When the early reports first surfaced that there had been an assassination attempt on former President Trump, my first thought was that I was not at all surprised. For six months, I have been saying if all of these legal and political maneuvers to take Trump out of the 2024 presidential race fail, they will try to kill him. Fortunately, the man appears indestructible and has the stamina, the energy of a lion-hearted warrior and the blessing of God above.
My second thought was of the assassination of Thomas a’ Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who died at the hands of several nobles in the Court of King Henry II. I remember seeing the dramatization of the killing in the 1964 film, Beckett. Starring Peter O Toole as King Henry and Richard Burton as the archbishop, the story was of two friends who used to drink and carouse in their younger days but took different paths as they matured. Their different choices inevitably led to conflict over church rights, privileges, other royal court issues and eventually to Beckett’s bloody death in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.
In a drunken rage, the king utters something to the effect will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest. Such sentiments, directed at Trump, have been making the rounds for months on the Net as many members of the mainstream media feel Biden’s lawfare strategy has failed on many levels. I tried to revisit one of the worst that sounded like a veiled incitement to murder from a major member of the mainstream media, but it seems to have disappeared. And with it my posted condemnation.
Assassination has become a staple in presidential history. Four sitting presidents have suffered the taste of an assassin’s bullet, three Republicans and one Democrat. The first one was Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and the last one, John F. Kennedy in 1963. Their bookend killings have both been laden with conspiracy theories and hundreds of unanswered questions. I doubt we will ever know the absolute truth about either one.
The last attempt on a president’s life was on Ronald Reagan, another Republican shortly after his 1981 inauguration. He came within minutes of being our fifth presidential fatality. I would be remiss if I did not mention the wild shots fired at President Gerald Ford, another Republican in Michigan, seventeen days apart in 1975.
There has been only one other attempt on a former president, before the July 13th attempt on Donald Trump. In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt, while running on a Third Party ticket, the Bull Moose Party, was hit by a bullet in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The assassin was John Schrank. His 50-page speech that had been in a coat pocket spared his life. Ironically, its title was, Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual. I find this ironic because I believe it is precisely Progressivism that nearly ended the life of President Trump.
In 1933, a bricklayer, named Giuseppe Zangara opened fire at the president-elect Franklin Roosevelt, while he was sitting in his open touring car after delivering a speech from his backseat in Miami’s Bayfront Park. The shooter hit five people, none of them Roosevelt. Sitting next to him was Chicago mayor, Anton Cermak. He suffered mortal wounds and died later.
Charges of Secret Service negligence came quickly. It is immediately obvious that the Secret Service failed dismally to protect the president. It was only a providential act on his part that saved his life. He turned his head at the last second and the deadly shot merely grazed his ear. Had he faced the crowd, as he always does, the bullet would have struck him in the temple, ending his life and the hopes of millions of American voters.
The SS’s biggest mistake was its failure to cover a vacant roof top, which violates its protocol. The rooftop was only 140 yards away and well in range of the podium. I have sat in the end zone for many football games. The field from goal post to goal post is 120 yards, only sixty feet shorter. It is not too difficult to see movement from that distance.
The most damning evidence to surface was that Crooks had been on the radar for hours. Police had seen a man walking in the area with a rangefinder. There is also video of Crooks wandering around the security zone on social media. Local people had seen a figure bear-crawl on the rooftop 26 minutes before the shooting.
The local police hoisted an officer police officer to the roof, but the assassin pointed his rifle at him, and he quickly dropped to the ground. Co-ordination and communication between law enforcement and the Secret Service seemed to be absent. How was it that the SS allowed Mr. Trump to approach the podium? Their protocol calls for them to whisk him away with the first hint of danger.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle dropped a bombshell when she said, they had identified Crooks as a potential person of suspicion but were not able to track him down before the shooting. Cheatle also said that they did not put an agent on the roof because of its slope, which caused a safety hazard, so they decided to secure it from inside.
Confusion reign supreme on the issue of the sloped roof. Many commented on social media that the anti-sniper team near the stage had fired their deadly shots at Crooks from a sloped roof. The SS says it was the responsibility of local police, but their chief denies that, saying he was supposed to provide officers, only for traffic duty. This is starting to sound more like a modern episode of the Keystone Cops.
This would be risible if the consequences had not been so deadly. The NYT did answer my question of why the SS snipers next to the stage had not reacted more quickly. They never thought to look for a sniper threat so close to the podium. They only look for sites over a thousand yards away. This view only adds to the amateurish aura of their protection that evening.
The SS’s overt failure to protect the president will inevitably create a handful of conspiracy theories and just maybe uncover a real plot. This would not be surprising to me, since the fingerprints of the White House or the DOJ have been on every other act against the former president to remove him from the electoral landscape since 2015.
In April nine Democratic congressmen tried to pass a law that if Trump went to jail, he would lose his Secret Service protection. How long would this 78-year-old man survive on Rykers Island? This elevates his crimes to a capital offense. His death has clearly been on the minds of many of his opponents since at least 2016.
Atlanta radio talk show host Erick Erickson is a resolute skeptic when it comes to conspiracy theories. He attributes the shooting to the incompetence of the Secret Service on all levels. He also cited the woeful communication between the SS and the Butler police. Both claim the other was managing the problems associated with the unprotected roof. Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson questioned why the SS had not used surveillance drones.
As for the Biden administration and the Secret Service, I really do not understand their lack of transparency on this horrible event. Their failures on all levels only add to the sauce of conspiracy that has been simmering since Saturday night. The one image that keeps coming back to me is that of a farmer who mindlessly leaves the door to his chicken coop open at night. It is as if he were inviting any nearby wolf to dinner.
This also raises the vital questions, will the SS do a better job throughout the rest of the presidential race and be better prepared should there be another shooter out there? Can president Trump trust them? At this stage it is difficult for me to believe that this will be a lone event and that the Secret Service will improve on its woeful performance on the 13th.
After the shooting, President Biden went on national TV to call for peace and a toning down of the rhetoric on both sides. I always get a kick about political postures of moral equivalency. The Democrats have been attacking Trump unmercifully as a threat to democracy. They have unleashed six months of violence-laced rhetoric, especially about taking Trump out of the race.
I seriously doubt that anything Biden says from his bloody pulpit will encourage the mainstream media to back-off or tone down their inflammatory rhetoric. Like the villain in the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, it is in their nature. Within 24 hours the trolls were back quipping about how they hope the next shot wouldn’t miss and how Trump needed to be eliminated. Were Trump president now, these comments would be federal offenses. I do not see why they should not be federal offenses now.
Have the Republicans made it a campaign issue that Biden is a threat to democracy on any scale? Yes, they attack the Woke culture the president is part of but there have not been any comments about taking him out. In fact, the Republicans want to run against Biden. They have mostly accused the Democrats of hypocrisy for doing everything in their arsenal of power to eliminate Trump from the election. Their actions certainly do not seem consistent with democracy.
The Democrats have only two campaign issues: abortion, which Trump has virtually eliminated as an issue by saying it was a state matter and his bogus threat to democracy. There is no moral equivalency here. One can honestly reason that it was the inflammatory rhetoric of the Left that nearly killed Donald Trump.
Before both sides agree to this kind of toning down of their respective rhetoric, the President should start with an apology, for comments he made earlier in the week. According to the New York Times and conservative columnist Joe Concha, Biden recently said We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye. Biden owns these irresponsible comments, as well as many others where he called Trump an existential threat to democracy.
Just two weeks before the assassination attempt, Biden had also said: Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He is a threat to our freedom. He is a threat to our democracy. He is a threat to everything America stands for.
Former Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard argued that Saturday’s attempted assassination was the logical conclusion of years of hateful rhetoric directed at Trump and his supporters from many on the left. It is also a logical consequence of repeatedly comparing him to Adolph Hitler…if Trump were another Hitler, wouldn’t it be their moral duty to assassinate him? Recently, The New Republic featured a cover, where Trump’s face morphed into that of Adolph Hitler.
Most people, who know anything about history, are aware that Hitler executed 5000 Germans for plotting to kill him in July of 1944. In a free society, it takes just one nut case to act on such bloody ideas and become a national hero.
Conservative scholar, Victor Davis Hanson wrote on July 14th that as a country we have always shied away from imagining the death or killings of any of our presidents or presidential candidates, that is, until now. But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now the killing of Trump has been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.
The alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks was a loner in high school. Now dead at 20, he leaves more questions than answers. He was on his high school’s rifle team. The gun he used was 11 years old. His father had legally purchased it when his son was nine years old. He was an outlier, terribly bullied while in high school. His life as well as his death remain shrouded in mystery and suspicion.
He was mentally competent. He planned the assassination well in advance. He scouted the site he would use, gauged the distance and was able to access the roof and get off at least six shots before the SS anti-snipers killed him. While he missed Trump by a hair, he did shoot three other Republicans,’ killing former fire chief Corey Comperatore and seriously wounding David Dutch and James Copenhaven.
We have not heard much from his father or any adults who could have offered some insight into his mindset. I read that, not only did Crooks recently graduate from a community college, but he was also set to attend Pittsburgh University in the Fall. But in March he withdrew his acceptance. What changed his mind? This just might be the key that unlocks the mystery surrounding him. Days after the assassination attempt, conversations from friends and an alleged video of a deranged Crooks having a meltdown in front of a group of MAGA supporters surfaced on social media. These isolated incidents may shed some light on a motive but are not enough to rush to any judgment.
Some on the Left have claimed that the Trump camp faked the whole incident. One Democratic press official even instructed the press to report that the assassination had been a staged event. I doubt if even the late Cecil DeMille could have staged anything as dramatic, spontaneous and eventful as what happened on the 13th.
There are many images that will stay with us for a long time. Trump’s bloody ear reminded me of former Boston Red Sox pitcher, Curt Schilling whose bloody sock became the ultimate symbol of grit and courage in the face of impossible odds in the 2004 Play-off series with the New York Yankees.
Like Schilling and more notably, Teddy Roosevelt before him who never stopped talking, though blood was visible through his shirt, the former president had been visibly shaken, but he was not stirred. Despite his shock and his wound, Trump had the presence of mind to lift his fist of victory through the protective arms of the SS around him and yell, Fight, fight, fight…with an inverted American flag waving proudly above his fist. This iconic picture will be frozen on our minds for generations like little John-John Kennedy saluting the coffin of his assassinated father sixty-one years ago.
