Above is the guy who was trying to kill the President and as many of his aides and Cabinet members as possible last night. (I don’t care what his name is.) You can read his “manifesto” here. The news media is calling it “unhinged.” It’s not unhinged. This is an arrogant, well-educated, erudite narcissist who has been indoctrinated by the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s propaganda over ten years to the point where he believed that assassinating the President of the United States is a patriotic act. John Wilkes Booth believed the same thing. He wasn’t unhinged either.
The key quote in the message is: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” There is no evidence that Trump is a pedophile. There is no evidence that he is a rapist. There is no evidence that he is a traitor, or that he has committed any crimes in office. But the news media and its message-makers within “the resistance” and the Democratic Party have been working hard to convince the weak of mind or narrow of perception that up is down and black is white. Outside the White House Correspondents Dinner, demonstrators carried signs saying “Death to tyrants” and “Death to all of them.” The failed assassin isn’t the wacko outlier that the Trump Deranged want sane people to think he is. He is one of them. He got his news and information from MSNBC and CNN, and believed this…
Last night Richard Grennell tweeted to CNN’s Jake Tapper, “You encourage the mentally unstable to take action against Trump every night.” Grennell is wrong. Tapper and his colleagues encourage normal, functioning Americans to hate and oppose their President every night. Another “X” used wrote, “Most of the people in that Washington Hilton ballroom tonight are morally responsible for what just happened. For over 10 years they’ve pushed the most hateful, vile conspiracies: Trump is a threat to democracy, a dictator, literally Hitler 2.0. They demonized him nonstop, normalized violence in their rhetoric, then acted shocked when the inevitable keeps occurring.” That is correct. So is the Instapundit contributor who wrote that MSNBC is complicit in last night’s attempted murder.
I played Scrabble last night with a smart, passionate, kind neighbor who is a private tutor who does wonderful work for various charities, and who devotes her spare time to helping the poor. She texted me today that she was in “mourning” because President Trump was still alive.
If there aren’t enough sane, principled, informed voters who care sufficiently in November to make sure that the party and the parties responsible for inflicting this hate plague on the nation do not gain control of the government, then American society will have proven that it is no longer worthy of a republic.
Ethics Alarms 
I knew either a “manifesto” was discovered or it was found out the shooter was a progressive when reporting on the incident disappeared.
Here is Jonathan Turley’s reaction.
Would it be out of line to say that’s a punchable face?
PWS
I hope this plays a part in the description or characteristics of Trump Deranged people. They are not unhinged. In virtually every other way, they are kind, intelligent, reasonable people.
I read it somewhere – maybe here – that this is not extremist behavior. If they say it and no one is shocked, then it isn’t the extreme, its the norm. The norm is that half, if not most of the left is eager for death to their enemies. And the rest pretend to be neutral while providing cover. “You’re right, both sides need to turn down the rhetoric…” no, one side needs to stop trying to shoot the other side. Eventually, they’re going to succeed, and the door of ‘if you disagree with them, just shoot them’ will be opened. Like the ark of the covenant in raiders of the lost ark.
I am pretty sure the “If you disagree with them, just shoot them” has been open for a while. The polls (whatever they are anymore) show that 45% of Democrats are at least somewhat OK with killing their political opponents.
Jamie Raskin pulls an “Elephant? What elephant: “Rhetoric? What rhetoric?”
Bing Videos
Great post. All these points needed to be noted.
Question: where are EA’s bold Defenders of the Left? Where’s Jerry? Jan Chapman? Curmie? Here’s Johnny? I want to hear the explanation for how there are two sides of this issue from EC?
Or answer my question: “What’s wrong with these people?”
Of course, nothing will change from here on out whenever the Republicans are in power. J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio will be given the Trump treatment if either of them becomes president. It’s the Democrat game plan from here on out. It’s not Trump specific. These white lefties are ruthless and blood thirsty.
Or explain this away: Jimmy Kimmel calls Melania Trump an ‘expectant widow’ in dinner parody | Fox News
You can’t. I don’t know if you ever watched “Win Ben Stein’s Money”, but Jimmy was hilarious and outstanding on that show.
TDS has completely warped him.
I think he will understand the situation better when someone writes an anti-Kimmel manifesto and then begins using him for target practice with real bullets fired from real guns.
Maybe…
Jack wrote, “If there aren’t enough sane, principled, informed voters who care sufficiently in November to make sure that the party and the parties responsible for inflicting this hate plague on the nation do not gain control of the government, then American society will have proven that it is no longer worthy of a republic.”
Although I agree with your overall frustration, on the boldfaced point, I disagree.
Unless the vote is 100% in favor of the Democratic Party across the entire USA then it will show that we are still worthy of a republic; however, if the Democrats win by any margin, in any race, it will show us that there is a portion of “We the People of the United States of America” that really don’t give a flying fuck about the United States of America and will do anything they can to take down the Trump administration and anyone that supports it even if that means that the USA has to fail. Their absolute dedication to their delusional thinking is truly cultish.
I truly believe that the left’s rhetoric shows us that the political left believes that any system that allows a person like Donald Trump to become the President of the United States must be terribly flawed and evil, therefore it must be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up. I’m also convinced that Democratic Party voters, especially those suffering from TDS, actively swallow any and all anti-Trump propaganda that’s presented to them as absolute truth with zero critical thinking and this tells us that they’re psychologically deluded and/or anti-American morons, and in either case it tells us that they’re so dedicated to their “cult” that they’re too damned stupid to realize it unless they’re deprogrammed. In my opinion, these people are not fixable outside psychological deprogramming.
There’s a huge swath of the adult population in the USA that’s had their critical thinking effectively destroyed and their psyche either indoctrinated or coercively persuaded (aka brainwashed) by creating intense fear or emotional arousal with constant propaganda, fear of isolation, peer pressure, outright intimidation, and threats. It’s as if there’s an invisible group of psychiatrists and psychologists controlling an actual cult.
Lastly; what if this attempted assassination operation by a lone wolf had been performed by a dozen or two reasonably trained individuals working in coordination with each other, the outcome could have and very likely could have been entirely different and would have been called an attempted coup. So based on the written manifesto and the fact that the goal of this assassin was to assassinate the President of the United States and as many of his cabinet members a possible, why isn’t this attempt being called an attempted coup and prosecuted under treason laws? There should not be any of that nonsense not guilty because of mental illness allowed, this was premeditated and very calculated. This traitor should be put to death and I’ll personally volunteer to drive myself to any prison anywhere in the USA to squeeze off the life ending round with my own firearm and ammunition – it won’t cost the American people one red cent.
My last paragraph would have sent the old progressive Fattymoon commenter over the edge.
And right into the nearest bottle of whisky. 😀
Yes, he certainly liked to indulge in his tequila and whiskey and he doesn’t remember what he wrote when he gets inebriated. He wrote things like…
He once invited me to his house for drinks and arm wrestling. He said we’d have a good time but “…UPS can’t find us. FedEx can’t find us. I’m so far out in the boonies that YOU couldn’t find me.” I told him his challenge was accepted and then proceeded to post an aerial and street views of his home out in the Garfield New Mexico boonies. I cropped the photos so no one could figure out where they were, him and I were the only one that knew the location. Here’s the aerial view…
I once wrote “Fattymoon doesn’t think before he writes, he simply reacts like a drunken teenage amoeba.”
After he left Ethics Alarms, him and I conversed for a while. Our last conversation was in January 2022.
Fattymoon aka Jeffrey Field burning daylight with his Theremin…
One of the comments was, “Nice art.”
Curious about your reaction to the following snippet from Trump’s interview with Norah O’Donnell at 60 Minutes:
O’Donnell read aloud from the document, citing the shooter’s apparent motive: “Administration officials, they are targets.” Then she kept going, reading the gunman’s claim that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” She asked Trump for his reaction.
He had one.
“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re — you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said.
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/04/26/youre-horrible-people-president-trump-torches-norah-odonnell-during-interview-n4952231
Reaction? He’s right. It was impolite to say it, but everyone knows he thinks that, so I can’t condemn him for being honest.
The way I am reading it is that the interviewer indicates to the President that the shooter made a valid point in his manifesto regarding the Epstein scandal by suggesting that the President is a pedophile.
There is probably a lot that is going to be said about security, and the need for a ballroom. Another question is whether the shooter had any help in Washington DC. Retired Green Beret Eric Schwalm has the following things to say:
So let’s unpack a few things right up front…
1) He left California and was in DC at the hotel where the WHCD was being held.
2) Imagine the intent he had to have in order to travel that distance all the while thinking about what he was going to do.
3) He either moved several weapons or procured them in/around DC and figured out a way to get them in proximity to the WHCD.
4) He took the time to load the weapons on to his body (to reportedly include several knives) and nobody noticed.
5) Now here is the kicker…in his hidden location he was somehow aware that the President was in the room and was seated. How/when was he aware of that part?
6) If he wasn’t a guest at the WHCD and he couldn’t see the President from where he was….how did he know?
7) It’s not like he could go look in the room and then go load up with his gear.
8) He was supposedly a guest at the exact hotel? Like every room in that place wasn’t booked full over a month in advance? In DC, on a Saturday, with the WHCD in the same hotel….have you ever booked a hotel in DC during a Major Presidential event? Good luck!!!
All of it screams that he had help from someone in DC. Someone with some serious knowledge and capabilities. You just don’t pull off something like that on a whim and without some serious reconnaissance ahead of time.
What makes me wonder is that the Secret Service didn’t appear to have run everyone staying in the hotel at the time of the event through whatever databases they had. The would-be assassin didn’t have a criminal record, but recent firearms purchases might have popped, which might have made them look again, see that he hadn’t gone through airport-level security, and made them at least check him out. Be that as it may, there is pretty clear evidence of intent here, between the manifesto, the carefully managed trip, and the hotel stay.
This actually makes four tries for Trump, if you count the one before he was elected the first time where the guy tried to grab a security guard’s gun but got grabbed before he could do much. We still know probably the least about Crooks, the guy who came the closest in Butler, PA, because he was shot and killed at the scene and he didn’t leave a clear paper trail.
I’m aware that few of the presidents were universally popular, and that a lot were divisive and had strong opposition. Andrew Jackson was disliked enough (especially in the Carolinas) that three people tried to kill him, although only one while he was president. Lincoln of course was killed by a Confederate bitter-ender (there were supposedly four other attempts to kill him, including one to kill him as he took the train to his inauguration). Garfield was killed by someone clearly crackers. McKinley was shot dead by an anarchist. Taft, Hoover, FDR, and Truman were all targeted for one reason or another. The two PR independence activists who tried for Truman killed a White House policeman. The anarchist who tried for FDR failed but did get the mayor of Chicago. Then of course there is the murder of JFK, the shooting of Reagan, and failed attempts on the next four presidents. As far as I know, Biden was never targeted.
Most of the presidential assassins and would-be assassins were either insane (Guiteau, Hinckley) or extremists of a lost cause or a cause that never was (Booth, Czolgocz, others). There’s nothing insane about this guy. Either that or most of the Democratic Party has gone over the edge. I don’t think that’s the case, though. A lot of it is just cold hate and arrogance. It’s easy to hate someone in the heat of anger. If you still hate someone when the heat of anger has cooled down, or if you were never all that angry when you decided to hate that person, that’s really a problem.
It’s completely normal to dislike Trump. It’s completely normal to believe that his policies are the wrong ones. It’s completely normal to think he is leading the country in the wrong direction. All of that is at least reasonably debatable and there is room for disagreement. It’s not normal to believe Trump is a pedophile, there is no evidence of that, and in fact there’s more evidence that Biden is (getting too close to young girls, showering with his daughter). It’s not normal to believe Trump is a rapist, there are no findings of any court convicting him of that. It’s not normal to believe Trump is a traitor, because if he could have been charged with treason they had four years to do it in.
It’s not normal to impeach a president over a phone call. It’s not normal to impeach a president who isn’t president anymore over something he wasn’t charged with criminally. It’s not normal to trump up multiple criminal cases that all just happen to be in venues where the president is most strongly politically opposed. It’s not normal to take a bookkeeping error where the statute has expired and ex post facto it into 34 felonies. It’s not normal to still be talking two years into that president’s second term that you can’t wait to impeach him again.
Actually, I should say it WASN’T normal once. If you told me at the end of Reagan’s second term that this was all coming down the pike later, I would have said you were high. Well, here we are. The only thing Allen did was take the Democratic party’s hatred to its logical conclusion – if this man is really that bad, and you can’t remove him from office by election, and impeachment isn’t possible right now and isn’t a sure thing later, then assassination is the logical next move. Why not? Why not do it when the leftosphere is cheering this action on, and when guys like all these leftist writers and Xers will hail you as the hero who went ahead and did what none of them had the balls to do. You can’t fail and there can’t be consequences, right?
Wrong.
Crooks, the guy who came the closest in Butler, PA, because he was shot and killed at the scene and he didn’t leave a clear paper trail.
In fact he had a very wide electronic trail. It was written about in alternative sources. And non-reported in the mainstream.
That is correct on all counts.
A Comment of the Day, Steve. Any liked to duel: are you including those shoot-outs? I wouldn’t. But I appreciate the details in the attempted assassinations. Frankly, I have trouble drawing the lines. It’s unclear to me that the guy who shot the Chicago Mayor was trying to kill Roosevelt: he was a crack shot. I still want to give Booth more credit: he wasn’t wrong that the killing of Lincoln might have re-kindled the Confederacy; his timing was just off by days. And his scheme was to have Johnson, Seward and Grant killed too—that part of the plan wasn’t as well thought out, but if he had conspirators who were all at least semi-competent like Lewis Powell, who knows?
Lee doesn’t get enough credit for shutting down the plan to have the rebels move into the hills and fight a guerilla war. He deserves statues for that alone.
No, I wasn’t counting the shoot-out with John Dickinson or the street fight with Samuel Jackson. However, it’s known that Richard Lawrence tried to kill Andrew Jackson while in office but had two pistols misfire on him. HE ended up the worse for it as Jackson commenced to beat the tar out of him with his cane until the crowd hustled him away. I’ve heard the attempted assassination of FDR go both ways, but Zangara said any official would do.
I had forgotten that Seward also got stabbed that night, but not fatally. Yeah, Lee killed the possibility of a guerilla war, wisely.
The Lawrence failed attempt is one of my favorite episodes in all of our history. Imagine the look on his face when both pistols misfired and he was face to face with a stone cold killer like Andy!!! I can just hear him saying, “Oh NOOOOOO!” And remember who stopped Jackson from killing Lawrence? It was Davy, Davy Crockett!!! Why has that episode never been dramatized?
Going through this list of successful and failed assassination, to which one does this last attempt on Donald Trump have the most resemblance? My vote would be on the assassination of Lincoln, because there is a clear political motive in the views that are supported by the majority of the opposition. All the other assassination attempts were by fringe figures and lunatics.
Outstanding, Steve…as usual! Thanks!!
It looked like he was targeting Administration officials “(excluding Kash Patel).”
Was that because Kash is a minority?
Makes sense. The lunatic did not want to be accused of racism.
-Jut
I played Scrabble last night with a smart, passionate, kind neighbor who is a private tutor who does wonderful work for various charities, and who devotes her spare time to helping the poor. She texted me today that she was in “mourning” because President Trump was still alive.
If there aren’t enough sane, principled, informed voters who care sufficiently in November to make sure that the party and the parties responsible for inflicting this hate plague on the nation do not gain control of the government, then American society will have proven that it is no longer worthy of a republic.
I know you might think my question is irrelevant, but I would be interested to know what words, maybe unusual words? that she played.
When one has been assigned the rôle of Cassandra, as I clearly have, what I see clearly and in living color right in my mind’s eye, and what I try to reveal, simply will not be seen recognized nor believed. Still, I am going to spell it out.
The following from The Dispossessed Majority (Wilmot Robertson, 1973):
In part an elegy, in part a galvanic recall to greatness, this mind-rousing book hammers home the theme that America has changed, and changed for the worse, not because of a hardening of its economic arteries, the Vietnam war, the generation gap, inflation or a callous disregard for Negroes, but because its once dominant population group, the Americans of Northern European descent, the Majority, has been reduced to second-class status.
To put it more graphically, the sickness of America is the sickness of the American Majority, which is presently racked by a double infection: (1) the moral debility of liberalism, which has brought about a near-fatal split in the ranks of the Majority at the very time it should be most united; (2) the rampant virus of minority racism, which has sapped the Majority’s powers of resistance and diluted its group consciousness.
Sick to the point of moral disintegration, the Majority has become the loser in a racial war. In this context the book examines the backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses of the combatants, with special emphasis on the assimilable and unassimilable minorities. It records the sorry chronicle of Majority reverses on all the important battlegrounds—cultural, religious, political, economic, and diplomatic. Since the liberal-minority coalition has emerged victorious on all fronts, it is not an overstatement to describe the losers as the Dispossessed Majority.
Demographics is destiny, someone said. The “hate plague” is, certainly a long and complex affair, but the essence of it is in demoralization. The undermining of those European-descended Americans to believe in themselves on all levels, including the somatic and ethnic, in order to defend the heritage of the nation and yes its destiny.
Robertson focuses on the issue of demographic composition — a totally forbidden notion here among the Conservatives of America today — but the undermining of America, the demoralizing, is multifold.
Once lost, the recovery of it is next to impossible. America was never solely “an idea” it was a manifestation of a peoples on an entire range of areas. Fact.
What is sad — a cause of deep lamentation really — is in the degree that this distorted figure of a man, given a Napoleonic mandate, is squandering it. I doubt he will make it through the term.
Do you play Scrabble? The trick isn’t vocabulary but rather constructing multiple words on the board in a single turn, maneuvering high point letters on the double and triple letter squares, and maximizing one’s exploitation of double and triple word squares while blocking similar opportunities of one’s opponent. Yes, one should also memorize the crucial list of two letter words…the definitions are irrelevant:
aa
ab
ad
ae
ag
ah
ai
al
am
an
ar
as
at
aw
ax
ay
ba
be
bi
bo
by
da
de
do
ed
ef
eh
el
em
en
er
es
et
ew
ex
fa
fe
gi
go
ha
he
hi
hm
ho
id
if
in
is
it
jo
ka
ki
la
li
lo
ma
me
mi
mm
mo
mu
my
na
ne
no
nu
od
oe
of
oh
oi
ok
om
on
op
or
os
ow
ox
oy
pa
pe
pi
po
qi
re
sh
si
so
ta
te
ti
to
uh
um
un
up
us
ut
we
wo
xi
xu
ya
ye
yo
za
Do you play Scrabble? The trick isn’t vocabulary but rather constructing multiple words on the board in a single turn, maneuvering high point letters on the double and triple letter squares, and maximizing one’s exploitation of double and triple word squares while blocking similar opportunities of one’s opponent.
I guess that is why I always lost. I always wanted to get the most interesting words.
I did look up “za” and found the following:
za (zä)
n. Slang
Pizza.
[Shortening and alteration of pizza.]
Our Living Language When people speak casually of ordering a za, “pizza,” they are unwittingly producing an expression that language historians find interesting. Za derives from the full form pizza by a process known as clipping. Two types of clipping are common in English: dropping the unstressed syllables or syllables not receiving the primary word stress, as in fridge from refrigerator; and dropping all syllables after the first syllable, as in ab, dis, porn, and vibe, whether or not the first syllable was originally stressed. In the case of za, the syllable that was dropped was originally stressed and was the first syllable, which is unusual. Rents from parents and nads from gonads are other examples of the same kind of clipping. Interestingly, we don’t need to stay in the realm of contemporary slang to see the results of this unusual process. The words phone, bus, and wig(from telephone, omnibus, periwig) belong to Standard English but had their start as slangy or catchy neologisms formed by clipping their most strongly stressed syllable, just like za.