“I’m Not Supposed To Be Here, I’m Supposed To Be Dead”

I said on Sunday that I've been thinking about the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers since I started this blog. Some recent comments from Trump about his assassination strike me as pertinent:

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told reporters from the New York Post and Washington Examiner aboard his plane to Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention will kick off Monday.

Then regarding the Iwo Jima-style photo of him pumping his fist beneath the flag, he said,

“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump said in the new interview. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”

I'm not sure if I like the word "iconic" -- it's overused, and it seems to mean more than it really means; I prefer "paradigmatic". But insofar as it refers to a kind of subliminal appeal to the psyche, I'm on board with it. As soon as I saw the quotes from the interview, I went back again to the Bourne thrillers. Why are they so appealing, and why do I find them so pertinent to the Trump story arc?

Let's go back to the fear that commentators have been expressing since well before the assassination attempt, like Frank Luntz, by no means the sharpest tool in the shed, last June 20:

Yes, Trump dropped a few points after being found guilty on 34 felony accounts, but remember this, that would have destroyed any candidate as recently as 10 years ago. And the fact that Donald Trump is still even with or in some cases leading Joe Biden after being found guilty of 34 felonies? Oh, my God, that is so significant.

And one more point, I'm watching the independent vote. I don't believe that they're swaying back and forth between Trump and Biden. I think that they decided that they hate both candidates. They hate both parties. And they're voting out of anger, out of desperation, out of resentment, that this is what our political system has gotten.

So, be very careful on how you analyze what goes on from now to the debates, to the election, because I think there could be a hidden anger vote that surprises everyone on Election Day.

He said the electorate is angry, and watch out. And he said it a week before the fateful Atlanta debate. Indeed, elite opinion has been voicing fear of MAGA retribution for months, per Reuters:

May 31 - Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

This from NBC News on June 10:

Donald Trump wants to talk about revenge, and neither Sean Hannity nor Dr. Phil can stop him.

Both have tried.

. . . But for Trump, it’s all politics, and revenge may need to be meted out.

“Well, revenge does take time, I will say that,” Trump said during a Thursday interview with Dr. Phil. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

This takes me back to a paradigmatic literary form, the early modern revenge play:

The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury.[1] The term revenge tragedy was first introduced in 1900 by A. H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras (circa 1580s to 1620s).

. . . While taken from Greek and Roman source material, many early Elizabethan plays with revenge themes had those themes exacerbated by the English translators. That is to say, the original stories were vengeance focused, but when rewritten and staged in England, they had an even greater focus on gruesome revenge.

In other words, they were popular because tastes demanded them:

Elizabethan audiences loved revenge tragedies, probably because they were used to watching horrifying scenes for entertainment, and popularity for this genre can be traced back to the 1580s. Although the earliest revenge tragedy we have access to The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (c.1587), the Ur-Hamlet (also attributed to Kyd) was probably written about the same time and this play influenced Shakespeare’s Hamlet which, as we all know, is one of the most famous plays that has ever been written.

Revenge plays continued to be popular in the 1590s and early 1600s with some of the bloodiest revenge tragedies being produced between 1585 and 1595, including The Jew of Malta (c.1590) and Titus Andronicus (c.1592). They were written sporadically until the 1640s but they tapered off in the Caroline era as tastes changed.

So, what are current tastes as of the early 21st century? Let's look at one of the most popular film franchises of the past decade, John Wick:

The films have received critical acclaim, and have been considered one of the greatest action film series of all time. Many critics and publications consider the first film, as well as Chapter 4, as two of the greatest action films ever made. The films have earned a collective gross of more than $1 billion worldwide.

What's behind this?

John Wick embraces a quiet, sly silliness that borders on parody. It's a movie that knows what it is: bloody, visceral, and self-aware enough to wink at the audience from time to time with an expertly placed one-liner.

. . . Wick's prowess as a dealer of death is actually the best example of the franchise's tonal balance. He's legendary throughout the assassin community, an unstoppable Terminator-style figure that inspires awe as much as terrified resignation. The audience sees none of Wick's murderous history, however; it's all conveyed through dialogue that reads like a modern fairy tale or a superhero origin story. Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), Iosef's father, flat-out abandons Iosef to his fate because that boy's in deep sh*t. But he still seethes over Wick's mythos, especially how Wick once killed three men with a pencil. "Who the f*ck does that?" he demands.

The Bourne film franchise, a decade older although sequels extend into the John Wick period, has the same winking irony, but it adds a specific theme of death, resurrection, and revenge that isn't as prominent in the Wick series. The Treadstone agents who are dispatched to kill Bourne always believe they've succeeded until the controllers at Langley find they've been outsmarted again. This is something the audience loves -- the sort of deep-state elitists you can see every night on The PBS News Hour being skewered and advised to hire good criminal lawyers.

So in many ways, it seems like the Trump story arc -- at least the part covered by his political career -- may as well have been written by a team of Bourne screenwriters, Trump in many ways battles the same villains who run Treadstone and their political patrons. Cheated at the ballot box, slandered in the media, sued by neurotic old women, indicted by comically corrupt DAs and slimy special counsel, reported dead time after time, still returns like Jason Bourse to make monkeys of every one of them.

Trump gives them the same Jason Bourne thrill, winks at the public, and the public loves every minute of it. Why? The public, as even Frank Luntz has begun tardily to discern, is angry. They're angry at the 2020 election. They're angry they were cozened iinto voting for Joe. They're angry at the polite verities. He understands the public mood better than anyone -- there's even a bit of old-time Hollywood there, but not the Holywood we ave now, except maybe for Bourne and John Wick.

Crooks Was A Quiet, Nice Kid And A Bad Shot. What Happened?

Here's what we know so far about thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump's attempted assassin, via the BBC:

Thomas Crooks had not been carrying ID, so investigators used DNA and facial recognition technology to identify him, the FBI said.

. . . Crooks worked in a local nursing home kitchen just a short drive away from his home, the BBC understands.

Right away, this is a big difference from pretty much every successful or unsuccessful attempted assassin from John Wilkes Booth onward. They didn't want to hide their identities; they wanted their names out there. Most lived flamboyant and unstable lives without steady employment. Booth was a famous actor well known for his Confederate sympathies, and he made no attempt to conceal his identity or motives -- he leapt onto the stage at the Ford Theater after shooting Lincoln, after all.

Charles J Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield, had a disorganized career as a failed writer and political advocate, but his identity as a notorious fabulist and deadbeat was well known. He had a pattern throughout his life of feeling underappreciated for his contributions, and his assassination of Garfield was tied to this. On shooting Garfield, he immediately identified himself.

According to Wikipedia, President William McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz's identity as an anarchist agitator in the Cleveland, OH area was well known, to the point that other anarchists warned that he must be a provocateur. He was immediately restrained and identified after he shot McKinley with a revolver at close range, and he attempted to plead guilty at his subsequent trial.

Like both Guiteau and Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald had a disorganized career in which he failed at numerous jobs, first as a US Marine, then as an emigrant to Russia, and again on returning to the US. Oswald had come to the CIA's attention prior to the Kennedy assassination when he contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, and he was known to the FBI when he wrote a threatening note to their Dallas office. He was also well known to the Russian emigre community in Dallas.

John Hinckley Jr is best known for wanting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in order to impress actress Jodie Foster, whom he'd previously stalked in an effort to establish a romantic relationship. He'd previously trailed President Jimmy Carter in an effort to assassinate him for the same reason. Clearly his intent was to gain fame, and he had no reason to conceal his identity. But even more than Guiteau, Czolgosz, and Oswald, he was unemployable, and at his trial, he was acquitted for insanity.

In contrast to all the others, Crooks had a steady employment history, kept a very low profile, and gave no prior indication that he was any sort of misfit. According to Newsweek:

Marcie Grimm, an administrator at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center where Crooks was a dietary aide, said in a statement obtained by Fox News politics reporter Aishah Hasnie on Sunday afternoon that the center became aware that Crooks was the gunman this morning.

"We are shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement as Thomas Matthew Crook performed his job without concern and his background check was clean," Grimm said.

Interviews with his schoolmates don't generally bear out any characterization as "bullied" or a "loner" -- but they do say he was a remarkably bad shot. According to the UK Telegraph:

Jameson Myers, who attended both elementary and high school with the suspect, said Crooks had attended trials for their school’s rifle team but had been asked not to return after “preseason”.

“He didn’t just not make the team, he was asked not to come back because how bad of a shot he was, it was considered like, dangerous,” Mr Myers told ABC News.

An anonymous member of the team, cited in the report by ABC, said Crooks “wasn’t really fit for the rifle team”.

They added: “He also shot terribly.”

Mr Myers said he was a “nice kid who never talked poorly of anyone”, adding: “I never have thought him capable of anything I’ve seen him do in the last few days.

This was the question I had in Sunday's post. While some experienced snipers have discounted the expertise needed to shoot somoeone in the head at 150 yards, it's plain from former sniper Rep Cory Mills's remarks to Jesse Watters that some level of serious training is required for that level of accuracy:

JESSE WATTERS, FOX NEWS: Let's bring in Florida Congressman and former U.S. Army sniper, Cory Mills. What kind of shot was this, Cory, from 130 yards?

REP. CORY MILLS (R-FL): Look, at the end of the day, this is a shot that your basic training boot camp soldier is requested to make within their nine-week period.

This is one of the easiest shots, and they train all the way out till 300 or 500.

Easy shot or no, this is something that takes up to nine weeks of serious training by a fairly well-qualified candidate to accomplish. Yet just a few years earlier in high school, he was considered such a comically bad shot that he was actually dangerous. The BBC link above says,

He had a membership at a local shooting club, the Clairton Sportsmen's Club, for at least a year.

According to its website, the club is based south of Pittsburgh and is “one of the premier shooting facilities in the tri-state area” of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. It has more than 2,000 members.

It has multiple gun ranges, including a high-power rifle facility with targets up to 171 metres away.

I had a membership like that when I was a kid. Yes, regular classes familiarized me with a rifle and ammunition, taught me the basics, and made me a slightly better shooter than my untrained peers in the ROTC, but it certainly didn't put me at a level that would be expected from military basic training, which is what experienced sniper Cory Mills acknowledges is the level Crooks needed almost to kill Trump. So precisely what did Crooks do to move from a "comically bad" shot to at least journeyman proficiency -- and why did he choose to do this?

It's hard to imagine that he didn't talk about this with anyone at the club, or indeed, that he didn't seek out someone to mentor him in this effort. So far, it doesn't look like the media has contacted anyone at the Clairton Sportsmen's Club, which is a puzzle.

But here's another question: what about his family? According to USA Today,

An FBI official said Sunday that the bureau believes the rifle, using 5.56 ammunition, was purchased legally by Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks. The official, on a call with reporters, said he did not know whether Crooks had permission to use the weapon.

The Crooks family’s digital footprint is small, but some of their few online tracks tie them to internet marketplaces that buy or sell guns.

. . . Matthew Crooks could not be reached in repeated phone calls Saturday and Sunday.

As I noted yesterday,

When reached by CNN late Saturday night, Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell is going on” but would “wait until I talk to law enforcement” before speaking about his son.

Nevertheless,

The FBI said it believes Crooks, who had bomb-making materials in the car he drove to the rally, acted alone. Investigators have found no threatening comments on social media accounts or ideological positions that could help explain what led him to target Trump[.]

So Crooks's dad seems to buy high powered rifles on line, makes one available to his son, and he's trying to figure out what the hell is going on? And according to ABC News,

FBI investigators, led by the Pittsburgh Field Office, have searched Crook's [sic] home in Bethel Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh. They've also searched his vehicle, which was at the scene of the shooting in Butler, the FBI said.

"Suspicious devices found at both locations have been rendered safe by bomb technicians and are being evaluated at the FBI Laboratory," the FBI said.

I don't understand. There were bomb making materials around the family home -- so Crooks hid them in his sock drawer, or what? How on earth, if dad bought the gun and the bomb materials were around the house, could the family not be involved? And how, unlike any other assassin in US history, could Crooks have maintained such a low profile, especially in an era when a high social profile is both desirable and so easy to achieve?

Guys there’s nothing strange going on here. The 20 year old shooter had never used social media or posted a single thing on the internet, ever, and his phone cannot be accessed because it has a password which our government’s best hackers cannot bypass. That’s all. Normal stuff.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 15, 2024

Garland and the FBI have to be taken off the investigation, although I'm sure this will happen soon enough, after the election if not before it.

Joe Sure Is Nervous

🚨 Joe Biden has once again REFUSED to take a single question from the media, and announces he’ll be having yet ANOTHER address to the nation tonight

This time, it’ll be from the Oval Office

Biden is DESPERATELY trying to score points here. pic.twitter.com/xyXnMJjpAp

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 14, 2024

I double checked the president's schedule, just to be sure I didn't get anything wrong: he addressed the nation from Rehoboth at 8:00 PM Saturday night, then again at 1:30 yesterday afternoon, and he spoke yet again at 8:00 PM last evening. At the afternoon remarks,

"We don't yet have any information about the motive of the shooter, we know who he is," the president said Sunday, without naming the suspect, who was identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper after opening fire.

"I urge everyone, everyone please, don't make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations," the president said. "Let the FBI do their job and their partner agencies do their job. I've instructed that this investigation be thorough and swift, and the investigators will have every resource they need to get this done."

The president said the independent security review of Saturday's rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, will assess "exactly what happened," and the results of that review will be made public.

The problem is, of course, that the suspicion that the shooter somehow intended to support the Biden campaign by taking out Trump is unavoidable. Attorney General Garland's extremely uncertain glance back at Joe at 0:14 as they exit the room is an indication that he's sweating as well -- Joe and Garland are acutely aware that Trump is going to win in November, and Garland's role will be scrutinized then, but meanwhile, nobody trusts either Garland or the FBI to conduct an impartial investigation.

To state the obvious, Garland and Wray must recuse themselves from the investigation into the attempted assassination of President Trump. There should be ZERO — ZERO — DC or FBI HQ involvement. It is patently absurd to think these people could be entrusted with this probe.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 14, 2024

Another problem has been reports that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service had consistently turned down requests from the Trump campaign for increased security, repeated after the Butler event by former agent Dan Bongino:

While the Secret Service has emphatically denied reports that Trump’s security detail asked for, and were denied, reinforcements, Bongino says he can prove otherwise. “I can tell you actual quotes,” he said on Sunday.

“I can tell you, and absolutely confirm, from the horse's mouth, from multiple people ... there have been repeated requests to increase the security footprint, around not just the residences of Donald Trump, but the body itself,” the former Secret Service agent said. “And they have been rebuffed.”

Rep Michael Walz, a member of the House Oversight Committee, made the same point and has indicated there will be briefings and hearings on the matter:

Unacceptable. We are determined get to the bottom of WHY former Trump officials denied security in the face of foreign threats. @HouseOversight https://t.co/3a8je2LDvC

— Rep. Mike Waltz (@michaelgwaltz) July 14, 2024

Apparently in response, Joe said this:

First, Mr. Trump, as a former president and nominee of the Republican Party already receives a heightened level of security, and I have been consistent in my direction to the Secret Service to provide him with every resource, capability, and protective measure necessary to ensure his continued safety.

Second, I’ve directed the head of the Secret Service to review all security measures for the — all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to start tomorrow.

But these are just brave words, and there's nothing specific about any increase in Trump's protection going forward. According to a piece by Susan Crabtree at Real Clear Politics,

The Secret Service briefed reporters Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee about the status of security at the convention but declined to discuss any possible lapses before and during Trump’s Saturday rally. The spokeswoman expressed confidence in the agency’s security plan for the Republican convention, which begins today in Milwaukee.

Despite reports that the agency was strengthening some aspects of security after the attempted assassination against Trump, the spokeswoman said there are no changes to the original plan and noted that the agency believes it has the resources it needs to execute it.

Joe's third appearance over the weekend was Sunday evening's seven-minute national address from the Oval Office that said nothing new but was almost a self-parody of gaffes and malapropisms:

“In America, we resolve our differences at the Battle Box,” Biden could be heard saying at one point. “Now, that’s how we do it, at the Battle Box. Not with bullets.”

. . . “Tonight, I’m asking every American to recommit to make America so….make America….well, think about it, what’s made America so special,” Biden continued, appearing to stumble on trying to find a way to say, “make America Great Again” without using those words.

In fact, Joe, at a loss for words, is nevertheless talking up a storm -- three special appearances in front of the cameras in three days. Clearly something has made him deeply worried. Part of it must certainly be that even on the left, it's being acknowledged that the assassination attempt has put the election out of reach for Joe's campaign. According to The Guardian, for instance,

All of this could not come at a worse time for Biden. His campaign, I don’t need to tell you, is in complete disarray. Day after day there has been headline after headline about the president being too frail and feeble for office. . . . Now that contrast has been extraordinarily heightened. Trump is the guy who jumps straight up after being fired at by an assassin; Biden is the guy who stumbles up the stairs. If you’re an undecided voter swayed by which candidate looks more presidential, your mind just got made up.

But that can't be the whole explanation. Biden, as well as Garland at this point, must be lookng at what's going to come out of the investigations, and as Rep Cory Mills put it to Fox News yesterday, "Bottom line is that this is massive negligence to the point of me speculating on what was intentional and what wasn't".

They aren't nervous about the election. They're resigned to that by this point. They're nervous about what's going to come afterward. Just as one example, Garland has been refusing to provide the House Republicans with the tapes of Hur's interview with Joe, presumably on the basis that they would feed speculation about Joe's cognitive state and affect the election. But the election at this point is as good as over, and come January, Garland's Republican successor is going to have those tapes and a whole lot more, whatever Garland refuses to give up now.

They're really, really nervous, not because of the election, but because of what they know will come after it.

Thanks Be To God

One story that's been at the back of my mind since I started this blog is the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers, and as the details about Trump's attempted assassination have trickled out, I keep wondering how I might try to fit them into a Robert Ludlum style plot. Let me say from the start that this is pure speculation driven by an overactive literary imagination.

We have Joe, an elderly, shallow, and self-absorbed president who's been propped up by the organs of state security since his time as vice president -- and as best we can determine, his son, a dissipated drug addict, has been one of his closest advisors since that time as well.

Even while Trump was in office, the organs of state security coordinated an effort to impeach Trump on Joe's behalf; since Joe came into office, the same organs assisted the January 6 "insurrection" investigation and either conducted or assisted a series of criminal indictments and civil actions designed to thwart a Trump effort at reelection.

If I were a Robert Ludlum wannabe, I'd at least insert a strong implication that Joe's dissipated drug addict son was one of the inner circle who advised him to use this strategy -- and because it was a product of the son's mind, it backfired spectacularly, with each successive indictment and civil judgment driving Trump's polls higher in the year before the election.

Joe's inner circle, increasingly worried at this trend, devised a strategy in the spring to stop Trump's advance by taking advantage of European trips to commemorate D-Day and meet with the G7 to look presidential on the world stage. They would then capitalize on this by challenging Trump to a take-it-or-leave-it early debate on their rules with friendly moderators, which would have the effect of popping the Trump balloon and returning Joe to presidential status.

But even before the European trips, Trump's standing in the polls continued to be worrisome, and even before the debate, Joe's bizarre episodes on his European trips began seriously to undermine confidence in his cognitive abilities. The debate, instead of rescuing Joe, made Trump look all the more statesmanlike, and polls began to suggest new states were in play on the electoral map.

This prompted new efforts by Joe's advisors, among whom continued to be his dissipated drug addict son, to restore Joe's presidential prestige, which continued to backfire, leading to efforts by his former mentor, Barack Obama, to replace him on the ticket or as president with an unspecified substitute.

At this point we've reached real Robert Ludlum territory. The Hitchcock MacGuffin of the Bourne series is a CIA black operation called Treadstone, which uses brainwashed deep operatives to conduct strategic assassinations. One of these is Jason Bourne, and the action of the series involves Bourne's gradual recognition of his role in Treadstone and his attempt to recover his identity.

If I were a Robert Ludlum wannabe, I'd develop a plot whereby Joe's inner circle, influenced by his dissipated drug addict son, faced with a coup led by Obama and Pelosi, aims to reverse Joe's dilemma by assassinating Trump. At this point, Joe's strong, experienced, steady-handed leadership comes to the fore, and he calms and unifies a stunned nation, winning reelection by a landslide.

Now, to bring this off, the assassin must be someone at Treadstone level. He definitely has to be a good shot. He should have no paper trail -- he should be completely anonymous. Any possible connection to the organs of state security and Joe's dissipated drug addict son must be not just deniable but unthinkable.

This is where I can't help but have questions. We know far less at this stage about Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, the alleged assassin who shot at Trump but killed one other in Pennsylvania yesterday evening, than we learned at the time about Lee Harvey Oswald, Sara Jane Moore, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, or John Hinckley Jr in equivalent circumstances. It took hours for the FBI to identify Crooks at all, and only a few outlets are willing to report even the little we know:

Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks, 53, told CNN that he was trying to figure out what happened and would wait until he spoke to law enforcement before speaking about his son. Thomas Crooks graduated in 2022 from Bethel Park High School, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He received a $500 "star award" from the National Math and Science Initiative, according to the newspaper.

The problem here is that in the wake of the event, eyewitnesses were claiming that they saw Crooks climbing onto the roof with a gun, tried to notify law enforcement, but law enforcement paid no attention. So naturally, Crooks's father's first instinct is to talk everything over with law enforcement.

Now, I've worked in the crisis management-contingency planning field, and at least I know that under such circumstances, a family needs to designate a spokesperson, possibly a trusted relative or an attorney. I'm puzzled that Crooks's father seems to be so clueless -- someone instead should basically be saying as little as possible to anyone, and that definitely includes law enforcement.

The next question I have is how Crooks got to be such a good shot. He wasn't a perfect shot -- he only grazed Trump's ear -- but he was awfully good, close to Lee Harvey Oswald level. While in the US Marines,

. . . Oswald was tested for marksmanship with his rifle on five different exercises—from 200, 300 and 500 yards firing slowly and from 200 and 300 yards firing rapidly. Based on these results a Marine would be rated by a defined scoring system. . . . in both tests that most closely matched the conditions in the Kennedy assassination for rapid fire shooting Oswald scored above an expert level. Additionally on his third test from 500 yards firing slowly, Oswald scored 46 out of a possible 50: again shooting above an expert level.

Crooks's rooftop was 148 yards from Trump. In contrast, Sara Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme were unable to handle a firearm competently; their attempts to shoot Gerald Ford both failed. John Hinckley Jr shot Reagan with a handgun at close range. Crooks was far more capable with a firearm than any of the other failed assassins.

Although Crooks appears to have been a reclusive who lived with his mother, he had to have received fairly advanced firearms training somewhere. In addition, he lived some 40 miles away from the rally site -- he must have done some detailed planning, or have had planning done for him, to identify the layout of the scene and find an advantageous rooftop. What we know about Crooks doesn't fit with what he appears to have been able almost to bring off.

And then we have the problem of the Secret Service:

Steve Nottingham, a former SWAT commander in Long Beach, California, called Saturday’s shooting “a fundamental security failure.”

He has worked security details for visiting world leaders, including presidents, and now trains officers on how to respond to critical incidents. He pointed at likely breakdowns in the pre-event scouting and real-time monitoring of places a gunman could shoot from.

But one thing definitely worked -- at least, if I were a Robert Ludlum wannabe. Just an instant after Crooks got off his rounds, the Secret Service snipers knew exactly where to shoot, and they blew his head off. Crooks had no ID and had to be identified with DNA. Gee, if they'd caught him climbing onto the roof before he shot, they'd have been able to interrogate him, huh? Well, the crack Secret Service snipers neutralized him instead, just seconds after he shot.

They were all high fivin' each other, from what I read. I think we have a lot to learn. But I'm just a Robert Ludlum wannabe.

UFOs, Ancient Aliens, And The Democrat Race

The impression, possibly fostered by Fr Schmitz and his Bible in a Year podcast, has been forming in my mind for a while that belief in space aliens is a form of idolatry. It's been enough to make me put a limit on the shows I watch on History that cover the subject. Here's an example of what's begun to bother me, an episode of Ancient Aliens that aired Aug 26, 2022:

Ancient cultures around the world often referred to the gods as the "Immortals" - but could they have encountered extraterrestrial beings that had achieved eternal life? And if these visitors genetically engineered the human race, as Ancient Astronaut Theorists suggest, is it our destiny to become immortals as well?

Note how quickly the story elides from archaeology through sci-fi to immortality, which is the province of religion -- if we somehow believe strongly enough that the ancient aliens were immortal, then maybe we can live forever ourselves, or sorta-kinda something like that. Nobody ascribes much to Presbyterianism any more, but the ancient aliens are becoming a real option. Those offer real hope for the human condition!

What interests me is that there's actually so little evidence for extraterrestrial life in the modern era, especially, say, post-1600, and even less now in the era of space probes and radio telescopes, that people are forced to impute evidence of UFOs into Egyptian tomb paintings or Mayan calendars. Doesn't that say something about how little concrete evidence of alien life forms we can find now, using scientific tools?

Actually, there's far more evidence for even the wishy-washiest version of Presbyterianism than there is for space aliens, but this is something millions of people apparently refuse to see. I'm starting to see an oddly similar mindset taking hold among a certain faction of Democrats, to wit, the idea that somewhere out in space, there must be a Democrat who can replace Biden and beat Trump. Douglas Schoen, whom up to now I had thought to be more grounded, writes in The Hill:

[T]here’s no doubt Biden has lost the confidence of his party and the country. I believe the solution — and indeed, a great opportunity for the Democrats — is a truly open, transparent, “blitz primary” that could lead to a truly open convention.

. . . Prominent Democratic strategist James Carville authored his own plan for a mini-primary, suggesting party magnates such as former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would select the eight strongest candidates to sit in a series of town halls moderated by liberal icons such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

At the convention, delegates would decide on the nominee using ranked choice voting, concluding on the third day. Once a nominee has been crowned, they would appear on stage with Biden and Harris, as well as Obama and Clinton in a demonstration of unity and progress.

Without this, the likely winner — indeed the almost certain winner — of November’s election, will be Donald Trump.

Let me see if I can parse this out. We have the list of usual suspects, starting with Kamala and extending through Newsom and Whitmer until veering into the impossibilities of Pritzer and Shapiro, who are Jewish and won't pass muster with the anti-Semitic wing of the party. Michelle Obama has taken herself out of the running, twice. Of Kamala, Schoen himself says,

Indeed, it is unlikely Harris would be a strong candidate, and she proved to be a less than adept campaigner after dropping out two months before the first primary in 2020.

Schoen goes through the rest of the list and adds a few others -- Pete Buttigieg?? -- and concludes,

While none of these candidates beat Trump in the current polling, a blitz primary would no doubt catapult any one of these individuals into the national spotlight, making up for a lack of familiarity among the broader electorate.

Basically he's hoping that somewhere there's an as-yet-undiscovered generic Democrat, so far completely unknown to the public but in fact known to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who could be found and suddenly shine in an August "blitz primary", who would steal the electorate's heart in a whirlwind romance and beat Trump soundly in November. Someone -- well, someone like Pete Buttigieg, or maybe Beto O'Rourke.

In other words, some pretty-boy young white guy, but without the baggage -- after all, with Buttigieg, where does presumptive first spouse Chasten fit in? You can't call him "first lady", and it's not inclusive to call him "first gentleman" like Doug Emhoff.

I suggested "first f*****" to my wife -- after all, Pope Francis uses the term -- but I think this is all just an example of how wishful any such scenario turns out to be. It's no different from the attempt in 1972 to replace Tom Eagleton with Sargent Shriver -- but I don't think the Democrats have anyone now with even the prestige of Sargent Shriver.

Well, if the ancient aliens are immortal, maybe they can hold a seance or something and rustle one up. He might just fit the bill. Erich von Däniken himself, though, is 89. Cross him off the list.

Good Enough?

I didn't watch Joe's big boy press conference last night, but I did check the aggregators later to see if there'd been any major blunders. My sense of things was that, although he'd started out by misgendering Vice Preasident Trump, his performance was good enough:

The Democrat Party is left in limbo as President Joe Biden’s NATO press conference avoided total disaster despite several gaffes, and it could stave off internal efforts among Democrats to remove him as the nominee in the immediate future.

. . . Biden’s former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on MSNBC that she thinks the press conference “gave [Biden’s campaign] more time, which for the campaign is a win.”

Nevertheless, the consensus that seems to be emerging is more aligned with Susan Glasser in the New Yorker:

And sure enough, Biden was barely into his first response before he let loose another gaffe, arguably even cringier than the first. Asked about Vice-President Kamala Harris and her ability to step in for him if need be, Biden responded by saying, “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be Vice-President if I think she was not qualified to be President.” This time, he did not even spot the error.

. . . But, for those who listened to the full hour of Biden’s press conference, it wasn’t, in the end, the gaffe that made this a poor performance. It was Biden’s over-all halting, painful delivery. It was his struggle to find words, and the fact that when he did find them they were often not the right ones. Most important, it was his inability to make the case for himself—and his difficulty prosecuting the case against Trump.

Mark Leibovitch wrote this in The Atlantic before the press conference:

Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove.

Ideally no one gets hurt along the way: Maybe grandpop refuses to give up his license, drives into an oak tree, and only the car gets totaled. But sometimes there are casualties[.]

. . . President Joe Biden, 81, is acting like one of history’s most negligent and pigheaded leaders at a crucial moment, and right now, we are all pedestrians.

Since his debate debacle nearly two weeks ago, much of America has been locked into the classic “Will he or won’t he?” cliffhanger. Will Biden step aside and not run for reelection, as massive majorities of voters have for years said they want him to do? Or will he persist in pursuing one of the most ill-fated and ill-advised presidential campaigns ever carried out?

. . . As of now, it looks as if Biden is committed to “riding this out” and “staying the course,” no matter how unfit he might be for the ugly course ahead. This is, maddeningly, the only consideration that now matters, because Biden is the ultimate decision maker.

According to Axios,

Democrats who were bracing for the worst out of President Biden's press conference at the NATO summit instead saw a passable performance – but it doesn't appear to have calmed Capitol Hill's panic around his candidacy.

. . . One senior House Democrat, asked it the press conference would quiet the uproar on Capitol Hill, told Axios "probably not," while another said "not quite, but almost."

Said another House Democrat: "Tonight he looked better than the debate, but still not enough to recover and beat Donald Trump."

So for now, the emerging situation seems to be that Trump is at minimum expected to do much better than he did in either 2016 or 2020, while the main obstacle for Democrats is Joe Biden himself. The party is consumed by controversy over whether to replace him as a candidate, but even if it were to agree to do this, there's no concrete plan of action, and other than Kamala Harris, there's no clear substitute. Nor is there any assurance that Harris would do any better against Trump.

Meanwhile, the longer the uncertainty drags out, the less time is available for a replacement Democrat candidate to unify the party or organize a campaign operation, and the less pressure is on Trump to do strenuous campaigning while the Democrats self-immolate in full view.

Right now, I still think the closest parallel to this year's campaign is 1972, except that the foreordained loser this year is the incumbent, not the challenger. It doesn't mean as much if the challenger has no credibility, as McGovern didn't have, and the Democrats were able to disavow him as a representative Democrat in the wake of his loss, while they soon enough recovered their credibility by shifting the focus to Nixon with Watergate.

The problem for 2024 is that Biden is the incumbent Democrat unifier and elder statesman.

"I Sorta Got On My Knees And Begged Him."

Biden describes giving NATO Sec. Gen. Jens Stoltenberg the Medal of Freedom: "I sorta got on my knees and begged him." pic.twitter.com/ONvsEIcWbC

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 11, 2024

It took me some time to connect the dots between two cryptic clips of Joe's remarks surrounding the NATO summit yesterday. It looks as though he was trying to tell some sort of private joke that stayed in his mind over two separate contexts.

The clip above was in a discussion with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while the clip belolw that more or less explains it was made at the NATO summit itself in a direct exchange with retiring Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

😳Oh boy…
“I realize after _____ing your wife. “

“I personally ask you to extend your service….laughs......... Forgive me?”

⁉️What did Joe just say he was doing to his wife? pic.twitter.com/KHi4bojNfY

— RoamingRN (@roaming_rn) July 9, 2024

Nobody is quite sure what the word was as Joe slurred out "_____ing", but I'm with those who think it was indeed _____. As best I can reconstruct what was going on in the presidential brain, the story he was trying to tell was that he was getting down on his knees and begging, but the person he somehow meant to be begging wasn't Secretary General Stoltenberg, it was the Secretary General's wife, or something like that. Yuk, yuk, huh?

As I said when Joe violated diplomatic protocols at the G7, including forehead-bumping Pope Francis, meetings at that level are intricately pre-scripted, and there are meant to be no surprises, especially not in the public exchanges. Ronald Reagan did not share toidy jokes with Margaret Thatcher no matter how much they may have agreed in their respective agendas.

At the very best, what this suggests is that Joe had basically lost situational awareness: this was a diplomatic summit at which nobody jokes about diddling the wives of other high-level diplomats, but Joe just had to get out a giggly sort of barb that nobody quite understood, but it had apparently been on his mind for hours. In this, he did nobody any favors.

But this turned out not to be the only time sex was on his mind yesterday -- he dropped by an AFL-CIO meeting and came up with this:

BIDEN: "I look back now and wonder how my dad handled those thin walls" 😳 pic.twitter.com/cMgtH5VBCW

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 10, 2024

As this commentator said, "This is what happens when Biden speaks without a teleprompter." He tells private jokes that either nobody quite gets, or if they get them, it makes them uncomfortable. On one hand, the experimental data that backs up the Dunning-Kruger effect involves people who tell jokes that nobody thinks are funny, but on the other, that a US president would routinely do this sort of thing, especially in a diplomatic context, is worrisome.

Nevertheless,

An embattled President Biden is set to stage a “big-boy” press conference Thursday afternoon — the first since his disastrous debate performance threw his 2024 re-election campaign into utter disarray.

The 81-year-old plans to close out the NATO summit in Washington — an event meant to showcase his leadership on the world stage — with the rare, solo news conference as he scrambles to prove to the American public that he’s capable of serving another four years.

The commander-in-chief is scheduled to take questions from the White House press corps at 5:30 p.m.

Beyond that,

President Joe Biden is slated to participate in a one-on-one interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, as the 81 year old continues to stand defiantly in his decision to remain in the presidential race, despite the pleas of some very well-known Democrats.

NBC’s Monica Alba announced the upcoming interview, writing on X, “BREAKING: @NBCNews anchor Lester Holt will sit down with President Biden for an exclusive one-on-one interview on Monday in Austin, Texas.”

The only thing that comes to mind here is "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Why are Hunter and Dr Jill still putting him up to this? One theory is that Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer have begun to lose patience, and they're telling Joe he's got to do more to prove he's healthy enough to continue. In this scenario, the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force, and Joe is convinced that all he needs is one good performance to pull it off -- not just to keep the nomination, but in fact to win in November.

Another scenario might be that Hunter and Dr Jill know it's a lost cause, but they aren't yet ready to throw in the towel. Letting Joe do one last press conference, one last interview, maintains the fantasy for just a few more days, and they'll deal with next week when they come to it.

But it's hard to imagine that in the context of June's repetitive disasters, anyone seriously thinks Joe is in a position to rescue his candidacy and turn things around in the next few days, especially given his performance yesterday.

UPDATE: Today's "big boy" press conference has been moved back from 5:30 to 6:45.