democrat Party and its media/propaganda allies at major newspapers and television channels have been pushing a radical agenda for a long time, and since Donald Trump came on the political scene they’ve also been pushing the narrative that Trump was everything they’ve shown themselves to be — lawless, authoritarian, unmoored by tradition and custom, and vituperative.

This column, several times, has warned that something like Butler was coming.

Hell, I had a scenario very similar to this — eerily, actually — in my new novel King of the Jungle, in which a suspicious security lapse leads to a shooter nearly taking out a Trumpian character.

I’m hardly alone. We all saw this coming. We all saw the radical Left, the elected radical Left no less, doing everything they could to stoke it.

1. It’s A Miracle Trump Is Still Standing, And We Should Praise God That He Is

Our Father, who art in heaven. That’s who gets credit for the fact the Butler Farm Show Grounds won’t go down like the Ford Theatre and Dealey Plaza as one of the most ignominious places in America.

As of this writing we don’t know a lot about the would-be assassin. We know he’s a kid who had an AR-15 or some similar rifle and he was positioned some 130 yards from Trump as he spoke. We know the assassin got off several rounds before Secret Service countersnipers took him out, and one of those rounds hit Trump in the ear.

We know that Trump had just turned his head when he was hit. Had he not had his head turned, that bullet would have driven through the side of his head, killing him instantly. Another one of the assassin’s bullets exploded the cranium of a bystander in the crowd, killing that man. Two other bullets seriously wounded other bystanders.

The shot, from a rooftop dangerously well within range of that rifle, wasn’t a particularly difficult one. Deer hunters make shots like that regularly.

Butler proved that God is watching over this country.

But it also proved that the devil lives among us.

2. Such Ignorance As Not To Be Believed

The fact Trump survived the assassination attempt and responded with defiance has idiots like this spinning conspiracies …

There are tens of thousands of clowns like this on Twitter.

And why? Because of this …

The theory, among the morons hiding behind computer screens, is that nobody who just took a bullet would rise up in a defiant pose like Trump did and yell “Fight!” to the crowd.

These are people who have never faced physical danger before. They have absolutely no concept of what it’s like.

I’m not going to pretend to have much expertise on the subject, other than to say I grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s when coddling your children was not the national American pastime. That said, I’ve had somebody try to kill me twice.

The first time was when I was a freshman in college. A few of us were walking through a dormitory parking lot on the way to an intramural ball field for an early-morning intramural football practice, and we came upon a hoodlum attempting to steal a car. We gave chase, but were a little too late, and before I knew it the hoodlum had started the car and pulled out of the parking space, and he gunned the accelerator and drove right at me. I dove onto the trunk of a nearby car and the thief sideswiped it as he went past.

Several years later I was shot at while driving on a busy road, and the bullet stuck in the side-view mirror. It probably missed my head by 18 inches or so.

Both times, I can tell you, my immediate reaction as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to die was exactly the same as Trump’s: defiance.

Adrenaline does that. Winston Churchill said it best: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Hell, Teddy Roosevelt took a would-be assassin’s bullet at a political rally and kept on speaking.

None of these people have any such life experiences. They know absolutely nothing of the subject. And so to them, if Trump were to suffer a near-miss assassination and emerge defiant and with spirit, it has to be staged.

The hatred, and the denial of his humanity, that underlies this contention is the clearest sign the devil lies in their hearts just as nothing of substance lies in their brains.

3. The Left Must Answer for the Hodgkinsonization of Its Base

We’ve heard since 2008 that it’s the “extremist Right” who are the largest threat to “Our Democracy,” and this is a narrative which has been promoted not just among the media but by our intelligence community and federal law enforcement.

The Department of Homeland Security, which should not exist for much longer as it has been an utter and total failure in every respect since its inception in 2001, has spent the past 15 years or more attempting to frighten the public about “extremists” who believe in such things as federalism and the Latin mass. This has been echoed by every propaganda arm the Democrat Party has.

And when Trump came along as an alternative to establishment uniparty/complacent-loser GOP Washington Generals political leadership, he was cast immediately as the lead figure among the “extremist” Right. A man who had been given awards by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton was suddenly a “racist” and a man who allowed his political enemies to spend two years attempting to frame him on an absurd theory of Russian collusion spun out of thin air by professional liars in the Clinton campaign is somehow an authoritarian fascist.

Just last week there was this …

And also this…

Plus this …

And let’s not forget this …

The fact is, for all the bluster about the “extremist” Right, there have been two very prominent assassination attempts on major political figures in the past decade.

Both of them were perpetrated on Republicans. And I’m not counting the assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh that didn’t make it to the kinetic stage.

The first was the attack on the Republican congressional baseball team in June 2017, which almost killed then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Scalise’s attacker was a Bernie Sanders supporter named James Hodgkinson, a raging loser from Illinois who imbibed heavily Sanders’ campaign rhetoric about how America needed a “political revolution” and took it to heart.

There was a nationwide outpouring of support for Scalise as he made a steady recovery from nearly perishing in Hodgkinson’s rampage, but Sanders was allowed to make an empty denunciation of “political violence” on the floor of the Senate and never bothered again about his rhetoric and tone.

And now, after months of castigating Trump as Hitler, we’re supposed to excuse all of this?

No.

To the Left: shut up. We are not interested in anything you have to say. We don’t believe you when you claim to abhor the political violence you’ve been stoking all year, and we have no desire to heed your calls for a turndown in the temperature. What we want from you is quiet. We want you to shut up. And we’re going to force you to take responsibility for your part in creating the environment that almost resulted in an assassination.

It’s your crazies who are violent enough to take out political leaders, and you’ve done everything you could to radicalize them. Until you own that, there is no constructive dialogue to be had with you.

4. No, It Doesn’t Matter What Party The Shooter Was Registered To

Of course, the new distraction is the fact that the Butler shooter, identified as one Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, apparently registered to vote in late 2021 as a Republican and voted in the 2022 GOP primary elections.

Crooks made a political donation at age 17 to ActBlue, the Democrats’ engine for political contributions. But because he registered as a Republican this means that … Trump was shot by one of his supporters?

The stupidity of this rankles.

If you want to be credible, you’re going to have to accept the assumption (it’s a lot more than an assumption, actually) that people who support a political candidate do not shoot that candidate at his rally.

There are a number of reasons why Thomas Matthew Crooks might have registered as a Republican.

He could come from a Republican family and registered with the GOP because his parents influenced him to do so.

He could have registered as a Republican out of an Operation Chaos motive. Pennsylvania has closed party primaries; Democrats cross over in an effort to influence the GOP nominee all the time there.

Or he could have planned an assassination attempt against Trump or some other Republican political figure. If you put yourself in the position of a political assassin, it’s only natural to assume that your assassination will be bad PR for your side, and as such you might do certain things to disguise which side you’re actually on.

No, it is not dispositive that this ActBlue donor is a Republican. He shot the Republican nominee on the eve of the Republican convention. It’s pretty safe to say that Crooks’ political motives are not MAGA.

5. After Assassination Attempt, Everything Must Change

Specifically, we should have heads rolling at the Secret Service, which has demonstrated itself to be utterly incompetent and perhaps even a hindrance to candidate security.

Lots of people are praising the Secret Service agents on the scene in Butler, and that’s explainable out of a sense that we want to hold onto some positives from what was otherwise a horrifying tragedy. And yes, there was evidence of effort on Trump’s behalf in the Secret Service team which rushed to him and whisked him away, at least eventually.

Except there is the matter of the eyewitnesses who spotted Crooks on that roof just 130 yards away from where Trump was speaking, in a location it is patently absurd to believe was outside of the security cordon. Hitting a mostly stationary target with an AR-15 or similar rifle, prone, from 130 yards away isn’t really all that difficult a shot.

And the Secret Service’s current director, Kimberley Cheatle, is a political/DEI hire who was head of security at Pepsico.

And yet he was allowed to go up on that roof? How on earth could Crooks have thought he would be allowed to go up on that roof? He was carrying a black rifle! How was he even in the neighborhood of the Butler Farm Show Grounds toting a long gun? (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: George Clooney, Sad Clown)

The Secret Service’s countersnipers did a good job of taking Crooks out, but the question is how he managed to get off enough rounds to graze Trump, kill a bystander named Corey Comperatore and wound two other eventgoers before the countersnipers got him. One would think a rifle-toting stranger appearing on a nearby roof within sight of several civilian onlookers would have been taken out long before he could fire.

Or at the minimum, his presence should have driven the Secret Service agents on the scene to rush Trump off the stage until he could be removed.

Then there is the matter of the female Secret Service agents, one clearly too short to protect Trump from an overhead shooter and the other who couldn’t seem to figure out how to holster her handgun as Trump was placed in the SUV for a getaway. It’s been fairly well documented that the Secret Service is now under a DEI mandate, so we have hiring and promotion not based on merit in the federal agency charged with keeping our political leaders alive.

And the Secret Service’s current director, Kimberley Cheatle, is a political/DEI hire who was head of security at Pepsico prior to being named to her current job in 2022. Elon Musk tweeted that she was guarding Cheetos before getting her current job, and he’s correct both in fact and in an assessment of her qualifications.

As of this writing, nearly 24 hours after an almost catastrophic agency failure, Cheatle — should we call her Kimberley Cheetos from now on? — had not addressed the media or the public about Butler. House Oversight Committee James Comer had already sought to remedy that by demanding she appear in front of the committee as it opens an investigation into the would-be assassination; one can imagine that isn’t going to go well …

The DEI angle is an obvious issue. The other obvious issue is that it’s been reported the Trump campaign has repeatedly asked for more security assets as threats against his life have mounted and been repeatedly refused, and now it’s clear there was a hole in their coverage at Butler. You cannot allow would-be assassins onto rooftops within 200 yards of the candidate under your protection, and apparently that’s exactly what Cheatle allowed.

The Secret Service used to be under the Treasury Department. Now it’s under the Department of Homeland Security, which means Cheatle’s boss is the old villain Alejandro Mayorkas, who has almost literally wrecked everything he’s touched. (READ MORE: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and the Death of Stalin)

Both of them should be fired by lunch on Tuesday.

And the Biden administration and the political party it serves ought to be put under a white-hot microscope for having stoked and enabled this fiasco.

The post Five Quick Things: A Most Expected Assassination Attempt appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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