The Surreal Aspects of the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump

If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.

Here's a rare day when I make two Substack posts. After what happened yesterday, I wanted to share what I've learned after spending a lot of time online.

Ever since the unsuccessful attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday, both the news media and social media have been discussing this nonstop.

Trump wasn't the first president or former president to face an assassin. The last time something like this happened was when John Hinckley unsuccessfully attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

But Trump's attempted assassination had a touch of the surreal as Trump reacted in a very bizarre way. The below video shows the shooting. The video begins with the shooting itself. Trump dives under the speaker podium and some Secret Service agents dive on top of Trump in an effort to protect him. You can hear screams from the audience. At about the one-minute mark Trump gets back up on his feet. The first thing he says is “Let me get my shoes,” which he repeats two more times. Then he says “Wait! Wait!” and he starts raising a fist and pumping it in the air. As he pumps his fist, starts saying “Fight! Fight!”

Here's why I thought it was so surreal. I'm old enough to remember the unsuccessful assassination attempts against Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. Each time the Secret Service agents swooped down on the president and they would take the president out of the public area as quickly as they can. The president never did any fist pumps or any thing like that.

That strange fist pumps by Donald Trump led to this photo, which has already become an iconic photo.

The bullet struck Trump’s ear but it looks like it was a grazing. Had the bullet actually gone into Trump's ears, the bullet would've struck Trump's brain and Trump would’ve died.

The 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, worked in a nursing home kitchen and was a registered Republican. (So much for all those accusations I read on social media claiming that Joe Biden's campaign or the Democratic National Committee was behind that shooting.) He was shot to death by a Secret Service sniper.

One member of the audience was shot dead by Crooks. His name was Corey Comperatore. While the news media is putting up quotes from friends and family about what a wonderful person he was, some people were going through Comperatore's old social media posts they found another side of the guy that the mainstream media is ignoring. Apparently he was an antivaxxer who was also a fan of drinking unpasteurized milk, and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He favored legislation legalizing running over bicyclists and he wanted the US to stop funding Ukraine and send all of the illegal immigrants to that war-torn country to fight.

With beliefs like those, it's no wonder he went to that rally. While I'm not going to say that he deserved it, it does show the how dangerous it has become to follow Donald Trump. For years Trump has used violent rhetoric in his rallies and had never faced the consequences of what he said. Karma finally decided to strike back for once.

If Trump was smart, he would use that incident to do some serious soul searching and begin to realize that using violent rhetoric on the campaign trail has led serious consequences that could have killed him. But Trump is too much of a narcissist to ever do anything like that. He'll just continue to blame others for bad things happening to him just like he has been doing for years.

Today, just one day after that shooting, he went to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey where he had reportedly gone golfing. If I was in that situation, I would be staying indoors reading publications, watching television, and basically be a couch potato. There is no way I would ever feel up to playing golf or any other type of outdoor activities.

The responses to that incident on social media is crazy. Congressman Mike Collins has accused Joe Biden of being behind that assassination attempt.

A couple of months ago I wrote about pro-Kremlin propagandists living outside of the United States who pretend to be Americans as they spew their garbage on Twitter/X. One of them is a Malaysian named Ian Miles Cheong who had long pretended to be an American even though he has never stepped foot anywhere in the United States. He made this tweet where he said, “I am one million percent behind Trump now. We are at war. This was the first shot.”

He may be behind Trump but, as a Malaysian citizen, he won't be able to vote for Trump in November. And he's doing all this bloviating about a “war” even though he's currently living in Malaysia. He needs to get a hobby or do something other than pretending to be an American on Twitter/X.

It gets even better. Some Kremlin propagandists are trying to convince people that the shooter is a Ukrainian named “Semen Hydenko” while providing fake evidence, such as a forged identity card or drivers license.

The bottom line is that the shooter is really Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican who was shot dead by a Secret Service agent. It'll probably take a while to figure out that guy's motive for trying to kill Trump. In the meantime it's going to be a very bumpy drama-filled road to the election in November.

My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription. Click on the button below for more details.