One inch. That’s about the distance between the top of your ear and your brain. And that’s how close America came to transforming, instantly, into a different country.
As of today, we are still an inch away from that new reality. What would that new reality be, exactly? We don’t know. Is it a civil war? All-out chaos? Burning cities and the complete destruction of our political system? Something not as bad — or something even worse? I have no idea. Nobody does. But it’s very clear now that we are nowhere near as far removed from anarchy as we previously thought we were.
As 21st century Americans, we tend to feel insulated from the kind of carnage and brutality that has shaped the world. “The end of history,” it’s been called. But history has not ended. It marches on and drags us with it. And our sense of security is draped in the thinnest of veils. It only takes one bullet to pierce through it. Two days ago, that’s very nearly what happened.
The official narrative is that two days ago, in broad daylight, a 20-year-old acting completely on his own, armed with an AR-15, managed to climb onto a rooftop just 400 feet away from where Donald Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. This was one of only a handful of rooftops in the area, and it was the one that offered easily the best view of the stage where Trump was speaking. The gunman was able to shoot Trump and three of his supporters — killing one of them and seriously injuring two others — before the Secret Service managed to take him out. This is a gunman whose phone is apparently inaccessible to the FBI at this hour, but they’re completely sure he acted all by himself.
Hearing those facts, you might conclude that somehow, this 20-year-old had managed to elude detection by Trump’s protective detail, until he was able to open fire. But that’s not true. The Secret Service and local authorities were aware of the gunman long before he climbed on the roof. From CNN:
The shooter was spotted by local law enforcement who thought he might’ve been acting suspiciously near the event magnetometers on Saturday, according to a senior law enforcement official. They put it out over their radio to keep an eye on him – and that information was passed to the Secret Service as well.
So already, we can say definitively that if the Secret Service did their job, that would’ve been the end of it. Anyone watching this would-be assassin would have immediately noticed when he scaled the building armed with a rifle. And Trump would have been taken to safety right away.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Apparently, though, the police and the Secret Service lost track of the assailant. But dozens of bystanders saw what he was doing anyway, and they alerted the police — including a police officer who was right in front of the roof where the shooter was perched.
Yet for some inconceivable reason, despite all of these warnings, the two counter-sniper teams at the rally — including at least two Secret Service snipers that were looking in the direction of this very rooftop — didn’t take any action. And the police officer in front of the building, who’s visible on recordings of the incident, didn’t seem to be doing anything, either. This went on for several minutes. Watch:
There have been several other presidential assassination attempts in US history. Usually, from the perspective of the bystanders, they come like a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky. Completely unexpected. Shocking. This is the first one where dozens of people in the crowd saw it coming and spent minutes pointing out the assassin to law enforcement, who proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it. This is the first time that you have a whole crowd of people, in the minutes leading up to the assassination attempt, pointing to the assassin and saying, essentially, “Hey that guy looks an awful lot like an assassin.” Yet the authorities didn’t radio to pull Trump off the stage. They didn’t start shooting at the gunman. They didn’t do anything. That makes this, easily, the single most preventable assassination attempt in the history of this country. The Secret Service, we’re led to believe, had less situational awareness than random people at a rally.
It defies any benign, rational explanation why so many people, in so many places, could see this shooter — but the Secret Service didn’t get Trump off the stage at any point. They didn’t do anything at all. Several people at the rally explained in interviews that none of this made any sense whatsoever from their perspective. Here’s one of those interviews:
They can see the guy has a rifle from the ground. They’re pointing it out to the police and the Secret Service, for several minutes. And no one does anything. No one gets Trump to safety. And as the guy rightly observes, none of this should be necessary anyway, because they should have already had agents on the roof. This rally was out in farm country in Pennsylvania. There aren’t that many rooftops in the vicinity. And of all the rooftops, this is the one that most needed to be secured, but it wasn’t.
Apparently there was just one police officer who responded in a meaningful way during this whole process, before the shooting started. According to the Associated Press, a local police officer heard all these people yelling about someone on the roof. Reportedly, the officer climbed up on the roof, at which point the gunman pointed his rifle at him. The officer dropped back down, retreated, and the gunman quickly began firing at Trump. It’s not clear why the officer didn’t alert the Secret Service or why he didn’t engage the shooter immediately — or why he wasn’t on the rooftop to begin with.
Late last night, NBC News reported that, “The roof where the [suspect] was located was a well-known high priority vulnerability … It was identified just the day before during a security walkthrough.” That obviously makes sense. You’d have to be blind to miss the rooftop. I could have brought my four-year-old daughter to that venue before the event and asked her to point out security vulnerabilities, and after I explained what a security vulnerability is, she would have identified that rooftop as a primary area of concern. Which raises an obvious question: who exactly is responsible for the willful decision to leave that roof unsecured? And why did they make that decision? And also: why haven’t they already been publicly fired?
Really, there are only two plausible ways to explain how this would-be assassin managed to take a position with a direct sightline to the stage only 150 yards away. It’s either the grossest, most extreme kind of incompetence and negligence from the Secret Service that we’ve ever seen, or they were in on it. Those are our options. There are no other options. The man who was killed, a firefighter named Corey Comperatore, would be alive if the Secret Service expended the minimum possible amount of effort to secure this venue. Donald Trump and those two other people at the rally would not have been shot.
At this point every “conspiracy theory” is on the table and will remain on the table indefinitely, because we’ll never be told the full story about the shooter. What we know is that Trump has two factors working against him. First, the federal government — to include especially the agencies tasked with keeping him safe — hate his guts and want him destroyed. And second, the federal government — to include especially the agencies tasked with keeping him safe — has been hollowed out by DEI hiring practices. The point is we simply can’t rule out them trying to get him killed again, or accidentally allowing someone else to do it. Donald Trump is in danger right now, and it’s clear that the Secret Service isn’t up to the task of protecting him.
This is a national scandal, obviously. The only thing more third world than imprisoning your political opponents is making them fear for their lives every time they go out in public. And that’s where we are. Remember that just a few months ago, several Democrats tried to introduce legislation that would strip Trump of his Secret Service protection entirely. The idea was that, as soon as he was sentenced to prison, he’d lose his protection. This was all a big joke on MSNBC, but the intent of it was clear. They wanted to use lawfare to ultimately cause the death of Donald Trump. In some instances, Democrats came right out and said it. In an interview with Jenn Psaki, Congressman Dan Goldman — who oversees the Secret Service as part of the Homeland Security Committee — announced that Trump needed to be, “eliminated.” Watch:
That’s a sitting member of Congress — one of the more influential ones, with oversight of the Secret Service — saying Trump simply cannot win. He has to be “eliminated.” And Joe Biden’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, just sits there and nods. It’s psychotic.
We often hear a lot about “dangerous rhetoric.” Most of the time it’s applied to things that are uncomfortable but true. It’s often called “dangerous” to point out the racial disparities in violent crime statistics, for example. But that can’t be dangerous because it’s A) true, and it’s B) not the sort of thing that, once acknowledged, will plausibly bring harm to any person or group.
But the Left’s decade-long campaign to label Trump a Hitlerian dictator who wants to destroy democracy is actually dangerous because it’s A) not true, and it’s B) the sort of thing that, if believed, is all but guaranteed to bring about exactly the result we saw on Saturday. That’s the point. It’s why they say it.
Think of it this way: If Trump really is an evil dictator who wants to destroy America, it would be not only understandable but in fact morally righteous to kill him — which is why it doesn’t make any sense for all of these Leftists to now be expressing grief and claiming that this kind of violence is unacceptable. Really? Wait a minute. I thought you said he’s Hitler? How could it be unacceptable to kill Hitler? I’ve heard people debate whether killing baby Hitler would be okay. But killing adult Hitler? What’s there to think about?
From a political perspective, Democrats are in a real conundrum. There doesn’t appear to be any way out of it. They can’t say Trump deserved to die, but if he didn’t deserve to die, then he isn’t Hitler incarnate. So what can they do? The only way to continue their Trump narrative is to actively celebrate his attempted assassination. Most of them don’t want to do that, for obvious political reasons. But this is the problem. If Trump really is an evil super villain dictator, as they have said countless times, then assassinating him would be morally justified. But they can’t justify this, which means they’re confessing that everything they’ve said about him is nonsense. They either have to openly defend his attempted murder or admit they’re full of crap. There is no good option. They’re screwed.
Democrats hope to thread this impossible needle by declaring — as many of them have, from Biden to AOC — that “there is no place for political violence in America.” The problem with a statement like this is that, first of all, it’s rote and cliche. A man just tried to murder a former president and current presidential candidate on live TV. This is an historic moment that every American alive today will remember for as long as they live. And in this moment all you can muster is a hollow slogan, an empty platitude? That’s no surprise. After all, what can you expect form hollow people but hollow slogans?
Yet there’s another problem, which I hope to explain without being misconstrued. A naive hope, no doubt. The other problem is that the statement “there is no place for political violence in America” isn’t true. It obviously isn’t true. Of course there can be a place for political violence in this country. This country was born in political violence. This country wouldn’t exist without political violence. Political violence can, in certain circumstances, be morally justified. The political violence that resulted in the formation of this country was morally justified. The problem with the assassination attempt against Donald Trump is that it was not one of those circumstances. It was not morally justified. Donald Trump is not the wicked, despotic tyrant they claim he is. What makes it wrong to kill Donald Trump is that it’s wrong to kill Donald Trump.
Not that it’s always wrong to kill political leaders, all the time, in all circumstances, throughout all of history. Again: Hitler was a political leader and most of us would agree that it would have been a great thing to kill him. Stalin was also a political leader and most of us would agree that it would have been great if someone killed him — and maybe someone did, actually. So it’s not always wrong to kill political leaders. But it is certainly wrong to kill this one. This should be obvious but it’s worth stating because you have to understand the game Democrats are playing. Condemning Trump’s assassination attempt by condemning all “political violence” is a dodge. They don’t want to condemn this specific act, so instead they just condemn the category. But it makes no sense to condemn the category.
After the assassination attempt on Saturday, Joe Biden shuffled out to give his approximation of a response. This is the same Joe Biden who has spent the last several years referring to MAGA Republicans as an “existential threat to democracy.” It’s the same Joe Biden who said that Trump and his supporters will supposedly bring about an end to the rule of law in this country. But on Saturday night, he seemed not to believe any of that. Watch:
So Biden’s assessment is that it’s “not appropriate” to use lethal force to save democracy and prevent Hitler from taking over the United States, apparently.
First of all — “Not appropriate?” That’s the term I use when lecturing my boys for making fart noises with their armpits at the dinner table. But it’s the most Biden could muster under the circumstances because he knows he’s trapped. He can admit his rhetoric for the past decade has been a lie. Or he can affirm that Donald Trump is Hitler and therefore it’s good to kill him. Biden can’t do either of those things, because he lacks any kind of moral backbone, so we’re left with this middling language. It’s “not appropriate” to try to blow the head off the leading presidential candidate, Biden mutters. It’s “rude,” you see. Impolite. Uncouth. “Hey, knock it off, you mischievous assassins. Not cool, folks. Take it easy. Enough with that assassination malarky.”
What this means is that Joe Biden continues to be the weakest and most pitiful man ever to occupy the White House. The contrast between Trump raising a defiant fist while streaked in blood, and this frail bumbling wimpish oaf could not be more striking. Trump will win in a landslide if they don’t kill him first. I don’t think they can even cheat their way out of it now.
At the moment, it appears Democrats are resigned to that fate. You can expect efforts to replace Biden to completely die down now. No one wants to take over this sinking ship. It would be like answering a help wanted ad on the Titanic 10 minutes after hitting the iceberg. Apparently, even Biden’s handlers have thrown in the towel, which might be why Biden was allowed to appear in public twice yesterday.
In the evening, six hours after his bedtime, he gave this bizarre address from the Oval Office. Watch:
JUST IN: President Biden misspeaks and calls on Americans to resolve their differences at the “battle box,” calls for an end to political violence.
“I’ll continue to speak out strongly for our democracy. Stand up for our constitution in the rule of law…”
“No violence on our… pic.twitter.com/NpnEjWE4kO
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 15, 2024
You heard it directly from Joe Biden: We’re going to resolve our issues at the “battle box.” What is a battle box? Is that what Biden calls the board game BattleShip? Does he think the presidential election will be decided by a rousing game of BattleShip between the two sides? Who knows? Anything is possible. And this is the choice you have in the next election: A man who could not be thwarted by multiple impeachments, multiple arrests, a criminal conviction, and an assassin’s bullet — or a man who is thwarted every day by his own teleprompter, and staircases, and bicycles, and bowels.
So where do we go from here? There have been many calls for unity in the wake of the shooting. Trump himself has said that he is going to re-write his convention speech to focus on national unity. That makes a lot of sense as a political strategy. It’s certainly the right move in a presidential campaign, in response to such an event. But can it actually happen? Can this country be unified now? Is there any chance that we all come together and put our differences aside, now that we have come so close to chaos, now that the thin veil was very nearly ripped to shreds?
The answer, I’m afraid, is no. That is the conclusion we come to if history is our guide — and it should be, because, as I said at the beginning, we are living in history, not at the end of it. And history shows us very clearly that when political tensions eventually lead to political assassination attempts, things don’t just stop there. The tide doesn’t come to a screeching halt. The factions don’t pull up short and say “Oh geez, maybe this has gone too far guys.” That’s not the way this has ever worked. We are not history’s great exceptions. It’s time that we admit that to ourselves.
What that means is that the forces which, at a minimum, set the stage for this — the forces which have demonized Trump and the movement he stands for — the forces which have tried to destroy him in every possible way — the forces which have actually destroyed many normal Americans far less powerful and prominent than Trump himself — those forces are still at work. Still scheming. Still plotting against Trump, and against you. We cannot unite with them. The only national unity to be had, will be had in their defeat. They must be defeated. That is the only way. Trump was right in what he said on stage after the shots rang out, with blood smeared across his face. He didn’t shout “unite.” He shouted “fight.” And that’s what we have to do. Now more than ever.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
One inch. That’s about the distance between the top of your ear and your brain. And that’s how close America came to transforming, instantly, into a different country.
As of today, we are still an inch away from that new reality. What would that new reality be, exactly? We don’t know. Is it a civil war? All-out chaos? Burning cities and the complete destruction of our political system? Something not as bad — or something even worse? I have no idea. Nobody does. But it’s very clear now that we are nowhere near as far removed from anarchy as we previously thought we were.
As 21st century Americans, we tend to feel insulated from the kind of carnage and brutality that has shaped the world. “The end of history,” it’s been called. But history has not ended. It marches on and drags us with it. And our sense of security is draped in the thinnest of veils. It only takes one bullet to pierce through it. Two days ago, that’s very nearly what happened.
The official narrative is that two days ago, in broad daylight, a 20-year-old acting completely on his own, armed with an AR-15, managed to climb onto a rooftop just 400 feet away from where Donald Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. This was one of only a handful of rooftops in the area, and it was the one that offered easily the best view of the stage where Trump was speaking. The gunman was able to shoot Trump and three of his supporters — killing one of them and seriously injuring two others — before the Secret Service managed to take him out. This is a gunman whose phone is apparently inaccessible to the FBI at this hour, but they’re completely sure he acted all by himself.
Hearing those facts, you might conclude that somehow, this 20-year-old had managed to elude detection by Trump’s protective detail, until he was able to open fire. But that’s not true. The Secret Service and local authorities were aware of the gunman long before he climbed on the roof. From CNN:
The shooter was spotted by local law enforcement who thought he might’ve been acting suspiciously near the event magnetometers on Saturday, according to a senior law enforcement official. They put it out over their radio to keep an eye on him – and that information was passed to the Secret Service as well.
So already, we can say definitively that if the Secret Service did their job, that would’ve been the end of it. Anyone watching this would-be assassin would have immediately noticed when he scaled the building armed with a rifle. And Trump would have been taken to safety right away.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Apparently, though, the police and the Secret Service lost track of the assailant. But dozens of bystanders saw what he was doing anyway, and they alerted the police — including a police officer who was right in front of the roof where the shooter was perched.
Yet for some inconceivable reason, despite all of these warnings, the two counter-sniper teams at the rally — including at least two Secret Service snipers that were looking in the direction of this very rooftop — didn’t take any action. And the police officer in front of the building, who’s visible on recordings of the incident, didn’t seem to be doing anything, either. This went on for several minutes. Watch:
There have been several other presidential assassination attempts in US history. Usually, from the perspective of the bystanders, they come like a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky. Completely unexpected. Shocking. This is the first one where dozens of people in the crowd saw it coming and spent minutes pointing out the assassin to law enforcement, who proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it. This is the first time that you have a whole crowd of people, in the minutes leading up to the assassination attempt, pointing to the assassin and saying, essentially, “Hey that guy looks an awful lot like an assassin.” Yet the authorities didn’t radio to pull Trump off the stage. They didn’t start shooting at the gunman. They didn’t do anything. That makes this, easily, the single most preventable assassination attempt in the history of this country. The Secret Service, we’re led to believe, had less situational awareness than random people at a rally.
It defies any benign, rational explanation why so many people, in so many places, could see this shooter — but the Secret Service didn’t get Trump off the stage at any point. They didn’t do anything at all. Several people at the rally explained in interviews that none of this made any sense whatsoever from their perspective. Here’s one of those interviews:
They can see the guy has a rifle from the ground. They’re pointing it out to the police and the Secret Service, for several minutes. And no one does anything. No one gets Trump to safety. And as the guy rightly observes, none of this should be necessary anyway, because they should have already had agents on the roof. This rally was out in farm country in Pennsylvania. There aren’t that many rooftops in the vicinity. And of all the rooftops, this is the one that most needed to be secured, but it wasn’t.
Apparently there was just one police officer who responded in a meaningful way during this whole process, before the shooting started. According to the Associated Press, a local police officer heard all these people yelling about someone on the roof. Reportedly, the officer climbed up on the roof, at which point the gunman pointed his rifle at him. The officer dropped back down, retreated, and the gunman quickly began firing at Trump. It’s not clear why the officer didn’t alert the Secret Service or why he didn’t engage the shooter immediately — or why he wasn’t on the rooftop to begin with.
Late last night, NBC News reported that, “The roof where the [suspect] was located was a well-known high priority vulnerability … It was identified just the day before during a security walkthrough.” That obviously makes sense. You’d have to be blind to miss the rooftop. I could have brought my four-year-old daughter to that venue before the event and asked her to point out security vulnerabilities, and after I explained what a security vulnerability is, she would have identified that rooftop as a primary area of concern. Which raises an obvious question: who exactly is responsible for the willful decision to leave that roof unsecured? And why did they make that decision? And also: why haven’t they already been publicly fired?
Really, there are only two plausible ways to explain how this would-be assassin managed to take a position with a direct sightline to the stage only 150 yards away. It’s either the grossest, most extreme kind of incompetence and negligence from the Secret Service that we’ve ever seen, or they were in on it. Those are our options. There are no other options. The man who was killed, a firefighter named Corey Comperatore, would be alive if the Secret Service expended the minimum possible amount of effort to secure this venue. Donald Trump and those two other people at the rally would not have been shot.
At this point every “conspiracy theory” is on the table and will remain on the table indefinitely, because we’ll never be told the full story about the shooter. What we know is that Trump has two factors working against him. First, the federal government — to include especially the agencies tasked with keeping him safe — hate his guts and want him destroyed. And second, the federal government — to include especially the agencies tasked with keeping him safe — has been hollowed out by DEI hiring practices. The point is we simply can’t rule out them trying to get him killed again, or accidentally allowing someone else to do it. Donald Trump is in danger right now, and it’s clear that the Secret Service isn’t up to the task of protecting him.
This is a national scandal, obviously. The only thing more third world than imprisoning your political opponents is making them fear for their lives every time they go out in public. And that’s where we are. Remember that just a few months ago, several Democrats tried to introduce legislation that would strip Trump of his Secret Service protection entirely. The idea was that, as soon as he was sentenced to prison, he’d lose his protection. This was all a big joke on MSNBC, but the intent of it was clear. They wanted to use lawfare to ultimately cause the death of Donald Trump. In some instances, Democrats came right out and said it. In an interview with Jenn Psaki, Congressman Dan Goldman — who oversees the Secret Service as part of the Homeland Security Committee — announced that Trump needed to be, “eliminated.” Watch:
That’s a sitting member of Congress — one of the more influential ones, with oversight of the Secret Service — saying Trump simply cannot win. He has to be “eliminated.” And Joe Biden’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, just sits there and nods. It’s psychotic.
We often hear a lot about “dangerous rhetoric.” Most of the time it’s applied to things that are uncomfortable but true. It’s often called “dangerous” to point out the racial disparities in violent crime statistics, for example. But that can’t be dangerous because it’s A) true, and it’s B) not the sort of thing that, once acknowledged, will plausibly bring harm to any person or group.
But the Left’s decade-long campaign to label Trump a Hitlerian dictator who wants to destroy democracy is actually dangerous because it’s A) not true, and it’s B) the sort of thing that, if believed, is all but guaranteed to bring about exactly the result we saw on Saturday. That’s the point. It’s why they say it.
Think of it this way: If Trump really is an evil dictator who wants to destroy America, it would be not only understandable but in fact morally righteous to kill him — which is why it doesn’t make any sense for all of these Leftists to now be expressing grief and claiming that this kind of violence is unacceptable. Really? Wait a minute. I thought you said he’s Hitler? How could it be unacceptable to kill Hitler? I’ve heard people debate whether killing baby Hitler would be okay. But killing adult Hitler? What’s there to think about?
From a political perspective, Democrats are in a real conundrum. There doesn’t appear to be any way out of it. They can’t say Trump deserved to die, but if he didn’t deserve to die, then he isn’t Hitler incarnate. So what can they do? The only way to continue their Trump narrative is to actively celebrate his attempted assassination. Most of them don’t want to do that, for obvious political reasons. But this is the problem. If Trump really is an evil super villain dictator, as they have said countless times, then assassinating him would be morally justified. But they can’t justify this, which means they’re confessing that everything they’ve said about him is nonsense. They either have to openly defend his attempted murder or admit they’re full of crap. There is no good option. They’re screwed.
Democrats hope to thread this impossible needle by declaring — as many of them have, from Biden to AOC — that “there is no place for political violence in America.” The problem with a statement like this is that, first of all, it’s rote and cliche. A man just tried to murder a former president and current presidential candidate on live TV. This is an historic moment that every American alive today will remember for as long as they live. And in this moment all you can muster is a hollow slogan, an empty platitude? That’s no surprise. After all, what can you expect form hollow people but hollow slogans?
Yet there’s another problem, which I hope to explain without being misconstrued. A naive hope, no doubt. The other problem is that the statement “there is no place for political violence in America” isn’t true. It obviously isn’t true. Of course there can be a place for political violence in this country. This country was born in political violence. This country wouldn’t exist without political violence. Political violence can, in certain circumstances, be morally justified. The political violence that resulted in the formation of this country was morally justified. The problem with the assassination attempt against Donald Trump is that it was not one of those circumstances. It was not morally justified. Donald Trump is not the wicked, despotic tyrant they claim he is. What makes it wrong to kill Donald Trump is that it’s wrong to kill Donald Trump.
Not that it’s always wrong to kill political leaders, all the time, in all circumstances, throughout all of history. Again: Hitler was a political leader and most of us would agree that it would have been a great thing to kill him. Stalin was also a political leader and most of us would agree that it would have been great if someone killed him — and maybe someone did, actually. So it’s not always wrong to kill political leaders. But it is certainly wrong to kill this one. This should be obvious but it’s worth stating because you have to understand the game Democrats are playing. Condemning Trump’s assassination attempt by condemning all “political violence” is a dodge. They don’t want to condemn this specific act, so instead they just condemn the category. But it makes no sense to condemn the category.
After the assassination attempt on Saturday, Joe Biden shuffled out to give his approximation of a response. This is the same Joe Biden who has spent the last several years referring to MAGA Republicans as an “existential threat to democracy.” It’s the same Joe Biden who said that Trump and his supporters will supposedly bring about an end to the rule of law in this country. But on Saturday night, he seemed not to believe any of that. Watch:
So Biden’s assessment is that it’s “not appropriate” to use lethal force to save democracy and prevent Hitler from taking over the United States, apparently.
First of all — “Not appropriate?” That’s the term I use when lecturing my boys for making fart noises with their armpits at the dinner table. But it’s the most Biden could muster under the circumstances because he knows he’s trapped. He can admit his rhetoric for the past decade has been a lie. Or he can affirm that Donald Trump is Hitler and therefore it’s good to kill him. Biden can’t do either of those things, because he lacks any kind of moral backbone, so we’re left with this middling language. It’s “not appropriate” to try to blow the head off the leading presidential candidate, Biden mutters. It’s “rude,” you see. Impolite. Uncouth. “Hey, knock it off, you mischievous assassins. Not cool, folks. Take it easy. Enough with that assassination malarky.”
What this means is that Joe Biden continues to be the weakest and most pitiful man ever to occupy the White House. The contrast between Trump raising a defiant fist while streaked in blood, and this frail bumbling wimpish oaf could not be more striking. Trump will win in a landslide if they don’t kill him first. I don’t think they can even cheat their way out of it now.
At the moment, it appears Democrats are resigned to that fate. You can expect efforts to replace Biden to completely die down now. No one wants to take over this sinking ship. It would be like answering a help wanted ad on the Titanic 10 minutes after hitting the iceberg. Apparently, even Biden’s handlers have thrown in the towel, which might be why Biden was allowed to appear in public twice yesterday.
In the evening, six hours after his bedtime, he gave this bizarre address from the Oval Office. Watch:
JUST IN: President Biden misspeaks and calls on Americans to resolve their differences at the “battle box,” calls for an end to political violence.
“I’ll continue to speak out strongly for our democracy. Stand up for our constitution in the rule of law…”
“No violence on our… pic.twitter.com/NpnEjWE4kO
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 15, 2024
You heard it directly from Joe Biden: We’re going to resolve our issues at the “battle box.” What is a battle box? Is that what Biden calls the board game BattleShip? Does he think the presidential election will be decided by a rousing game of BattleShip between the two sides? Who knows? Anything is possible. And this is the choice you have in the next election: A man who could not be thwarted by multiple impeachments, multiple arrests, a criminal conviction, and an assassin’s bullet — or a man who is thwarted every day by his own teleprompter, and staircases, and bicycles, and bowels.
So where do we go from here? There have been many calls for unity in the wake of the shooting. Trump himself has said that he is going to re-write his convention speech to focus on national unity. That makes a lot of sense as a political strategy. It’s certainly the right move in a presidential campaign, in response to such an event. But can it actually happen? Can this country be unified now? Is there any chance that we all come together and put our differences aside, now that we have come so close to chaos, now that the thin veil was very nearly ripped to shreds?
The answer, I’m afraid, is no. That is the conclusion we come to if history is our guide — and it should be, because, as I said at the beginning, we are living in history, not at the end of it. And history shows us very clearly that when political tensions eventually lead to political assassination attempts, things don’t just stop there. The tide doesn’t come to a screeching halt. The factions don’t pull up short and say “Oh geez, maybe this has gone too far guys.” That’s not the way this has ever worked. We are not history’s great exceptions. It’s time that we admit that to ourselves.
What that means is that the forces which, at a minimum, set the stage for this — the forces which have demonized Trump and the movement he stands for — the forces which have tried to destroy him in every possible way — the forces which have actually destroyed many normal Americans far less powerful and prominent than Trump himself — those forces are still at work. Still scheming. Still plotting against Trump, and against you. We cannot unite with them. The only national unity to be had, will be had in their defeat. They must be defeated. That is the only way. Trump was right in what he said on stage after the shots rang out, with blood smeared across his face. He didn’t shout “unite.” He shouted “fight.” And that’s what we have to do. Now more than ever.
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