Conceivably, we might have given them the benefit of the doubt the first time around, applying the old adage about fooling me once and fooling me twice, but the second?
After the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in as many months, it’s become all-too clear that the establishment, which includes the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden-Harris Administration, doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. I’m reminded of the classic line from Robocop, when Peter Weller’s Alex Murphy, inspired by an old Western TV show his son likes, tells the bad guy, “dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” In this context, the powers that be, whether you call it the establishment, the uniparty, or the deep state, would prefer the former President be locked up, but in their warped view of the world, dead is just as good, so long as he is removed forever from the political stage. Of course, they will never come out and say it bluntly, but there’s a reason for the old expression that actions speak louder than words and sometimes, what’s left unsaid is as important as what’s actually said. With that in mind, key leaders in the Democrat Party including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris offered the usual platitudes this second time around, same as the first, claiming they were thankful he was safe and political violence had no place in this country, all while doing precisely nothing to ensure his safety and leaving just about everything important completely unsaid. Reconciling their statements and others, with their incessant reliance on apocalyptic “must be stopped” rhetoric targeting the former President, the lack of any and all proactive measures by those in power to prevent the former President from being stopped, literally in this case, and their failure to hold the Secret Service accountable in any fashion is near impossible. Given that those responsible for this security are simultaneously President Trump’s chief political opponents and harshest critics, the situation is akin to setting your house on fire while intentionally disabling the sprinkler system and then wondering why it burned down, or leaving the door open and the alarm off with a Picasso framed in the front window and acting surprised when its stolen. Putting this another way, they are fanning the flames as they say, knowingly and consciously, while not doing anything to prevent the obvious consequence of their actions and indeed, denying that there’s really anything to be done except giving the Secret Service more money to keep doing what they’re doing.
While much has been said about the heated rhetoric before both attempts (President Trump even provided a helpful run down of some of their claims, from the Vice President saying flatly “Trump is a threat to democracy and fundamental freedoms” to the “President insisting “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye”), the reaction afterwards, which gave new meaning to both victim blaming and evasion of responsibility, is far more telling in my opinion. As The New York Times put it rather backwardly, “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him,” meaning he was asking for it and should consider himself lucky his head wasn’t blown off, if you want answers or sympathy of any kind, look elsewhere. If anything, they made this even more clear with a follow up later in the week insisting the former President can’t possibly be right for blaming the incendiary rhetoric targeted at him directly. “Now, as part of a continued effort to deny Democrats one of their chief lines of attack against him, Mr. Trump is seeking to blame his opponents for an increasingly volatile political climate that he himself has helped stoke.” In a similar if even more bizarre vein, The Washington Post found fault not with the rhetoric, but with President Trump’s golf game, as if no President or former President before him has ever safely played. In an “exclusive” story, they claimed “Soon after Donald Trump became president, authorities tried to warn him about the risks posed by golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads. Secret Service agents came armed with unusual evidence: not suspect profiles or spent bullet casings, but simple photographs taken by news crews of him golfing at his private club in Sterling, Va.” Of course, the incident didn’t actually occur in Virginia, but that doesn’t prevent them from concluding, “Trump insisted that his clubs were safe and that he wanted to keep golfing, the former officials said. These preferences posed problems for his protection that former Trump aides, Secret Service officials and security experts said have only intensified in the years since he left the White House, as his security detail shrank and agents no longer maintained as extensive a perimeter guarding his movements. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.” Even those in the media who didn’t openly blame the former President, were willing to excuse and spin the motivations of a rabid Trump-hating shooter. The man had self-published a book begging Iran to assassinate the former President, “you are free to assassinate him,” who referred to the former President as a “fool” and a “buffoon” committing “tremendous blunders,” but Time Magazine described him as having an “unclear political ideology” whose “politics do not appear consistently aligned with one party or the other.” Their sole source for this belief? The shooter himself claimed to have voted for Trump in 2016 in a bizarre social media post. “@realDonaldTrump While you were my choice in 2106 [sic], I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment and it seems you are getting worse and devolving,” he wrote. “I will be glad when you gone.” Why we would conclude someone willing to assassinate a person isn’t also willing to lie remains necessarily unsaid, except it supports the notion that a former supporter had turned on the former President, which is the most important thing in their twisted eyes. If you doubt that, a study by the Media Research Institute found mainstream media coverage of President Trump was 95% negative immediately after the second attempt on his life.
Sadly, Democrat politicians weren’t much better. Former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resurfaced to wonder not how something like this could happen twice, but why the media wasn’t even harder on President Trump. Speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, she declared, “The press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should. They careen from one outrage to the next … I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is. You know, the late great journalist Harry Evans, one time said that journalists should, you know, really try to achieve objectivity, and by that, he said, I mean they should cover the object. Well, the object in this case is Donald Trump. His demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world. And stick with it,” presumably until he’s gone from the world stage. For her part, Vice President Kamala Harris completely dodged the question of whether the incompetent Secret Service is competent at an event with the National Association of Black Journalists on Tuesday. When asked if she feels safe with the Secret Service protecting her and if she still has confidence in their ability to protect politicians, she declared, simply “I do” as if there was no reason to doubt. She completely failed to acknowledge the not one but two assassination attempts on her opponent, and then immediately switched to a different topic entirely, giving a masterclass in the importance of what’s unsaid. “I do, but, I mean, you can go back to Ohio,” she answered, referencing the controversy over whether or not migrants were eating cats in an unstated indictment of her opponent, clearly leaving it open to interpretation that maybe, just maybe President Trump shouldn’t feel safe because he supposedly made Haitian migrants feel unsafe. “Not everybody has Secret Service,” she continued to reiterate the point, “and there are far too many people in our country right now who are not feeling safe,” leaving unsaid once again that Trump is making them so in her opinion, despite that her own immigration policy has flooded a small town with migrants, made the existing residents feel unsafe, and turned a once proud community into a beggar, beseeching the state and the federal government for assistance simply to survive. “I have Secret Service protection,” she concluded, “but that doesn’t change my perspective on the importance of fighting for the safety of everybody in our country and doing everything we can to, again, lift people up and not beat people down so they feel alone and are made to feel small and made to feel like they’re somehow not a part of it or us.” Looking past the platitudes, how else can you interpret her response other than not really caring whether or not her opponent is safe and having no issues with the conduct of a department that has failed to perform its primary function? How could anyone say they had “complete confidence” in the Secret Service a mere 48 hours after yet another person got close enough to kill a former President?
Conceivably, we might have given them the benefit of the doubt the first time around, applying the old adage about fooling me once and fooling me twice, but the second? This is doubly true considering Republican Senator Josh Hawley released a report on Monday about the failures in Butler, PA that contributed to the first attempt, failures that were completely unresolved in the run up to the second. These included a lead agent who “failed a key examination” to become an agent in the first place, an intelligence unit that coordinates with law enforcement about suspicious persons that wasn’t on site as it was supposed to be, another counter surveillance team that was inexplicably absent as well and didn’t perform the required assessment before the rally, Department of Homeland Security agents who knew little about event security and whose only training was a two hour webinar on Microsoft Teams. The lead agent in particular was described as being “known to lack competence and experience in the role” and personally making decisions that “likely compromised the overall security of the event.” Incredibly, the roof from which the would-be assassin opened fire was supposed to have been guarded by law enforcement, but it was simply “too hot” for the poor dears, and when local law enforcement recommended using drones to secure the rally, their requests were denied. Even the security after the shots were fired was lax. The hospital where President Trump received treatment was described as “poorly secured” and the agent on-site “could not answer basic questions about site security.” Even more incredibly, when confronted by these failures then and now, the Secret Service asserted outright that President Trump’s life is less valuable than President Biden or Vice President Harris. As they put it in the report, officials “preemptively informed the Pittsburgh field office that the Butler rally was not going to receive additional security resources because Trump is a former president,” “not the incumbent President or Vice President.” They said much the same after Sunday’s attempt, claiming that they couldn’t possibly have stationed anyone outside the golf course, as in where they themselves have said a threat might originate. I’m reminded of what my mother used to say about my father when she asked him to do something he didn’t really want to do: He’d fuck it up on purpose so she never asked him again. Republican Senator Robert Marshall was a bit more tactful, but said much the same, “In two months, there have been two unprecedented assassination attempts on President Trump’s life. Enough is enough, the current level of Secret Service protection around President Trump is insufficient. It is clear to every American that the threats to President Trump have reached a level that warrants additional security. That’s why we are demanding that President Trump receive the same amount of security resources as the President and Vice President. We are not a third-world country. Keeping President Trump safe is non-negotiable and remains paramount; any response less than this or debate around his safety and security is unacceptable.” He can keep demanding, but nothing will change when dead or alive doesn’t really matter to them.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 