Sadly the experience doesn't seem to have convinced Trump to dial back the douchebag behavior.
Just A Couple of Inches Can Change History
By Cory Franklin, Kass News
August 9th, 2024
A matter of mere inches can change the course of history irrevocably. The ultimate example may be when 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Michael Crooks barely missed killing Donald Trump on live television in Butler, Pennsylvania in July. America should be profoundly grateful because by just a couple of inches, the country was saved, not in any “We love Donald Trump and still have the Great Man” sense – the gratitude should exist whether one thinks Donald Trump is the Savior or the Devil incarnate. Either way, the U.S. narrowly avoided a terrible fate.
Consider: given the utter incompetence of the Secret Service in protecting Trump, had his murder been televised and seen by millions – no Zapruder film necessary – it would have guaranteed conspiracy theories about Government collaboration for decades. The country would have been torn apart more than any time since the Civil War.
It seems inconceivable that any agency, but especially the Secret Service, could be so inept. The roof of the building the shooter was on was deemed to be outside the perimeter of the target area, even though it was clearly within shooting range and had an unobstructed view of the target. No agent was placed on the roof of the building purportedly because of its slope, even though agents were on other sloped roofs. There were local law enforcement officers inside the building as the shooter scaled the wall to the roof. The Secret Service, ultimately responsible, left the details of the actual shooting site to local police, then blamed local police after the fact.
Crooks sent a drone over the area, presumably to locate the optimal perch to shoot from. An hour before the shooting, he was casing the area with a rangefinder and was identified as a potential threat. The Secret Service was aware of his presence, a picture of him was circulating, but he was lost during a subsequent ground search. A number of people actually saw the shooter with a weapon as he crawled across the roof and notified law enforcement at least a minute and a half before he started firing. Despite the obvious threat, no one on the Secret Service took the initiative to pull Trump from the stage. He began to speak even as the elusive shooter sighted his weapon – with law enforcement snipers watching and waiting. All of this is a product of incompetence.
In simple terms, a young man with murderous intent and reported to be a middling shot in high school was able to smuggle a weapon in plain sight, evade professional law enforcement and the Secret Service for a significant period of time, and manage to squeeze off eight shots. Trump avoided the kill shot by inches, only because turned his head at the last minute. He was grazed, another man was killed, and two others were wounded before the Secret Service immediately “silenced” the shooter with extreme prejudice.
It would be charitable to call the Secret Service errors amateurish. The final straw may have been the Director of the Agency’s admission they had no radio recordings of the episode. Yet she would not fall on her sword, and it took the threat of impeachment to force her Bidenesque resignation (I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, OK I will). Simply one more case of US government fecklessness.
But now imagine a counternarrative – an alternative history – one that did not become reality only by the narrowest of margins. Trump does not turn his head at the last moment and is murdered as millions watch. With the template of the JFK assassination, where there was far less damning evidence than here, millions would believe a conspiracy involving the government occurred.
Had Trump been killed, at a minimum half the country would never believe the Secret Service could be so incompetent as to let a kid with a rifle get so close and fire shots unimpeded. Those people, and perhaps millions more, would be convinced the Secret Service was complicit in the assassination.
It would follow quite naturally they would also believe that the political party in charge – in this case, the Democrats – planned, ordered or simply approved of the operation to rid America of this troublesome candidate.
It is difficult to conceive of the damage this would do to the fabric of the country. Quite possibly, violence would ensue. Lest this sound impossible, the feminist author and journalist Naomi Wolf, who is not averse to tossing out conspiracy theories anyway, has already written that she believes the Secret Service, under the aegis of the president’s wife, was involved in the assassination attempt. Wolf did not even require the shooter to succeed in making her allegation. However farfetched that sounds today, if millions witnessed Trump hit in the head with a bullet, it wouldn’t sound so improbable.
And of course, in any successful conspiracy the assassin cannot remain alive – the plot requires he be killed. Silencing him is essential. Contrast the JFK assassination with the attempted Ronald Reagan assassination. The reason there are so many JFK conspiracy theories is that Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. Had Oswald survived and made it to trial, most of the questions about what happened would have been answered and there would be fewer conspiracy theories today. (This was another instance of history being changed by a minuscule fraction in the time-space continuum. Ruby, with no idea where Oswald was right before he shot him, had less than two minutes to appear coincidentally in just the right spot. If Ruby’s errand at a nearby Western Union had been delayed by even those two minutes, Oswald would have been safely transported out of the jail.)
In 1981, when John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, the circumstances were remarkably similar to the recent Trump circumstance. A deranged young man was able to get close to his target, fired three shots and missed killing the President by inches. Back then, the newly elected Reagan was a divisive, partisan figure and the world situation was unstable; an assassination attempt was not wild fantasy. But the truth was more prosaic and apolitical: the would-be assassin turned out not to be a foreign actor nor a domestic terrorist; it was 25-year-old John Hinckley trying to impress the actress, Jodie Foster. It sounds unbelievable if you don’t know the facts.
Why were there no grand conspiracy theories? Simply because the Secret Service took Hinckley alive, and the facts quickly became apparent.
In the Trump assassination attempt, although the Secret Service was aware of Crooks’s location and his weapon, they did not kill him until after he fired at Trump. A conspiracy theorist would point out the convenience of the Secret Service killing the shooter after the successful attempt – not before, when they clearly had the chance.
Given everything, we know, there was no conspiracy in the attempted assassination of Trump. The government was simply bunglers, and the most likely motive right now is that Thomas Michael Crooks was a disturbed young man who likely wanted to commit a spectacular crime knowing he could not escape and would die of “suicide by cop.”
It is far easier to come to those conclusions dispassionately because a bullet missed being fatal by inches. Lady Luck saved America from unrest and possibly insurrection by people who would have posited a conspiracy after their candidate was murdered. Regardless of political persuasion, Americans should be thankful that, but for a couple of inches, history might be quite different. Because now it is nothing more than a thought experiment.
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