Saturday July 13th, 2024
The chants of a large crowd can be heard excitedly repeating the phrase, “USA, USA!” Former president Donald Trump steps onto the stage with an enthusiastic smile as he looks around at the rally attendees in Butler, Pennsylvania. “This is a big crowd,” he remarks, “this is a big, big, beautiful crowd.” He begins to speak to the crowd while some uneasy shouting begins outside of the rally. Trump turns to point to a chart on a nearby screen to discuss border patrol statistics. “You know, that’s a little bit old that chart. That chart’s a couple of months old and if you want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened…” Trump stopped speaking as he reached for his ear. As he pulls his hand away covered in blood, he realizes that a thudding gunshot had echoed from the near distance. His ear had been hit. More gunshots were fired rapidly one after another. Trump immediately drops down behind the podium for cover. Secret Service agents immediately swarm Trump and cover him up.
Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, turns and grabs his family, “Get down!” As a total of 8 bullets rang out from the gunman, one struck him in the head as he shielded his family from the fire of bullets. His life sacrifice had saved theirs. Two other attendees, Marine David Dutch and James Copenhaver, fell to the ground among the bleachers after being shot. They were in critical condition but became stable in the hospital about 2 days later.
A Secret Service counter-sniper on a nearby rooftop finally took aim and fired back at the shooter on another building about 400 yards away, killing him on impact. The agents around Trump yell, “let’s move!” They pick him up and surround him to shield him from additional shots. Adrenaline pumping, Trump raises his fist in the air and yells, “Fight!” The crowd cheers in response to his safety and begins to chant, “USA, USA!” As Trump is escorted to his vehicle, the against continue to scan their surroundings for additional threats. As he was driven away to safety, people started to stagger around trying to figure out what had happened.
Donald Trump was just the target of an assassination attempt. A shooter on a building across from the rally had taken a shot that hit Trump in the ear just as he was turning his head to look at the chart. A rare move of turning away from the audience that saved his life. Only a moment later and the bullet would have entered his skull. The immediate reaction is to ask after the motive.
The simplest of answers is to state that he was a Democrat that so hated Trump, he was willing to risk time in prison and possibly his life to take Donald Trump out. After Joe Biden’s horrendous performance at his debate against Donald Trump on _ it can be assumed that Democrats were feeling panicked about their chances of winning. But we all see our desired candidates win some and lose some, so why is this any different?
Why have presidents been assassinated in the past?
More than likely Donald Trump’s shooter was simply a Democrat voter who believed the lies about Trump that he has been filled with for the previous 8 years. The simplest way to put it is that the Left has been demonizing Trump's name and repeatedly calling him Hitler for years now. To add insult to injury his followers are called Nazis with no basis for the slander. When you consider the question, "Would you kill Hitler if you could go back in time," a lot of us would give a resounding, "Yes!" Well, the Left and their media have basically said that Trump is worthy of death by constantly comparing him to Hitler. Frankly, it is more surprising that this assassination attempt on Trump has not happened before now.
There have been about 23 presidents who have had a would-be assassination attempt on them. Four were successful and as of July 13th, 2024, three were successfully wounded. Most of these were what you could call mental or personal issues, such as the man who claimed that Andrew Jackson beat him with a cane. Luckily his pistols did not go off due to the humidity affecting the gunpowder.
There were others who sought a more vengeful purpose for their assassination attempts. The most commonly thought of presidential assassination is that of Abraham Lincoln. Seeing as he was the leader of a war against the South, it is easy to see why someone might want him dead. Especially since the South used propaganda to pain Lincoln as a dictator for not allowing states’ rights and a secession from the Union. After attending an April 11, 1865, speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for Black people, John Wilkes Booth, was a well-known actor and a Confederate sympathizer from Maryland decided to assassinate the president. Booth’s plot also involved the assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward who’s attackers failed. As the story goes, the president was sitting in his state box in the balcony watching a play with his wife Mary and two guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris. Booth entered from behind and fired a .44-caliber Derringer pistol at the back of Lincoln's head. As Lincoln fell forward, Rathbone momentarily grappled with Booth. Booth stabbed him and escaped only to be shot down by Union soldiers who found him hiding on a farm 70 miles south of Washington.
President William McKinley’s assassination in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz was claimed to be politically motivated but is unclear what outcome he was hoping the shooting would yield. The significance of McKinley's assassination however, lead to the mandate of the Secret Service protecting presidents by the direction of Congress.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 has long been debated as to the motive by Lee Harvey Oswald. Conspiracies of plots by Cuba, the Soviet Union, and even domestic organizations have been circling since and still exist today. What can be asserted to an extent is the wide criticism of his stance on civil rights. At the height of Martin Luther King’s movement, it can be argued that they were assassinated for similar reasons. This admittedly is only a service-level viewpoint without diving into the web of conspiracy theories that would take another book entirely to cover. What was found is that the assassination of John F. Kennedy followed later by the assassination of his brother Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign, both had assassins assumed to be communist sympathizers due to journals found of the two during both investigations.
Then you have mentally unstable assassins who get themselves worked up in their own minds. Theodore Roosevelt’s assassin John Schrank claimed that William McKinley visited him in a dream and said to avenge his assassination by killing Roosevelt. Luckly when Schrank shot Roosevelt, the campaign speech folded over twice in Roosevelt's breast pocket, and a metal glasses case slowed the bullet, saving his life. Being a hunter, he concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung. He declined an immediate to the hospital and delivered his 84-minute speech with blood seeping into his shirt. "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
The assassin John Hinckley Jr. who made an attempt on Ronald Reagan simply because he was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver and idolized himself as the leading character saving Jodie Foster who he was stalking and wanted to impress by attacking a sitting president. Something Robert De Niro’s character considered doing in the movie. This is fitting considering
Robert De Niro’s constant one-sided gripe with Trump. Making statements like “real racist” and a “white supremacist”. He even participated in referring to Trump as Hitler and a dictator, “I think that if he became president for a second term he’d try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.”
This irresponsible rhetoric has been cycling and recycling for years by celebrities, politicians, and the media. Just in recent years alone, mainstream media and politicians have been painting a dark picture of Trump at every chance they get:
Joe Biden, September 1st 2022, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Kamala Harris, July 12th 2024, “If reelected he will be a dictator on day one.”
Joe Biden, September 1st 2022, “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.”
Kamala Harris, July 12th 2024, “ and I will quote “terminate the United States Constitution.””
Joe Scarborough, December 3rd 2023, “Authoritarianism and totalitarianism.”
Joy Reid, April 7th 2024, “A person who’s telling them, “I’m going to be a dictator.””
Hillary Clinton, November 8th 2023, “Well Hitler was duly elected.”
Jake Tapper, December 18th 2023, “The dehumanizing rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.”
Joy Reid, July 4th 2024, “Let me know, when you guys are finished fighting amongst yourselves, who I gotta vote for in November to keep Hitler out the White House.”
Dick Cheney, August 4th 2022, “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.”
Rep. Gregory Meeks, July 8th 2024, “He’s an existential threat to democracy.”
Mika Brzezinski, June 10th 2024, “Like acts committed by a dictator or even says he will be one.”
Hillary Clinton on The View, November 8th 2023, “So dictatorial authoritarian tendencies.”
Rachel Maddow, November 25th 2023, “He wants to build camps for millions of people.”
Kamala Harris, July 13th 2024, “He will be a dictator on day one.”
Dana Bash, November 13th 2023 “The term vermin was really effectively used by Adolf Hitler and by Mussolini.”
Liz Cheney, December 1st 2023, “Things that we see happening today is sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”
Norm Eisen, July 2nd 2024, “He wants to assert autocratic powers. They’ve just given him a license for dictatorship.”
Don Lemon CNN, “August 15th 2018, “President Trump, what he did today is straight out of a dictator’s playbook.”
Joy Reid, January 10th 2024, “It has historically been the province of dictators like Vladimir
Putin, Bonito Musolini, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler.”
Rachel Maddow, November 25th 2023, “He is behaving like a Hitler or Musolini style fascist dictator.
Nancy Pelosi, April 29th 2024 “Donald Trump is a great threat to our democracy.”
Michael Cohen, September 9th 2020, “Donald Trump believes that he should be the ruler, the dictator of the United States of America.”
Joe Biden, September 1st 2022, “Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans quote a clear and present danger to our democracy.
Madonna, January 22nd 2017 “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”
Add in visual stimulants against Trump like Kathy Griffin holding a bloody fake head of Trump like a savage cutting off the head of their enemy.
Let us assume for a moment that these statements are not lies. We are looking at the portrait of someone who is a clear and present danger to our democracy. Someone who is likely to be elected and assume the role of dictator. You falsely convict and prosecute him to ensure that he is ineligible for the presidency, destroy his life and ability to make a living, and after all efforts, none of that works. You are left with a threat that just destroyed the only chance your party had of winning this election in a devastating debate with a mentally crippled Joe Biden. What does that leave as the next logical option? In the eyes of the Left, what is the next and only option to save America? Well, someone thought that the only means of saving America was a desperate climb to the top of a building with a rifle in his hands. What causes this desperation? A few quotes surely would not do it. How about years of repeated lies about Trump that make it impossible to ignore him as the villain?
The Russian investigations that led to nothing. The continued lies about Trump supporting Nazis and white surprises at Charlottesville. The children in cages and separated from their parents lie that actually stemmed from something Obama did during his administration. And let's not forget the two baseless impeachment attempts. The list goes on and on as the Democrats have tried to destroy this man's life. Now we have come to the point where people are trying to take his life.
While Donald Trump was giving his speech on that day in Butler, Pennsylvania, many spectators began to notice a man with a rifle climbing up onto a nearby building located between 400 to 500 feet away from the stage. They began to yell to authorities, “he’s on the roof!” A spokesperson from the United States Secret Service stated that they did not sweep the building, but depended on local law enforcement to conduct security there. The Pennsylvania state police denied this claim and said they were not responsible for the building or this area.
One of the biggest things being repeated by the media is that the identified shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican and was wearing a gray t-shirt emblazoned with an American flag on the sleeve and the word “Demolitia” across the front and back. A logo-matching merchandise sold by YouTube influencer Demolition Ranch who speaks mostly on topics about firearms. While this can seem confusing at face value as to why someone of this description would take a shot at Trump, these facts can easily be explained away. First, it is not uncommon for Democrats to register as Republicans during the primaries because many states do not allow non-registered party members to vote in primaries. The benefit to this is simply to vote for anyone other than Donald Trump, like Nikki Haley, to prevent someone like him from running in November. This especially makes sense when no other Democrat is running in the primaries. At least not at the time of the Republican primaries. A lot of these malicious voters probably kicked themselves when Biden dropped out of his re-election race. What makes this more than a theory is that Thomas Crooks was a verified doner to the liberal ActBlue political action committee. As for the shirt, it would make sense for someone to be wearing such a shirt in order to blend in with a Trump crowd, especially if they were to get caught holding a gun. If Thomas was someone who thought Conservatives were extremists, then he would have concluded that what he considered an extremist shirt would likely go unnoticed in this crowd.
Unfortunately, many people have made accusations that this was an organized attempt on Trump’s life because Joe Biden had proven to be in such bad shape after the debate between him and Trump that there was just no way he was going to win based not only on his physical condition but in how poorly he was running the country into the ground. They are also linking the fact that Biden is technically in charge of the Secret Service, although there would be far too many red flags for agents dedicated to the job to coordinate anything like this. These assumptions have been piece mailed together by people analyzing the footage and getting reports, real or not, of people from the FBI meeting with Thomas Crooks prior to the assassination attempt. While the FBI has earned a high degree of distrust, the fact that the shooter was able to take a shot at Trump has a higher probability of incompetency on the part of the Secret Service’s response time than malicious plotting.
Several civilians can be seen in recorded footage yelling out to authorities that a shooter was climbing onto a roof well before he took the shot. Since Biden is technically in charge of the Secret Service, it can be construed that this was intentional. I’m not about to point any fingers, but those are the facts. That being said, incompetency seems to be more common with the Secret Service under the leadership of director Kimberly Cheatle who seems more interested in diversity hires rather than someone who can effectively protect an asset and take out a threat. The female agent struggling to holster her gun was an example of that. Or more obvious, the fact that they could not stop the shooter before he took his shot. Director Cheatle has since stepped down after the Congressional hearings regarding the poor conduct of her staff at this unfortunate event.
Five days later, Donald Trump stepped onto the stage at the Republican National Convention to address the nation on what happened. Something looked different about Trump. Somber. Determined. He had just experienced his life flash before his eyes. Trump began with, “Let me begin this evening by expressing my gratitude to the American people for your outpouring of love and support following the assassination attempt at my rally on Saturday. As you already know, the assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life.”
On September 15th a second attempt was taken on Trump's life. While Trump was golfing, his Secret Service agents were securing an upcoming hole when one agent saw the barrel of a rifle sticking out from the bushes. He immediately fired four to six rounds at the suspect, who fled the scene. 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh had been camping in those bushes since 2 am. Trump was 400 to 500 yards away and within firing range at the time that the agent found him. Despite the consequences, the rhetoric continues to come in from Democrats who have done nothing but put a target on Trump's back.
Following the tragic day of the shooting in Pennsylvania, the photograph of Trump pumping his fist in the air after being shot, with Secret Service agents surrounding him and the American flag waving above him in the background, went viral. It became a symbol of the patriotic purpose that Conservatives are fighting for. Even Mark Zuckerberg had to admit that, “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” He continued, “At some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight and I think that’s why a lot of people like the guy.” The truth of the matter as that this support of Trump as a champion against domestic enemies is just as emotional as the opposite side of the coin that paints Trump as a dictator to the voters of the Left. Our words matter and the expression of the pen is mightier than the sword has never been truer than today.
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