Cloudy with a high chance of bullets

You going to believe your lying eyes and brain, again?

The attempt on Trump’s life on Saturday threw the media class into a frenzy of mental gymnastics to avoid calling it an assassination attempt, saying things like “Trump fell” (CNN) or “Former President Donald Trump rushed off stage after loud pops” (USA Today). They seem to have scrubbed a lot of these from the record, although at time of writing this there are still a few articles still referring to it as an ‘alleged assassination attempt’, even if they can’t help linking to other articles that drop the ‘alleged’:

To call it an ‘alleged assassination attempt’ is gaslighting of the highest order. Are you supposed to think that someone just casually fired a gun in Trump’s vicinity and the bullet just coincidentally grazed his ear, like this is something that happens all the time?

The same media has done a lot of stretching of the term ‘conspiracy theory’, too. Within hours or even minutes of the ‘alleged assassination attempt’, interviews were appearing with people stating that they saw the shooter on the roof, tried to get the attention of police, and were ignored. Someone even took a video of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, climbing onto the roof from which he took his shot, in which people can be seen pointing at him and trying to get the attention of the police. It’s farcical, but very darkly so when you consider that moments later he killed two people, before being killed himself.

When the shooter finally got his shots off at Trump, there was a pause of less than 20 seconds before the police marksman killed him, meaning that they already had him in their sights. As Larry Johnson, firearms trainer and former CIA analyst stated on his own blog and in conversation with the Duran, the only explanation for why this occurred that does not implicate the police and secret service in the assassination attempt, is that they were so disorganised that they did not know for sure that the shooter was not with another branch of law enforcement until he shot at Trump. And this is after they let someone into the site with a rifle and a ladder! Given the choice of incompetence or complicity they will have to plead incompetence, so maybe the narrative in future will be that it’s a conspiracy to think that they were actually complicit rather than just criminally bumbling.

There have been some bizarre actual conspiracy-takes, like people who said that Trump’s security detail put fake blood on his ear to make it look like he was shot, essentially saying that the assassination attempt was a false flag to drum up support for him (so I guess the people who died are either not dead or were killed to make it look real?). The ‘fist in the air’ image was very powerful and made Trump look pretty damn good, like him or not, and his popularity has indeed surged since then, so if you’re committed to believing it was an inside job by the Trump team, it’s unlikely you will be convinced by anything the news or Trump says. But these silly false flag theories do a great job of feeding the mainstream narrative that there are conspiracy theories around the shooting, even if no sensible person would take them seriously, and even if the reality is actually worse.

The whole media clown show was reminiscent of their reaction to when Epstein got suicided, but with the obvious difference that from the moment the shots were fired at Trump, there has been an embarrassment of video footage available for everyone to see exactly what happened. When Epstein got killed, it came after numerous commentators noted that the only way the trial could fail to go ahead and incriminate lots of high-profile liberals from the worlds of politics and media, would be if Epstein died. Then precisely that thing happened, while Epstein was in a maximum-security prison, and all of a sudden the media was full of stories of Epstein’s tragic suicide and of prison staff falling asleep, forgetting to turn on security cameras and other such cartoonish buffoonery, which we were all expected to take seriously.

The attempt on Trump’s life came after years of shrill insistence from Democrats and the liberal media that he was a unique threat to democracy, that he “must be stopped”, and that “yes, it’s OK to compare Trump to Hitler”. Where in Epstein’s case the establishment had every reason to want him dead but swear blind that they didn’t, in Trump’s case they did everything they could to rile up their supporters into a murderous rage - or at the very least into believing that it would be a good thing if Trump died - and then offered platitudes about ‘condemning violence’ when someone acted on it.

The details might be different, but the stubborn denial of reality is the same. It’s a loyalty test for their supporters: are you committed enough to our neoliberal agenda to keep believing whatever intelligence-insulting thing we say, or will you finally accept the evidence that’s been piling up for years that we simply don’t value human life, and will kill anyone who threatens our hold on power?