Most of these notes, as you may well expect, involve the latest Trump assassination attempt.
1. Barack Obama is trying to surpass Donald Trump as the most obnoxious former President ever. At least Trump had the excuse that he was trying to get elected to another term. Obama has no excuses. He wrote on “X”: “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.”
Nobody has any doubts about what the motives of the shooter were, and the message he sent out shortly before his attempt to kill the President and as many of his aides and Cabinet as he could made those motives clear. So this is going to be his party’s tactic for ducking responsibility, is it? Gaslighting? (See the shameless Rep. Raskin pretend he has no idea what kind of rhetoric his party has used against President Trump.) Obama’s message is also notable in expressing concern for the Secret Service agent but none for the would-be assassin’s main target. Apparently it was too difficult for Obama to say he was also thankful that Trump, his wife and others were “going to be okay.” That sentiment, after all, would upset the Democratic base that wants Trump dead.
The longer I get to observe Barack Obama, the more indefensible his character seems to be. If Jimmy Carter, as he boasted, was among our most accomplished ex-Presidents ever (well-behind Herbert Hoover, however), Obama has to rank as among the most destructive, right down there with John Tyler, who joined Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy Cabinet.
2. How can this happen? NYPD Officer James Giovansanti’s pickup truck has been caught on camera 547 times in Staten Island since 2022, with 187 camera-issued tickets in 2025 alone. The cop has accumulated $36,650.02 in fines. Apparently Giovansanti is a piker compared to NYC’s reckless driving champion, someone in Brooklyn whose tickets total up to over $60,000, but the Staten Island scofflaw is a law enforcement officer. He should have been terminated years ago. [Pointer: JutGory]
3. The hot topic for the Trump Deranged isn’t that the President was nearly murdered, but that he was mean to Norah O’Donnell on “Sixty Minutes” less than 24 hours later. During a Sunday interview, O’Donnell read to Trump’s face the most direct part of the failed assassin’s so-called “manifesto,” the section I called “the key quote in the message” yesterday: “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Then:
Ethics Alarms 
You make a fair point about Obama, but my point is always: “I condemn any form of political violence regardless of the victim.” It makes it very easy to be consistent. I don’t care who does it or why they do it. I condemn it. No qualifications. I condemn it.
That should be the standard line coming out of every politician’s mouth in every such instance. Problem is that so many of them use violent rhetoric to start with.
So, that is what I liked about Obama’s statement, but your points are well-taken.
-Jut
Well you can’t go to a “No Kings” protest to unseat the president and say something like
“What we’re seeing right now … is not consistent with American democracy,” he added. “It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under Orbán. It’s consistent with places that hold elections but do not otherwise observe what we think of [as] a fair system in which everybody’s voice matters and people have a seat at the table, and there are checks and balances, and nobody’s above the law. We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that.”
and then claim that you have nothing to do with the problem. You can’t say that the current president is not a validly elected official and is someone who has usurped the government (become a king) and then feign ignorance when people try to kill him for it. This especially goes when you yourself acted much more like a king than the current president is.
John Fetterman has been a pleasant surprise.
But it’s concerning. The only way to get a Democrat to be reasonable is if they suffer brain damage.
No, Fetterman wasn’t reasonable when he had brain damage. He became more and more reasonable as he RECOVERED from brain damage.
Twitchy makes the point that the manifesto is not very original, but almost entirely based on very ordinary everyday talking points from Democrat politicians. The article below show many tweets at X from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who almost has reason to sue the shooter for plagiarism, this includes all the Nazi and pedophile references in the manifestor.
Obama and Raskin are gaslighting us by playing coy about who inspired this shooter.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2026/04/27/just-guess-which-senator-whcd-gunmen-quoted-very-often-hint-he-compares-republicans-to-nazis-a-lot-n2427577
Why is the senator who suffered a catastrophic stroke the one making sense???
This is the second author this morning who engages in Civil War rhetoric. The first one is Rod Dreher who is about to publish a book about Weimar America. Call me a pessimist, but I am afraid that this rhetoric is not hyperbole. Imagine for a moment that the assassin had succeeded, what would be the ramifications for the USA.
The full text of the tweet is at the bottom of my comment.
After the Spanish Right won the 1933 elections, Communists in Asturias launched a revolution, killing thousands before the army was deployed to finally put an end to the chaos.
They did the same thing in Catalonia, and when that too was quelled, they engaged in a low-level terrorist campaign all over the country, planting bombs, sabotaging infrastructure, assassinating newspaper editors and political figures, and staging general strikes all over Spain.
They kept doing this until they finally won the 1936 election, at which point the Left went full mask-off and began unleashing thousands of criminals into the streets, ransacking businesses, dragging conservatives out of their homes to beat them, and going into the countryside to expropriate private property. The entire country descended into a state of near-total anarchy in a matter of months.
The Left spent years agitating for a Marxist revolution in Spain and refused to obey the legal system because they saw the Spanish Republic as a mechanism to achieve Leftism, not as a neutral system intended to uphold democracy, the constitution, or the rule of law.
And thus, any deviation from the march towards Leftism was seen as an illegitimate act of treason and proof of an imminent fascist takeover of the state. As a result, ANY electoral victory by the Right was inherently treated as illegal by the Left, and ANY attempt to actually govern in accordance with Right-wing principles was seen as just cause to engage in violent insurrection.
You cannot have a country like this for long. If one side treats the process as illegitimate unless it produces their desired ideological outcome, they will inevitably win unless they’re physically stopped.
Obama’s feigned uncertainty about the “details” in this case is particularly jarring considering Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and other incidents, in which he saw no compelling reason to avoid jumping to a conclusion.
Nice catch, rep.
“Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting ….”
Okay, Barack. Let’s see what the other options are: The guy is a sprinter, and he got lost during his workout and ended up sprinting toward the Secret Service agents by mistake. Wait, he’s a cutlery salesman and wanted to go table to table demonstrating the wonderfulness of his wares. No, wait, he was in the wrong hotel and actually thought he was late for a gun show that was going on down the street in a nearby D.C. hotel. No, he wanted to enlist and wanted to speak to the Secretary of War and show him how good he was with a knife and a shotgun! I’m sure the investigators are working hard to suss out and eliminate all these other possible motives.
At least he didn’t refer to the guy as “the alleged assailant” or say, “If I had a son, he’d look like the alleged assailant.”
Jonathan Capehart: It’s gun violence. ‘Pop. Pop. Pop.’: Inside the room at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Next up, David Hogg.