There are so many stunning examples of the apparently irrepressible Trump hate and anti-Trump bias in the news media that it would take an over-long post to thoroughly document it. I decided that the one above was the blue ribbon winner; I can’t even imagine the degree of ugly bias in a news room that would permit a headline like that to reach publication. Then there was CNN’s characteristically disgusting fake news spin:
Anyone looking at the video could see that Trump didn’t “fall;” he ducked down after feeling a bullet hit his ear and hearing gunshots. In its front page photo, the New York Times carefully cropped out the American flag over Trump’s head, making the spectacular composition of the original photo…
…look ugly: this was obvious cognitive dissonance scale manipulation. Mustn’t have any positive imagery linked to that monster Trump! Quickly after the incident, as EA already noted, a CNN talking head criticized him for saying “Fight!” minutes after he was shot, as blood dripped down his face. As I also noted, some found it an appropriate time to suggest that Trump’s upraised fist was another fascist “dog whistle.”
This was a confirmation bias classic: commenter Joel Mundt sent me these photos, none of which inspired a similar interpretation.
Gee, I wonder why? There was also a lot of triumphal fist-raising yesterday at Wimbledon too, but then we all know that pro tennis is a hotbed of fascism.
Yes, I believe that the news media’s unending assault on Trump can fairly and legitimately be implicated in the assassination attempt. On July 9th, Times pundit James McWhorter was chastised by Glenn Loury on his podcast for writing that he wished someone would kill Trump. McWhorter: “I have taken a great deal of heat for saying, or implying, that I wish somebody would kill Donald Trump. And that is exactly what I was implying. It was irresponsible ….Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I said it. And it was irresponsible of me to say that in a public space. I really shouldn’t have said it here. Now I already did, and so, you know, I have to own it, I did say it. Somebody has asked, you know, ‘Do you say that in private?’ And, yes, I have said it often, and I have only halfway been kidding, and I’m gonna say it again, yes. And it is a smaller side of me. I should not wish for another person to suffer, even if it’s a hideous pig of a man like him.”
Loury, hardly a conservative, replied, “Uh, do you realize what hell will have been unleashed upon the country if people start and continue to talk like that? You — This is not something that you can just casually throw around: killing politicians whom you don’t like. That is, that is not a way that you want to run the railroad, here, man, I mean, that’s — that’s disaster. Do you think it ends there? Do you think that if somebody were to do something along the lines of what you’re suggesting, that would be the end of it? You’d unleash the whirlwind.”
Has it? Has it unleashed the whirlwind? To my eye, the Trump Deranged refuse to accept any responsibility for their death wishes and extreme vilification that seemed to compel a violent response.
Numerous journalists have said that Trump is responsible for his own assassination attempt because of his “hateful rhetoric.” My smart, retired government lawyer family member tried to huminahumina away the Axis complicity in the placing of a bullseye on Trump, literally what President Biden called for just a few days ago when he said,”We’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” She cited as provocation Trump’s calling “immigrants” “vermin” and saying that they “poisoned the blood of the nation.” 1) You do mean illegal immigrants don’t you? This is what comes of watching MSNBC, 2) Oh! He was mean to the people who come here illegally, many of whom commit horrific crimes? Of course someone should shoot him, then. Good point. 3) Somehow I think declaring a candidate Hitler, and an existential threat to democracy and the nation is just a scosche more of an actual call to violence than the victim’s own hyperbolic description of reality.
On July 3, British pundit Mark Steyn noted that BBC presenter David Aaronovitch called on Biden to murder Trump:
Later, post ear-shot, Steyn reminded readers of this op-ed in the Washington Post by columnist Robert Kagan. Sample quote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending… With each passing day, it will become harder & more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal.” Steyn asks, “If what Mr Kagan and The Washington Post assert is correct, why would you not act upon it?”
Why indeed. Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson just last month tried to strip Trump of his Secret Service protection. He also was one of the leaders of the Jan. 6 kangaroo committee investigation in the House. His field director, Jacqueline Marsaw, tweeted after Trump was shot,
Of course, Thompson had to fire her, though there is no question that she was only saying out loud what the Congressman’s office and staff—and he himself—really think.
Fire-breathing PJ Media columnist Stephen Kruiser wrote this morning, “The Democrats have done everything they could since 2016 to make last Saturday happen, dutifully aided and abetted by their flying monkeys in the mainstream media. I use the word unhinged a lot when writing about the Left, not because I have a limited vocabulary, but because it’s the most accurate description of the way that they have been behaving since Trump was elected.”
Unfair? Excessive? If so, not by much. This was the New Republic’s cover last month:
Finally, here’s red-pilled former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi at his substack, in his essay titled, “The Slow-Motion Assassination: Self-described guardians of democracy spent years creating a lethal atmosphere around Donald Trump”:
Before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, while questions raged about the health of President Joe Biden, officials downplayed the importance of the physical leader. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters to look at the administration, not the man. “What we are saying,” she said, “is there are results, his record.” As my podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote, we were “being introduced to the idea that the presidency is a diffuse impersonal ‘office,’ and the bucks stops nowhere that is… conventionally identifiable.”
But we live in a physical world, and individuals still matter. Official actions betray this more than anything else. When a populist movement built on frustration over decades of misrule began having electoral success, they created a legend that the backlash was irrational and the fault of one Donald Trump, building him into a figure of colossal art, a super-Hitler. It became cliché that he was the embodiment of all evil and needed to be stopped “at all costs.” By late last year, mainstream press organizations were saying legal means had failed, and more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.
Now he’s been shot, in an incident that’s left two dead. . . .
After the 2016 election, Trump began to be described as a new kind of American villain, someone not quite entitled to normal rights — the political equivalent of an “enemy combatant.” Weeks after inauguration, California congresswoman Maxine Waters blithely said Trump was guilty of “sex actions” and “collusion” described in the Steele dossier, and as for evidence, “We just have to… do the investigation and find it.”
Waters has always been on the edge of the credibility spectrum, but this chucking of the presumption of innocence raised few eyebrows, for that new reason: Because Trump. Fellow Californian Adam Schiff, held hearings on the Steele accusations without even attempting to verify them. There were widespread hysterical accusations of a capital crime — TREASON — after an anodyne meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The office of Trump’s lawyer was raided on a dubious pretext (leading to this year’s criminal prosecution), news that the FBI deployed informants in Trump’s 2016 campaign drew yawns, and no one fretted over lunatic character attacks on former Trump aide Carter Page, or the jailing of figures like George Papadopoulos who committed no real crime. Even Schiff’s attempt to resurrect the McCarthyite concept of “disloyalty to country” as a means of unseating Trump was received politely by media arbiters like Chuck Todd.
Most of the early madness surrounding Trump expressed itself as religious worship of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his investigation. Solemn readings of the Mueller report by actors like John Lithgow and Annette Bening really happened. The failure of that Great Deliverance to come to pass seems to be when officials shifted their tone toward the current posture that Trump needs to be stopped “at all costs.”
Bingo. If the Trump-hating Left had any integrity, it would accept responsibility for the predictable results of its unprecedented demonizing of a former President.
It doesn’t.
Ethics Alarms 
Whew! I’m done with John McWhorter. Incredible. What a disappointment. I’ll stick with Prof. Loury (whom I would readily call a conservative), but John’s persona non grata.
And I’m going to convey this to Glenn.
Why were there no snipers on the roof where the shooter was? If the snipers shot him an instant (three or four seconds) after he’d begun firing, why didn’t they shoot him BEFORE he fired. Surely, they had him in their sights?
A lot of suspicious behavior on the part of those responsible for protecting Trump. Who thinks the investigation will be objective and real?
All I have is an old meme that seems particularly appropriate:
The democrats haven’t been this mad since we took their slaves away…
This is the third individual who shot a President or candidate who was in turn shot dead before anyone could question him. The other two times, massive and long-running conspiracy theories arose holding that the government was complicit in the shooting. In neither of the previous cases have all the questions and suspicions been thoroughly resolved.
Lincoln, JFK, and now Trump.
At least, they got the diary Booth kept while on the run so they knew his mindset. On the other hand, Boston Corbett was quite a character. I wouldn’t call him Jack Ruby, though.
Only Boston’s friends called him “Jack Ruby.” His enemies called him “New York.”
Corbett castrated himself, and later went completely nuts and opened fire on a state legislature.
The diary was missing crucial pages, and the officer who retrieved the diary at the Garrett’s barn swore it was complete before he handed it over to the War Dept.
There’s so much stuff like that around Lincoln’s assassination. I love it….
… as only a theatrical director would.
Did you ever read Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre by Thomas Bogar? Terrific book!
Yes. One more sliver in that incredibly complex and fascinating episode.
A good friend of mine is a lover/reader of all things Lincoln. I’ll have to see if he owns that book. Thanks!
A follow-up: I mentioned that book to my friend, and five minutes later he replied to say he ordered it.
“Only Boston’s friends called him “Jack Ruby.” His enemies called him “New York.””
No, you’re thinking of Kid New York, fought out of Philly. He was killed in the ring in Houston by Tex Colorado…you know…the “Arizona Assassin”.
Ah, this man knows his “Naked Gun” dialogue.
All I know is never bet on the white guy.
Surely, you can’t be serious!
I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.
Self-orchiectomy. With a pair of scissors, no less.
Of course, Joshua Chamberlain was shot through the bladder, and leaked blood and urine for the rest of his life. In fact, he was one of the last Civil war soldiers, if not the last, to die from the side effects of wounds.
I don’t know.
There’ve been a lot of police hesitating to confront given there’s greater likelihood they’ll be excoriated for being even close to looking like they might be slightly in the wrong. The officer that pursued the guy up the latter and backed off. The counter sniper team maybe did see him crawling on the roof….but whose going to pull a trigger without a fully written permission slip from above any more?
Nope – they waited until shots were fired.
Who can blame them in this anti-police environment?
But…but… he wasn’t black! They could have shot him without criticism!
There are a lot of reports (some claiming to be the counter-sniper) that they waited 3 minutes to get permission to shoot. The Secret Service head doesn’t seem to be a fan of Trump, so it is plausible that she ordered them to wait until a shot was fired at Trump. I don’t know what rules of engagement she had when she worked at Pepsi. I don’t know if I believe it. When I saw the sniper’s tripod lift up into the air after the shot, requiring him to remount the entire rifle/tripod on the roof, I wonder if it was because of poor training. The amateurishness of the SS team really makes me wonder if this assassination attempt was assisted by weaponized incompetence.
Bing Videos
Jesus H. Christ. The Secret Service snipers moved into position to face the shooter’s location and set up and aimed at him before the shooter shot! What were they waiting for? Who told them to reposition? And yes, the recoil from one of the Secret Service snipers knocked the gun off its tripod? Is that supposed to happen with a super specialized weapon like what those guys use? And are trained to use?
No, the entire rifle/tripod lifted into the air (all 3 legs off the roof). I’ve never actually seen anything like that happen before.
Yes, it’s visible in the video. The whole assembly, gun and tripod, pops up two or three inches.
OK, I just saw the video from before that with audio. They hadn’t been there the whole speech. They just set up a few minutes before the shooting. Some are saying they are positioning there because the shooter had already been spotted. They pointed at the shooter for a few minutes, then the sniper with the tripod takes his eyes out of the glass and looks OVER the scope. About a second after he does this, the shooter opens fire. The sniper had to get back on the scope in a hurry and he probably just wasn’t ready. It is a .300 Win Mag. What I didn’t know is that there was another sniper team closer to the shooter that set up at the same time. One of those probably hit the shooter. So, 4 total Secret Service snipers were pointing at the shooter for a few minutes before Trump was shot.
Brilliant.
Well, if half of this is true, if they knew they had a man with a rifle on the roof 130 yards from Trump and they had time to move sniper teams to cover him for minutes, yet they did nothing until he fired 7 or 8 shots at Trump, then the Secret Service leadership intentionally tried to get Trump killed.
If you dispute this, answer 1 question: In the minutes they were trying to decide whether or not to shoot the sniper, why didn’t they pull Trump off stage?
They knew there was a definite, serious threat. They had minutes to deal with it. Why was Trump left to give his speech, oblivious to the danger. Why did the agents on the ground not respond until after Trump was shot? It doesn’t matter if they were debating if they could kill the suspected assassin or not, you can still pull Trump to safety. The incompetence dodge won’t work here. If they were communicating through to the head of the Secret Service, you can’t tell me that NO ONE would think that they should pull Trump out.
That just does not make sense.
Maybe I am naive, but I don’t believe anyone in the Secret Service wants to have their person get killed.
I mean, Trump got grazed and they are going to put through the wringer for that.
That is also one reason it could not have been staged. They are not going to let some 20-year old take a shot at the President just for show. He could have accidentally hit him.
If they had known about him, it is inexplicable that they would not have taken Trump away during those 3 minutes they were waiting for a shot.
Or yelled at the shooter to distract him or get him to try to run off.
Incompetence seems to be the best explanation.
-Jut
Wait…the head of the Secret Service worked at Pepsi before this job?!? What was her job there?…making sure the water was carbonated?
Keeping Coke snipers at bay…
Pretty cushy corporate position for former law enforcement people. The nickname for the area of responsibility involved is “guns and badges.” When Mrs. OB was head of computer security at a telecom in India for three long, long months, she was, much to her surprise, also in charge of guns and badges. It’s managing the security guards and the ID scanners and granting access and stuff like that.
She retired from the Secret Service before she worked for Pepsi. On paper at least, she had a solid background in protection operations during her career.
https://x.com/bravokiloactual/status/1812959974135591163?s=46&t=hYBRdyKc75ixaD6bBbzJZw
No reason to trust an anonymous source, but this is just as reasonable of an explanation as any other.
Maybe we have discovered the real “basket of deplorables” Sec. Clinton talked about all those years ago. Once again, the Left projects its own character traits onto me.
Jack wrote, “If the Trump-hating Left had any integrity, it would accept responsibility for the predictable results of its unprecedented demonizing of a former President. It doesn’t.”
It’s rally hard for Trump Deranged individuals to blame them self when Republicans are right there to blame.
Root Cause Of Recent Political Violence And Incendiary Language Must Be Placed At MAGA Doorstep
Yup, that’s right folks, Republicans are to blame for an anti-Trump lunatic shooting Trump and others, the left’s constant demonizing anti-Trump propaganda for nearly eight years straight has nothing to do with. I CALL BULL SHIT!!!!!!
Questions: how many lefties are changing their anti-Trump rhetoric immediately following the assassination attempt but still claim that their rhetoric had nothing to do with it? Why would they change their rhetoric if they honestly didn’t think their rhetoric inspired this lunatic to hate Trump so much that he wanted to kill him?
Remember me saying that it would take an extraordinary turn of events for an independent like me to vote for Trump; well this assassination attempt and the left’s outright denial that their demonization propaganda played any part in radicalizing this assassin to the point of this kind of violence is the blade of straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m going to vote for Trump simply to vote AGAINST the morally bankrupt political left. We can’t let the morally bankrupt political left continue what they’re doing across the board.
I so wish I could up-vote this comment. Best analysis I’ve seen yet on the deliberate lying against Donald Trump. Thank you.
It’s quite good. Few people think about those working at Ford’s Theater- the people who knew and worked with Booth.
Well, they did prosecute stage hand Edward Spangler and sent him to prison on flimsy evidence.
Another example of how emotions can get in the way of justice.
As a tie-in, Elon Musk now says he is voting for Trump. They tried to smear him in the media, they tried to cancel Twitter after he bought it, dozens of federal agencies have sued him, now they have tried to assassinate him at least twice in the last 2 months. Sound like a familiar pattern?