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July 17, 2024

The Trump shooting: Inexplicable facts lead to a plethora of theories

By Andrea Widburg

With every day since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we’ve gotten more facts. And with each additional fact, the government’s narrative—that a weird loner without any skills, social media, or photos was the guilty party—makes less and less sense. Hanlon’s Razor tells us that we must “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” However, when the stupidity that allegedly characterized the United States Secret Service (“USSS”) becomes impossible to accept, people will start to follow Sherlock Holmes’s dictum: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

The initial story was a simple one: A lone gunman sneaked onto a roof and managed to get off some shots, wounding three (including President Trump) and killing one, before a Secret Service agent took him out with a perfect headshot. That sounded reasonable.

However, in the ensuing time, a lot of strange—I mean really strange—facts have emerged. Some of the most obvious ones that I can list off the top of my head are as follows:

  • The gunman, who graduated from high school only two or three years ago, was known then as a terrible shot.
  • The gunman had no social media presence at all, a striking anomaly today.
  • People repeatedly warned the police that they saw a man with a gun on a shed near Trump’s platform, but neither the police nor the USSS reacted.
  • The USSS had been aware of the shooter’s bizarre behavior for at least 30 minutes before the shooting itself but did nothing.
  • Security allowed a ladder to be positioned at the shed without responding to that fact.
  • Snipers had the shooter in their sights before he shot anyone.
  • The administration kept Trump’s USSS team understaffed.
  • Trump’s existing team, which had presumably learned to work together, was suddenly disassembled so that Jill could make an appearance at the same time as Trump’s rally.
  • The USSS put the shed outside of its security perimeter even though (a) it was 125 yards away from Trump, which would work even for a mediocre marksman, and (b) it had a perfect sightline to Trump.
  • USSS Director Kimberley Cheatle said agents weren’t actually on the shed because the roof was sloped. Using passive voice, she explained, “the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.”
  • As Cheatle noted, there were USSS agents inside the shed, even though the roof was the perfect firing platform.
  • The feds were instantly able to identify the shooter by his DNA, which is peculiar because he’d never been arrested, so there’s no reason that his DNA would have been in law enforcement records.
  • Despite the above cascades of failures, Director Cheatle has not been fired and has refused to quit. That in itself is truly weird.

As I said, that’s just the weirdness off the top of my head. I know there’s more.

When you think of those multiple failures and judgment calls, it calls to mind what Ian Fleming wrote in Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

I’m not accusing anyone in the Biden government of enemy action. I’m not claiming any specific theory is correct. However, I am noting that, with this level of weird incompetence and easy opportunities for an assassination attempt, a lot of people are saying that the given explanations seem so impossible that many believe the only probable explanation for what happened was enemy action, with the enemy being someone (or many people) within the Biden administration.

Sean Parnell noted negligence at an incomprehensible scale:

The most prominent person to level this charge is Sean Davis, one of the founders of The Federalist and someone with a record of being data-driven and level-headed. In an essay yesterday, he charged that “Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt.”

Darren J. Beattie, who worked in the White House and founded The Revolver, had an interesting question that adds to the many mysteries described above:

Other theories take the same available evidence and reach even further, with the shed itself serving as the equivalent of the grassy knoll:

And then there is this:

What saddens me is that it’s impossible at this point in American history to discount these theories and, instead, to say that people ought to focus on the facts and remember that, sometimes, “a cigar is just a cigar.” Here, that “cigar”—i.e., the obvious answer—is a lone wolf who almost got lucky.

But given what we know about the D.C. bureaucracy, whose members view Trump as an existential threat to the power they wield, it’s hard to say “stupidity,” “DEI,” and/or “luck” adequately cover Saturday’s events. We’ve seen the government in action against Trump, whether it was covering up Hunter Biden’s hard drive or promulgating the Russia collusion hoax.

While Sally Field once gushed about Hollywood that “you like me,” the inversion is true in D.C.: The establishment hates Trump, and there’s an open question about how far that hatred will go.

So, while I once would have characterized any theories about a malevolent government conspiracy as fringe people connecting imaginary dots with invisible lines, I no longer feel comfortable being so dismissive. We’ve long known that D.C. has become corrupt in a byzantine way, and we can only hope that it hasn’t adopted byzantine manners when it comes to political opponents.

Image: X screen grab.

(You can find me on Twitter here.)

UPDATE: I just posted this, and I've already got a good update:

 

Related Topics: Trump, Government
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