The attempted assassination of Donald Trump

The USA dodged a bullet Saturday evening, even as one whistled through the right ear of former President Donald Trump. We should all thank God for sparing Trump's life and the sparing America the upheaval that would have followed his death at the hands of an assassin. We pray that God would comfort the family of Corey Comperatore, the fire chief in the stands who was killed by another shot from the terrorist.

The Left has used the term "stochastic terrorism" to denounce the exposés of Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) and Christopher Rufo or the comments of State Superintendent Ryan Walters. The argument is that by simply calling attention to the outrageous comments of public school teachers and administrators, they are seeking to inspire some unbalanced person to attack them physically. There's no record that this has ever occurred, but some folks who are careless with their social media posts have been outed as the sort of people who ought not to be teaching Oklahoma school children and are happily no longer employed in that capacity.

The Left's treatment of Trump is a different matter. Not content to call attention to his outrageous statements and actions, prominent voices on the Left speak about Trump as an unparalleled existential threat to democracy, going so far as to depict Trump as Hitler's reincarnation on the cover of The New Republic. Joe Biden himself spoke of putting a bullseye on Trump just a few days before the assassination attempt. If you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler before he came to power, wouldn't you?

There are a lot of questions being raised about the security arrangements at the venue. Why was Trump being guarded by women a whole head shorter than him? Why did law enforcement ignore people in the crowd who spotted a guy on the roof? Why was a building just 120 yards from the stage apparently outside the security perimeter? Rather rehash other people's analyses, I will link them here:

X (Twitter) user MilkBarTV put together, in a single video, eyewitness videos from different angles, correlated by the audio of Trump's speech heard in each, covering the two minutes before shots were fired and the two-and-a-half minutes that followed. (Direct link here.)

???? Watch the real time assassination attempt on Trump from different angles. With countdown from footage of people warning authorities about the shooter to Trump being whisked away. pic.twitter.com/iJTbRNlCEw

— MilkBarTV (@TheMilkBarTV) July 15, 2024

Sean Davis, The Federalist: Biden's Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump's Security to Allow an Assassination Attempt:

They deliberately starved Trump's security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.

With Trump's security detail understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits, Biden's security regime reportedly diverted even more resources to a hastily planned Jill Biden event that just happened to be in the area.

Biden's security regime then ordered the most obvious assassination perch in the entire area to remain outside the main security perimeter.

Furthermore, Biden's Secret Service director ordered law enforcement and counter-snipers OFF the roof the assassin used.

If that weren't enough, Biden's security regime also refused to block the line of sight from the assassin's perch to Trump's location. When law enforcement radioed in a suspicious person using a laser range finder at the building and even took photos of him, nothing was done to detain the assassin.

The assassin was so obviously a threat that bystanders at the event begged law enforcement to stop him, but nothing happened. And even as snipers on the roof near Trump saw a gunman on the other roof, Biden's security regime refused to have agents immediately surround Trump or remove him from the stage to protect him from being shot....

They called him Hitler. They said he was an existential threat. They said he would destroy democracy. They said he was the most dangerous person on Earth. Then they denied him security. They kept the rooftop open. They watched the shooter and did nothing. They kept Trump on that stage. And they didn't do a damn thing until after he had been shot in the head.

And we're all supposed to believe it was just an innocent oopsie?

Naomi Wolf: "Lady MacBiden": Wolf was married to a Clinton White House speechwriter, was an advisor to Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's chief campaign advisor in 1996, and was a campaign advisor to Al Gore in his 2000 campaign, which leads to her questions about the choice by Jill Biden's team to hold an event in the same region of Pennsylvania at the same time as Trump's speech, stretching Secret Service resources thin. In Wolf's experience, nothing involving the President or First Lady happens spontaneously or casually. Her current husband, Brian O'Shea, served in military intelligence and private security, and included in this article is a video conversation discussing ten major security practice anomalies that he identified.

A destabilized, desperate First Lady could -- theoretically could, don't sue me -- imagine that she might, via her staff, direct all of the able, experienced Secret Service agents; all the tall secret service agents; to her own event, and to the Vice President's; and that she could thus leave her rival physically exposed in Butler PA; and that she could get away with it.

In a POTUS or FLOTUS office, everything is about "deniability". Directions are put on paper as rarely as possible. No one would ever say directly, in 2001, in a Bush Jr. White House, "Don't follow up on warnings about a terrorist attack"; just as no one would ever say directly, in a Biden White House, "Hey, leave a security vulnerability open for President Trump's event in Butler PA."

The outcome that leadership wishes, if it is a bad one, is usually inferred by those around "the Principal", by reading between the lines. The communication tenor is much more like England's King Henry II's line: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"...

"[S}everal knights [...] took Henry II's outburst--"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"--to mean that the king wanted Becket dead. They murdered Becket near the altar of Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170."

There has been historic reluctance to challenge any First Lady.

But someone made the decision to surround President Trump with tiny female Secret Service agents, at least one of whom cowered behind him while he was being shot at, and who appeared later not to know how to manage her holster.

All this happened when who knows how many tall, strong, experienced Secret Service agents were just 54 minutes away.

Someone made sure to arrange to be short of a third counter-sniper team; someone made sure to fail to secure a building 130 meters away from the speaker. Someone is directing SS director Cheatle to give nonsensical answers (this is itself a message, about impunity). Most chillingly, to me, is that someone directed a guard in military uniform to point his rifle directly at the van with a wounded Pres. Trump in it, before raising it again.

Dr. Robert Malone has featured a couple of guest posts from a Substack writer with the handle ArnGrimR:

Trump assassination attempt: separating fact from fiction: A careful analysis with maps and photos. ArnGrimR believes that the countersnipers failed to deal with the threat on the roof before he could shoot at Trump because their view was blocked by a tree:

Figuring out the position of the assassin, shows something very remarkable: both sniper teams could not see the assassin, because a tree was in the way. (Look back up, two pictures, the one with the cranes and the bleachers: see the tree, and how it is widest roughly at the height where the shooter would have been?) The shooter, however, had an unrestricted view on the podium, wherever on the roof he would have positioned himself (see dotted red line from edge roof). This explains the fact that neither sniper team did anything. They couldn't do anything, as they didn't see anything.

One of the videos of the rally goers that showed the shooter on the roof gives another important clue: about 19 seconds in, you hear a man yell "He's turning this way!" followed almost immediately with a final 'pop', with a different sound than the previous pops. As the assassin crawled to his right, likely to get a better view of Trump, a new angle away from the Secret Service agents covering him, away from the boom of the first forklift with the speaker array, the counter-sniper team finally got a bead on him, and immediately took the shot. Incredible shooting!

In a follow-up, ArnGrimR considers speculation that another shooter was located on the water tower: He looks at photos and angles and concludes that the shots claimed to be from the water tower make more sense from the known shooter position on the roof.

Another Substacker, El Gato Malo, applies Hanlon's Razor and, drawing on a former Secret Service agent's comments, comes down on the side of incompetence. (Tim McMillan's thread is captured here.)

But Florida Congressman Cory Mills, who served as a sniper in the Army, raised some interesting questions during an interview on CNN.

I've done thousands of advances. I've done thousands of counter-sniper operations with our teams in you know, Iraq and Afghanistan, et cetera. The amount of negligence, the amount of mistakes that were made here, I have a very difficult time not being myself towards this was intentional as opposed to fecklessness....

My point is this, from the perspective of someone who has actually conducted these, these are not difficult advances. This is not like I'm putting together a stage placement in a tight shot. This is about looking at your surroundings. What is my green, yellow, and red route, which is your routes out, in case. What is my actual elements that I need to be looking at as far as mitigating threats or risks or increased levels. Where's my range fan for the sniper that says okay, here's my 100, my 200, my sketch. Here's an area where someone could shoot here....

My point is that this was too easy of a solution. I'm uncomfortable with even having to say it. Trust me, my whole point is that I would like to look at this and say, "Where was the mistake made? How can we correct it in the future? Why was this actually done?"

But I think that this does warrant a J-13 type of commission where we can actually look at it and say, let's investigate and find out why this happened. So it doesn't happen again. This is not about a political thing. This is about we had an attempt to assassinate a president. We really need to understand what a serious matter. And this was a milliseconds or millimeter difference between this being an attempt, and this being an assassination.

And I can tell you at 160 yards... I am a person of faith. I can't explain one. I hope that it was a corrugated roof and maybe he slipped off on one of the edges of the corrugated roof or he was rushed, but this -- the whole thing just needs to have a better explanation so that the American people and everyone can feel comfortable.

UPDATE: Anonymous special operations experts with apparent access to Secret Service data tell Blaze News that the shot that killed Thomas Matthew Crooks did not come from the visible countersnipers stationed behind the stage, but from almost 450 yards away.

Evidence of the 448-yard shot was submitted to the U.S. Secret Service shortly after Crooks was killed, according to two elite experts who have frequently served in security missions globally. They are often called on to train snipers for the Secret Service, SWAT, and sniper teams at many federal agencies and tactical teams at state and local law enforcement agencies.

The sources expressed a firm belief that the much closer snipers stationed about 150 yards away just behind the speaker's platform did not kill Crooks. When Crooks fired his first shot at Trump, one of those snipers visibly flinched, took his eye from the scope, and raised his head. When he returned to the rifle, the barrel was aimed too low for the trajectory needed to hit the gunman.

Those actions, the experts said, are indicative of what they consider a "B-team" or even "C-team" sniper. Top-tier "A-team" operators don't flinch at the sound of a rifle's report, they said.

The two snipers on the barn behind Trump appeared to be using .308 caliber Remington model 700 bolt-action variants, according to a special operations source who spoke exclusively with Blaze News.

Those are not the types of rifles used by the Secret Service A-team snipers. For normal operations, Secret Service snipers use semi-automatic .308 rifles such as the Knights Armament Co. SR-25 or a high-quality AR-10 variant that has interchangeability with the SR-25. For long-range operations, they use bolt-action .338 Lapua Magnum rifles, the source said.

The sources, speaking anonymously because they are not part of the official shooting investigation, showed Blaze News visual evidence, including telemetry data from the sniper's rifle, indicating the distance and the 10 mph wind blowing at the time of the shot....

Crooks suffered at least three gunshot wounds after he opened fire on President Trump and the surrounding crowd, according to a Blaze News source with direct knowledge of tactical operations at the Butler site.

The source said a SWAT team based in Butler County cleared the inside of the building on which Crooks was perched when he fired his rifle. Contrary to a statement issued by Cheatle, there were no Secret Service or other law enforcement officers inside the building, according to the same source.

MORE: Pittsburgh-based political reporter Salena Zito was there, standing next to the stage, and describes the mood before the rally and after the shots were fired:

I was four feet from the stage, in a causeway with about five other journalists. My daughter, a photographer, was next to me. Her husband was next to her....

Some people in the crowd might have thought they heard fireworks. But I knew exactly what it was. I own a gun.

I looked up at the president. He touched his ear. I was shocked to see blood on his face. A smear of red across his cheek.

Suddenly, he was surrounded. Everyone went down.

My daughter hit the ground. My son-in-law lay on top of her. I threw my body next to theirs. Immediately, a security officer was on top of me.

"ARE YOU OKAY? ARE YOU OKAY?" he asked....

I've since seen videos of what happened. People were screaming. But all I remember hearing was an eerie silence. With that kind of crowd, you'd expect pandemonium, a stampede. But I never had a sense of chaos....

I'm still in shock. I can't make sense of any of it right now. As a journalist, you're always looking 360 degrees around you at all times--but for details, not for danger.

The whole thing was deeply disorienting. We've all seen enactments of this sort of violence--in movies or documentaries--but when you experience it, it doesn't happen that way. There's no soundtrack, no visual signposts. It's just unreal.

What's clear to me after today is that if someone is determined to commit an act of political violence, they will find a way.