It Isn't Over By A Long Shot

On succeeding to the presidency following Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford said in part.

I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.

In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

In that case, Nixon had resigned, a final and unambiguous act, and the electorate was at least tentatively willing to believe that the problem was specific to Nixon, and it culd be solved simply by replacing Nixon with Ford. But if one thing is plain from Joe's withdrawal as a candidate for the November election, the nightmare isn't ending, and Joe's mere withdrawal as a candidate is neither final nor unambiguous.

Trump, whose instincts over the past year have been remarkable, edges closer to the real issue here: Joe is out of the race, but nothing has changed, tomorrow's going to be same lies, different day. Joe -- or at least his puppetmasters -- are still running the country, and for now, we've simply got his surrogate Kamala. The Republicans, including Speaker Johnson and vice president nominee J D Vance, are taking the line that if Joe isn't fit to run for president, he isn't fit to serve as president, and other ommentators are beginning to agree.

The problem for Kamala, at least as long as Joe remains president but she runs as the presumptive nominee, is that while she has to defend Joe's policies, she can't do anything to change them. For instance, she's powerless to tell Secretary Mayorkas to make any change at all at the border, even if she's forced to acknowledge the Biden policies are deeply flawed. But if she were to make any change, it could begin to establish her as a serious candidate and potentially increase her slim electoral prospects. That option remains out of reach as long as Joe is president.

The second immediate problem will be the ongoing investigation into the Butler assassination attempt, linked with Secret Service Director Cheatle's refusal, at least so far, to resign. If Joe as continuing president continues to back her, this severely limits Kamala's own ability to seem decisive and independent, because firing Cheatle is a no-brainer. If any daylight begins to show between Kamala and Joe on this and other positions, it could benefit Kamala but prove unacceptable to Joe.

The third problem is the underlying circumstance of this year's front-loaded presidential campaign. The reality is that the campaign actually began last fall with Trump's New York civil trials, continued through the Atlanta debacle, culminated in Joe's disastrous June 27 debate performance, and was put out of reach with the failed Butler assassination attempt followed immediately by the Republican convention. Reports are that Joe dropped out of the campaign Sunday when it became clear that he no longer had any potential route to 270 electoral votes.

When Biden huddled with his two closest advisers Saturday, the information they provided on polling and where top Democratic officials stood underscored that a path to victory was “basically nonexistent,” according to another person familiar with the matter.

There wasn’t any single poll number, wavering Democratic official or fundraiser presented in the meeting with longtime aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti that pushed Biden toward his decision, the person said.

Instead, the information highlighted that the path back to a viable campaign had been severely damaged by declining national and swing-state poll numbers, along with party defections that were likely to rapidly accelerate. The information included polling and details gathered from outreach outside Biden’s inner circle.

This is another way of saying that the election was lost months before November. In large part, this was Joe's own doing, by initiating politically driven court cases that began to come to trial last year, reinforced by his own choice of an unprecedentedly early first debate. The problem was Trump's instinctive ability to turn each legal setback for the Democrats into a personal political victory, followed by Joe's clear defeat in the June 27 debate, which had the predicted effect of giving the Democrats plenty of time to dump Joe before the August convention. But dumping Joe won't fix anything, because Kamala.

As a result, we have a continuing constitutional crisis that's begun to morph from the fairly simple question of whether a president is fit for office, into the problem that the November election has been decided months in advance, with the question of who's running the country up in the air until January 20, when every indication is that the opposition party will take over then, but the country will drift in the meantime with uncertain leadership.

One solution, as I've already suggested, is for Joe to resign as president,be succeeded briefly by Kamala, who would also resign, to be succeeded in the constitutional line by Speaker Johnson, a Republican, who could serve as a Trump standin until January.

Given the unprecedented events we've had up to now, I don't think this can be ruled out.

There's Neither A Plan A Nor A Plan B

The problem nobody wants to face is twofold: first, JD Vance as Trump's running mate is stepping right into the role Nixon played for Eisenhower and Agnew played for Nixon, the low-road campaigner, and he's asking the important question:

If Joe Biden doesn't have the cognitive function to run for re-election, then he certainly doesn't have the cognitive function to remain as Commander-In-Chief.

How can any Dem pushing him to drop out of the presidential race, argue in good faith that he should stay on as POTUS?

— JD Vance (@JDVance1) July 19, 2024

But the second horn of the dilemma is Kamala:

We reported on Friday that Kamala Harris was going to have a conference call with big Democrat donors. The meeting was put together on short notice. However, at the time of the report, it was not clear what message she was going to deliver to them.

. . . We now have details about the call.

According to the New York Times, the call included roughly 300 donors, and "several listeners said they found the meeting overall to be of little value and even, at times, condescending, believing that the message ignored donors’ legitimate concerns about the Biden-led ticket."

Kamala Harris reportedly spoke for just over five minutes via video, focused on criticizing Donald Trump for his convention speech, and tried to link him to Project 2025. She only briefly mentioned Joe Biden but did not take questions.

. . . after Harris finished speaking, one participant, who was accidentally unmuted, described the call as “ludicrous.”

So on one hand, there's a genuine constitutional crisis, with the president suffering from severe cognitive issues, while his shallow and entitled wife, his crackhead son, and his wife's chief of staff, the Rasputin-like Anthony Bernal, appear to be running the country on his behalf. On the other, if he steps down or is removed due to incapacity, his successor is Kamala, who is probably worse -- but she's almost certainly incapable of organizing a majority of the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, much less marshaling two-thirds of both houses of Congress to sustain it, which only she can constitutionally do.

So if the 25th Amendment is ruled out, which as a practical matter it must surely be, the only other option is for Joe himself to "step aside", "pass the torch", or however it can be delicately put, but again, if he resigns the presidency at any time before Inauguration Day 2025, Kamala is president, and we're in the same pickle. So for the Democrats, the only conceivable option is for Joe to withdraw his candidacy but remain in office, while the August Democrat convention somehow replaces Kamala as the candidate. But even then, we're faced with Sen Vance's point, Joe's still president until January.

And so far, Joe is showing no sign he's going to "step aside" or "pass the torch".

The White House and the Biden campaign have denied that he is about to drop out. “Absolutely, the president is in this race,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday, one of the president’s favorite shows and a regular venue for Democrats speaking to other Democrats. “You’ve heard him say that time and time again.”

But at the same link,

“We have to cauterize this wound right now, and the sooner we can do it, the better,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., who has not publicly called for the president to step aside.

Er, cauterize it how? Per Norman Ornstein, a PBS News Hour regular, at the LA Times,

For many members of Congress and others sophisticated about politics, a wide-open nominating convention in Chicago in four weeks is the best way to come up with a dream ticket — Whitmer-Warnock seems to be the one mentioned most. At minimum, they want to have a contest, an open process that yields the nominee. To some, if Kamala Harris prevails in that setting, directly vanquishing other rivals, it would bolster her candidacy. And the excitement of a wide-open convention would give the Democratic ticket the jump start it needs.

But that still relies on Joe "passing the torch". and the longer he takes to make up his mind to pass it, the less the time available to rig the "open convention", which of course is just a polite way of saying finesse Kamala out of the running. And that is the only tine Ornstein mentions the K-word at all in an essaay that brings up figures from Adlai Stevenson to Barry Goldwater. Nor does he have any sort of concrete path for doing this -- all he can suggest is Whitmer-Warnock, but according to the New York Times, Whitmer herself is not on board:

She said no. The speculation is “a distraction more than anything,” she said. “I don't like seeing my name in articles like that because I'm totally focused on governing and campaigning” for the existing ticket of Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Oddly, Ornstein mentions election cycles from 1952 to 1964 to 1968 to 1976 to 1980, but the one he leaves out is 1972, which I've long said is the one that most closely resembles this year. An "open convention" would likely be much like that year's Democrat convention, with the nominee, McGovern, consistently behind in the polls and his running mate forced to withdraw due to questions about his mental capacity:

The convention nominated Senator George McGovern of South Dakota for president and Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri for vice president. Eagleton withdrew from the race just 19 days later after it was disclosed that he had previously undergone mental health treatment, including electroshock therapy, and he was replaced on the ballot by Sargent Shriver of Maryland, a Kennedy in-law.

The convention, which has been described as "a disastrous start to the general election campaign", was one of the most unusual—perhaps the most contentious in the history of the Democratic Party since 1924—with sessions beginning in the early evening and lasting until sunrise the next morning. Previously excluded political activists gained influence at the expense of elected officials and traditional core Democratic constituencies such as organized labor. A protracted vice presidential nominating process delayed McGovern's acceptance speech (which he considered "the best speech of his life") until 2:48 a.m.—after most television viewers had gone to bed.

The fact is that if Joe "steps aside" in whichever way, Harris is the likely nominee, which opens the same contentious question that dominated the 1972 convention: McGovern was a certain loser, and no Democrat with a political future wanted to end his career as McGovern's running mate, least of all Ted Kennedy. But a long list of other choices also declined, and Eagleton was a last expedient of desperatiom. Very few commentators so far have mentioned this problem if Kamala becomes the nominee: no other Democrat with a political future is going to sign on as the sacrificial lamb on that ticket, either.

Ornstein concludes,

There is no sugarcoating the mess Democrats find themselves in right now. But they need to keep it from getting even messier, and soon.

Yes, but how? There's neither a plan A, nor a Plan B, nor. . .

Why There's No James Kallstrom To Manage This Crisis

The other day, I mentioned James Kallstrom, the FBI manager who quickly became the face of the investigation into the July 17, 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800. He represents a textbook execution of crisis management: at first, there were equal competing theories of the disaster, ranging from a terrorist bomb to a misfired US antiaircraft missile.

Kallstrom was able to establish himself as a credible central figure who made information available no matter which way it led, and by making himself the best single source, he was able to establish the consensus that the explosion was the result of combustible vapor in a fuel tank, ignited by an electrical short circuit. As a result, other competing theories remain at the fringe.

While TWA 800 was unquestionably a corporate crisis for TWA, which had already declared bankruptcy the year before, it was also a crisis, and probably a bigger one, for the FBI, whose credibility had been badly damaged by the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992 and the Waco massacre the following year.

Kallstrom's performace gave the FBI a brief respite from bad publicity, but it's woth pointing out that only ten days after the Juy 17 TWA 800 disaster, the Atlanta Olympic bombing took place on July 27, which led to the FBI wrongly identifying Richard Jewell, a security guard who actually alerted the crowd to the bomb, as the suspect. One Kallstrom clearly wasn't, and isn't, enough to rescue a corrupted FBI.

And as I've been saying, the one figure who's missing from the current crisis -- a crisis not just for the FBI and the Secret Service, but for the Biden administration, which is in lugubrious collapse, and the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities in general -- is someone of Kallstrom's character and integrity. As a result, we're getting piecemeal reports from leaks by frustrated agents lower down in the orgainizations, for instance:

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, made his final search for pornography before the Pennsylvania rally shooting last weekend, according to a new report. A senior law enforcement official told the Daily Beast that the FBI found this… pic.twitter.com/LuFRIaSwJx

— josette caruso (@josettecaruso) July 20, 2024

No doubt in following days we'll see some of these claims retracted or contradicted, while other new ones will arise willy-nilly, precisely because the FBI currently has no James Kallstrom, when it badly needs one. Kallstrom had one factor working for him in addition to his clear aura of integrity: the FBI didn't have a dog in that fight. The competing theories involved terrorists, none of whom worked for the FBI, or possibly the US Navy, which might have had an antiaircraft missile fire by mistake from a nearby destroyer, but the Navy didn't work for the FBI, either.

In contrast, the agencies involved in the Butler assassination attempt, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service, are all closely associated organs of state security, and they have an incentive to cover for each other. The FBI could tolerate a Kallstrom, even if he had the potential to be a loose cannon, because no matter which way he got loose, it couldn't hurt the FBI, and on balance, whatever he came up with, it could only make the FBI look good.

In the Butler assassination attempt, no matter which way the investigation goes, the FBI is not going to look good, and if anything, the Secret Service and Homeland Security will only look worse. So we have Missouri Repulican Sen Hawley commenting on the secret briefings the FBI and Secret Service are providing to insiders:

I mean, let’s be honest, the Secret Service is out there and the FBI now doing these secret calls, these behind-the-scenes briefings, where, by the way, they don’t really answer questions. They limited — strictly limited the number of questions. The Secret Service director herself did not actually brief. She was present on the call, but didn’t do hardly any briefing.

When she did try to answer a question or two, it did not go well. She was not well-prepared. This needs to be done in public, bottom line. We need public hearings. We need a full and thorough investigation.

Neil, what we know about this is that there were 62 minutes, 62, between the time that the Secret Service identified the shooter as a person of interest, somebody acting suspiciously, and the time he started firing shots at the president.

I mean, what in the world is going on? We have got to find out.

At this point, the crisis is out of control. Biden has retreated to a Delaware basement and likely has little knowledge of what's going on. He could rescue the crisis, and potentially even his candidacy, by firing Secret Service Director Cheatle and appointing a Kallstrom-like figure to take over and make the facts public whichever way they fall -- because, realisically speaking, Joe doesn't have much of a future no matter what happens now.

Instead, we're starting to get the predictable second-gunman theories, and there's really no credible body of reliable information to say whether they're reasonable or not. The crisis is more than just the administration, it's going to metastisize into the deep state, and the only way to control it, which is the only way to control any crisis, is to have a strong honest-broker spokesman to provide credible information as soon as it's available. That's the one thing the deep state can't do.

Why Did Crooks's Parents Report Him Missing Before The Rally?

Fox News: Thomas Crooks’ parents were looking for him on Saturday in the hours leading up to the rally...Called law enforcement to indicate that he was missing...call happened on Saturday before Crooks later opened fire... pic.twitter.com/EblJ9am07L

— Rantingly.com (@rantinglydotcom) July 17, 2024

Almost anything we might surmise, at least so far, about the Trump assassination attempt last Saturday has to be heavily hedged. The organs of state security are saying very little, and what they say is contradictory and often retracted days after it's said. But subject to that caveat, one data point stands out for me via the tweet above, the report that Crooks's parents were looking for him and had gone so far as to report him missing before the Butler rally Saturday afternoon.

A few people responded in the thread below the post that this seems pretty unusual -- Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20 years old, and although he was a little strange, he wasn't the sort of at-risk person you'd report missing as soon as you lost track of him, as you might with a toddler or an elderly person with dementia. This can only suggest to me that his parents had serious reason to wonder what he was up to. Per the timeline of events at ABC News,

On the day of the assassination attempt, he asked if he could borrow his father's AR-15-style rifle, saying he planned to go to a shooting range, sources said. Because Crooks' father had previously let him use the gun for target shooting, he was not suspicious that his son was planning anything of concern.

Really? If this was totally routine, how come they got antsy when he wasn't back by mid-afternoon? Normally if a 20-year-old is a couple hours late getting home on a Saturday, that's not a biggie. He had a phone, after all, and his parents could simply have called him for an update. Something's hinky here, as though his parents had reason to be more worried than they've let on. One of Crooks's schoolmates, Vincent Taormina, offers potential insight:

According to him, Crooks belonged to a group of friends who were known for their reclusive behavior and irregular attendance at school. The group allegedly made threats to carry out a school shooting during their freshman year.

“Everybody was saying it was Thomas who made a threat, and it was that friend group,” Taormina recalled. “Everyone was mainly blaming the friend group, but a name that kept coming up was Thomas.”

Despite these allegations and his absence from school for a few days following the incident, no severe disciplinary action was taken against Crooks. Taormina stressed that Crooks wasn’t a victim of severe bullying and questioned how the signs of his erratic behavior were overlooked by those around him, including his parents, who were both counselors.

“The signs were there, and somebody definitely had to look out,” Taormina said. “Somebody, whether he was talking to somebody, or somebody either just didn’t realize and just overlooked it, somebody should have known because he was not a loner.”

It sounds like somebody needs to take a closer look at that incident. This may also provide context for the earlier report that he was asked not to join his high school rifle team:

“Our old coach was a stickler, he trained Navy marksmen, so he knew people. He knew when someone’s not the greatest person,” the ex-classmate explained.

“We noticed a few things Thomas said and how he interacted with other people … He said some things that were kind of concerning,” the classmate said.

“You know, obviously, we’re using guns in a school setting, so you need to be very careful in that regard.”

“He made some crass jokes that weren’t appropriate when there are firearms in the school setting,” they said, without elaborating on what exactly Crooks said.

It sounds like somebody needs to follow up here, too, because it sounds like there were real warning signs about this guy. But adding to that question is the fact that both Crooks's parents were mental health counselors:

Among the swirling unanswered questions about what drove a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man to very nearly kill the former and potentially future president last weekend, focus has turned to the parents of the would-be assassin — both of whom are licensed professional counselors, according to the Pennsylvania Social Work Board.

Matthew Brian Crooks and Mary Elizabeth Crooks, residents of Bethel Park, Penn., hold active licenses as professional social workers. Records from the Pennsylvania Licensing Verification Service indicate that both have been licensed since 2002, with Mary obtaining her license in February and Matthew in March of that year. Their licenses remain valid until February 2025.

It's hard to avoid thinking that they knew enough about Crooks suddenly to become very worried when he didn't come home from the rifle range. It also raises questions about what the school knew and why, according to reports, there were no disciplinary records of the freshman-year threats to shoot up the school

But this in turn provides little conclusive information on Crooks's precise motive or whether he acted alone. According to the most recent reports,

Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had two cell phones and used three encrypted accounts overseas to communicate.

The FBI found Crooks’ second cell phone at his home with only 27 contacts, The Daily Mail reported.

Congressman Mike Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters that according to an FBI briefing, Crooks had multiple encrypted accounts and said more will come out Monday.

The caveat at the top of this post applies.

Tucker: "It's Not Crazy To Think That. . . It Wasn't Just A Lone Gunman"

Tucker says this at about 8:00 in the video above, but he simply isn't the only one. To think this might even be an inside job is, frankly, against ordinary charity, against ordinary decorum in publc discourse, and against ordinary restraint -- but people are starting to come out and say it. The FBI investigation, which Joe says will be "thorough and swift", so far has been neither. But every day the loose ends go untied leads to more speculation, and the deep state is simply digging a hole for itself when it allows people like Secret Service Director Cheatle to set the tone:

As the head of the agency, Cheatle said it's her responsibility to investigate what went wrong and make sure nothing like it can happen again.

"The buck stops with me," she said. "I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary."

Cheatle responded to reports that the suspect was seen and identified as potentially suspicious before he opened fire, saying that "a very short period of time" passed between then and the shooting.

Except that in his remarks Sunday afternoon, Joe strongly inplied that the FBI would be the lead agency investigating what happened: "Let the FBI do their job and their partner agencies do their job." Yet Director Cheatle seems to think her job is to investigate her own agency.

What's puzzling is that so many people with experience both in the Secret Service and working as snipers have been claiming something's hinky. For instance:

Dallas Alexander, who spent 14 years in a sniper team for the Canadian military doing close protection for major world leaders including the Canadian prime minister, suggested in a video Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who opened fire at the former president's rally Saturday night, may have had help from the inside.

'I'm very familiar with the layout of these types of things and what the job should be, and yesterday what happened,' he said.

'I have no doubts in my mind that the shooter had help from somewhere within an agency, an organization or the government.'

. . . 'So something happened, and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. It's just too obvious that this guy had help getting there.

'So whether it's someone turned a blind eye or it was strategically planned, it had to be planned to a certain level, because events like that, security like that, it's not a small thing - and that is an obvious place to be.'

But although Director Cheatle claims "a very short period of time" passed between the time Crooks was spotted and the shooting began, that time span keeps expanding:

Channel 11′s Nicole Ford confirmed that Beaver County’s ESU team had eight members at the rally, including snipers and spotters. According to Ford’s sources, one of them noticed a suspicious man on a roof near the rally at 5:45 p.m., called it in and took a picture of the person. We have learned from our sources the person in that picture is Thomas Crooks. We’re told it’s not clear if Crooks had a gun with him at that point.

ccording to multiple sources, a law enforcement officer had also previously seen Crooks on the ground and called him in as a suspicious person with a picture prior to 5:45 p.m. Our sources tell us an officer checked the grounds for Crooks at that point, but did not see him where the first picture was taken.

It shouldn't be that difficult to get hold of the tapes from the command center that received the call and determine who said what to whom, or didn't. So far, we've heard nothing further. But beyond that is the problem that the Secret Service snipers on the roof above the Trump rally stage appear to have been aware of Crooks on the building roof before he shot:

Televised pictures of snipers behind the stage where Trump had begun to speak appeared to be looking in the direction of the sloped-roof building just as Trump began to speak.

Why they didn't fire before Crooks ever had a chance to aim at Trump let alone open fire also baffles [retired police niper Jim] Scanlon.

"You wonder if they saw the threat and hesitated," Scanlon said. "But the real failure comes with not having someone on that roof. From 130 yards away, you have to own that roof.

"I have never been on a detail where that possibly could have happened."

The report that Crooks was lurking around the site with a range finder adds yet another question to my own list. On one hand, the report that he had a gun club membership with a firing range for AR type rifles is one explanation for how he improved his marksmanship from the time he was a "comically" bad shot in high school -- but at a firing range, you don't need a range finder. This is the sort of stuff you learn at sniper school, not at the gun club.

Although the FBI was finally able to crack the advanced security on Crooks's phone, this story says it revealed nothing:

The Bethel Park High School graduate’s phone yielded little evidence, and even his laptop showed typical online activities, including an interest in gaming and coding, CNN said.

Matthew Crooks — who called the police sometime Saturday to report his son and his gun missing — and the shooter’s mother have cooperated with law enforcement, sources said.

How could Crooks's parents have been so clueless about his activities? On one hand, OK, he and his dad liked to shoot at the gun club, but you use range finders to hunt big game in the wilderness, or, of course, as a sniper. Did dad know anything about the range finder? Where did Crooks learn to use it, and from whom? How was he so well informed about where to scout a sniper's perch?

So far, these questions aren't being dealt with. Again, as someone who's worked in the crisis management and contingency planning field, I know that it's important to have a single, credible, and knowlegeable spokesman to serve as a point of media contact to provide just such answers. One of the best examples is James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation into the explosion of TWA Flight 800 and also served as its chief spokesman.

Although the investigation was surrounded by controversy, and there are other continuing theories concerning the flight, Kallstrom is a good example of how any such event should be handled, and in his role, Kallstrom gained a reputation as a man of openness and integrity. The impression of integirty he projected at the time probably increased public confidence in the investigation's conclusion that the accident was neither a terrorist attack nor an errant missile.

So far, no figure equivalent to Kallstrom has emerged in the Butler investigation, which is yet another failure among the responding agencies. In fact, nobody at the FBI or the Secret Service seems yet to have recognized they have a crisis on their hands that is, if anything, more serious than TWA 800, and nobody has yet recognized that a Kallstrom (who passed away in 2021) is what they need. On the other hand, I get the feelinmg that a James Kallstrom would not be welcome in today's FBI.

“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.