Making sense of the information chaos surrounding the failed assassination attempt of Trump

Helpful context and organization for assessing the assassination attempt and the aftermath

A friend from across the pond asked me to how to assess the failed assassination attempt of President Trump, and thought the response worthy of a substack post. Since almost half of my subs are from outside the US, and even for people inside the US the information firehose is very chaotic, I figured it worthwhile to reproduce here.

The point of this article is not to delve into the details of the actual event, nor to highlight the insidious, Orwellian and frankly evil nature of how the media and many politicians/pundits attempted to spin this. There are an endless array of other sources one can easily access especially through Twitter/X and adding another article to the burgeoning cavalcade of what is now mostly repetitive pieces regurgitating the same series of observations adds no value to anyone. That there was a shocking and profound failure of security for the rally is anyways an unimpeachably established fact at this point, something that has been already widely covered in the public domain from every conceivable angle. (The rest of the explanation of the objectives of this article is at the end of the article.)

I. Relating to assassination attempt itself

The following points are all in themselves uncontroversial as a factual matter, and materially relevant to assessing the collapse of security at the rally:

1) The entire federal govt bureaucracy has been rotted out with numerous DEI hires across all levels of all agencies, including protective service depts and intel. This is also true on a state level, although the extent and impact depends on the state, and I can't tell you which states are worse than others (California seems a good bet to be bottom 5 at least).

So undoubtedly a substantial % of the personnel responsible for security lack the proper qualifications and competency for the jobs they are doing.

This is aptly personified by the images of the female Secret Service agents on Trump's protection detail - one was clearly not tall enough to shield him (a must for agents on the protection detail); one could be seen fumbling around attempting to reholster her weapon; and a third was visibly flustered and unsure of what to do.

2) The bureaucratic regulations and policies are a product of the same DEI conventions and philosophy that governs personnel choices. Rules of Engagement for using force in woke doctrine can't even be properly conveyed with the word 'insane' (this actually goes back all the way to the Vietnam War).

To both of these points, consider the numerous “minor” Secret Service screwups over the past decade where they allowed threats to percolate and advance far more than is reasonable, that they could have shut down at the onset by the immediate and appropriate use of force. Think of the White House riot in 2020 where they allowed it to build up to the point they evacuated Trump to the bunker out of caution, or the miscreants who managed to penetrate the outer security perimeter of the White House.

The general incompetence of the Secret Service has also been a longstanding issue since Obama’s tenure.

Anyone remember the unvetted fellow who ended up on an elevator with then-president Obama *WITH A GUN* who was (for real) a “security contractor with three prior convictions for assault and battery”?

Or the time someone managed to “park his car on a street near the White House (on a night Obama was staying there), fire a semiautomatic rifle multiple times and inflict damage on the president’s home, and then flee the scene”, and the Secret Service didn’t even realize this happened until *FOUR DAYS LATER*? This was such a profound lapse by the Secret Service it managed to elicit a scathing condemnation from even the Washington Post, which reported “[t]his reconstruction of the events of that night shows the confusion and lapses in security — never previously reported — amid an attack that the Secret Service failed to properly identify and investigate.” Um, what now??

Another policy point to keep in mind is that even though for example official policy permits preemptively shooting at a potential threat, an agent on the ground may fear that the politics of the situation mean that following correct protocols will result in his imprisonment and his life ruined, or in the case of a less serious infraction which could still be a career-ender under the critical gaze of a woke manager or political opportunist, and might be reluctant to proactively engage a potential threat.

DEI - and the woke/leftist culture more generally - also implicates value judgements both because of its ideology and because of the differences in the personnel.

A somewhat hyperbolic (for now) caricature of the former is ChatGPT’s insistence that in a hypothetical situation where a nuke was launched at a populated metropolis that could be deactivated only by broadcasting the N-word, it is immoral to do so, meaning the moral calculus is that the nuke otherwise killing millions of people does not justify broadcasting a racial epithet. While this cartoonish example is not a realistic scenario (yet), lesser degrees of such dysfunctional morality are. Woke value considerations are already dictating many decisions, policies and protocols, where technical soundness and reliability are being sacrificed on the altar of some progressive principle or diversity mandate.

Regarding personnel shaping values, an easy example that is not at all hypothetical are differences between men and women. For instance, women are generally more risk averse and prone to ‘safetyism’ than men. So what happens when a traditionally male dominated enterprise is flooded with female managers and personnel? This is not a criticism of women. Some things by their nature require a higher risk tolerance, aggressiveness, and other masculine characteristics - such as security and protection services of high profile persons. But the reality is that there are differences that are relevant and affect the performance and effectiveness of an agency like the Secret Service.

A particular insidious influence of DEI on values and organizational management is the elimination of accountability. While a proper examination of this would require a lengthy article in its own right, we can make several generalized observations as to why this is (non-exclusive list).

Firstly, “DEI hires” by definition can’t be fired because that is inherently a form of repugnant discrimination/oppression within DEI epistemology.

Secondly, admitting that DEI hires or values led to bad outcomes concedes that DEI is a parasitical ideology foisted on society that drags down performance and leaves people worse off.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, replacing DEI polices or personnel within an organization weakens the woke control and hegemony over the organization. Possession of the institutions and organs of society is one of the key pillars of practical Marxist strategy to conquer and subjugate society, one which it is worth sacrificing everything about the organization in order to maintain if necessary. (Consider how they wrecked the expertise, functional capacity, and credibility of public health institutions like the CDC by their unrestricted promotion of things that were widely seen by the public as absurd or evil.¹)

The deleterious impact of a culture which instinctively eschews accountability as a mortal threat to its existence is hard to overstate. It fundamentally rejiggers the basic incentive structure facing employees and managers alike. Since this permeates all throughout an organization, its effects are additive as people at all levels are engage in hazardous behavior and decision-making where there are no consequences for doing so, until the organization becomes a corporate Swiss cheese riddled with DEI bullet holes.

3) We don’t know that this is the first functionally unsecured Trump event. It stands to reason there were similar security failures at previous Trump events, but nobody took advantage to attempt an assassination. If every Trump event lacks proper security, the law of probabilities submits that eventually the chickens will come home to roost. A prudent deliberate actor/s could therefore simply rely on this statistical near-guarantee that eventually someone will take advantage of the lackadaisical security.

4) It is necessarily true purely as an ironclad law of human nature that many of the thousands of personnel in government who are a part of what we’ll just call the ‘security apparatus’ (in the sense of being relevant to some aspect of the provision of security) are apathetic to their job, especially as it relates to Trump. Imagine how you would feel about your job if your job involved providing security for Hitler. That’s quite literally what such an assignment is to many of the personnel who have been steadily indoctrinated over the past 10 years to believe that Trump is Hitler reincarnated. Even seasoned professionals are human and would not be immune to this. (And even those who don’t internalize the Hitler/Nazi comparisons still internalize a sense of Trump’s wickedness, danger to society, and most importantly the shared ubiquitous instinctive revulsion of Trump among the various cliques of ‘elites’ and other tribal leftist affiliations.)

Furthermore, a higher percentage of people in the government whose work relates to security are anti-woke, or at minimum are not woke themselves compared to other government workers or agencies. This is largely because security and the related fieldwork typically appeal to masculine instincts but not to liberal sensibilities, and that they are jobs where there is little margin for error so less room exists for free-wheeling implementation of DEI mandates over meritocracy and outcome-oriented decisions and policies. The SJW-types / DEI hires in these agencies inevitably are more prone to feel “unsafe” and stressed out because they have to be around and interact with “hostile” people and work environments (to them anyway). This also leads to apathy about the job, and in the case of employees feeling resentful against their employment also tends to breed animosity and a greater willingness to proactively sabotage the objects of their resentment.

Moreover, as mentioned above, a fundamental tenet of modern practical Marxist doctrine is the conscription and redirection of every agency, organization and institution into espousing and championing woke virtues and ideology combined with the relegation of the core mission of the agency as secondary importance to implementing woke principles on society. Usually this also involves repurposing the specific work that is the raison d'etre of an organization’s existence into promoting the woke principles (e.g. the CDC using public health as a vehicle to push CRT or gun control by framing racism and gun violence as a public health crisis). An inevitable consequence of this is that people care less, or not at all, about the core functions of the organization or agency.

Apathy breeds shoddy work, inattentiveness to detail, complacency, emotional divestment, and laziness (among other negative work traits).

5) An unappreciated aspect of human nature - especially these days - is that people are very susceptible to their own propaganda. Literally. If you constantly proclaim or listen to a blatantly delusional idea, you will begin to internalize it until you come to truly believe it. We’ll highlight a couple of examples to illustrate the point.

First off, and an easy target in light of the widely observed morbidly comical deficiencies of the female Secret Service agents on Trump’s protection detail, it is hard to overstate how much woke propaganda that ‘anything a man can do a woman can do just as well’ has saturated the culture especially on the left. Inevitably, many if not most of the people living within this bubble imbibing a constant stream of “Mary Sue” “girl boss” clichés cannot help but to internalize this masculinized muscled up version of women at least to some degree (obviously different people internalize things differently and to different extents). So we can confidently assume that for at least some of the folks in the federal govt, a part of them actually thinks that female agents are just as capable as male agents (yes this is even as these same people also water down the standards for women in order to increase female recruitment, which is a massive contradiction).

Woke propaganda about the inherent virtues of a ‘diverse’ workforce has likewise saturated the culture to the point that there are bound to be plenty of genuine adherents to this principle. (This idea has become so hardwired into the woke weltanschauung that the lawyers defending the colleges racially discriminatory admission practices explicitly invoked it during oral arguments before the Supreme Court.)

To be clear, this is not to say that someone who falls for the relentless propaganda about these topics (or any other propagandized topic) cannot also be a deliberate malicious actor, nor even that they cannot simultaneously appreciate that “hey if we assign a bunch of women to Trump’s detail that will mean weaker security”. On the contrary, people are very much capable of holding and acting on multiple irreconcilable beliefs or ideas simultaneously. I’m simply highlighting that many people buy into their own propaganda (especially when they’ve been exposed to some version of it throughout their formative years being indoctrinated in the education system).

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These five points can be summed up as ‘DEI weaponization of incompetence’ into a nuclear level threat - this sort of institutionalized malignant incompetence has a limitless capacity to destroy or ruin everything it touches, so it is not a possibility that can be lightly dismissed.

6) A substantial portion of the federal govt workforce - including the agencies tasked with intel, security, and protective services - fantasize about Trump’s death, and some actually harbor a genuine desire to for his death (such as this compilation of thugs dug up by Libs of TikTok). This can be seen by the numerous govt personnel (elected officials, their staff, and govt employees) who posted on social media some version of "darn he missed" in the hours following the rally. This is also something which can be seen from the endless trove of similarly aspirational social media posts over the past 8-9 years prior to Saturday.

The FBI and intel agencies are notoriously among the worst government agencies exhibiting an exceptionally blatant and shocking degree of outright weaponization against Trump and people who oppose leftist/woke ideology or policies. This includes the brainwashing and self-sorting that keeps contrarian or dissenting political views out while radicalizing those who remain in these agencies to think of political dissent as treasonous and a “danger to Democracy”. The recent slide from a Fort Liberty military base ‘sensitivity training’ labelling pro-life organizations as literal domestic terrorists is a good example:

7) The level of rhetoric against Trump for the past 8 years - especially combined with the general support for violence and riots by the Democrats/left/woke brigade - means that a substantial portion of the Democrat/leftwing base has been propagandized to truly and sincerely believe that Trump is literally the next coming of Hitler. Thus there are literally millions of people radicalized to accept violence as legitimate "resistance" against the new 'Fuhrer'. If even 0.1% have the type of personality that is disposed to acting on ideological approbative violence, that amounts to tens of thousands of potential assassins walking around. So it is plausible both that a lone wolf type would try something like this independently, and that people in power aware that they already have an army of potential assassins could subtly alter security protocols or take other actions (such as a strategic personnel replacement at a critical juncture) that simply raises the likelihood of one of them successfully prosecuting an assassination, and need not do anything glaringly overt to accomplish this.

8) If Trump were to be assassinated, the guaranteed ensuing chaos would provide the necessary pretext for the left to (try to) impose draconian marshal law where they could attempt mass gun confiscation, summary arrests of high profile personalities deemed "dangerous", etc. So there undeniably exists political incentive for this to happen. This is true even though there also exists plenty of political incentives to avoid such a political earthquake. The question is who faces what balance of incentives - something that varies widely from person to person depending upon a whole host of factors.

9) The following actions/policies were all already implemented prior to Saturday that all aimed to restrict the degree of security provided to Trump or RFK:

• (a) Biden admin (still) denied RFK Secret Service protection despite his obvious prominence, ongoing threat level to RFK, and the uncontested tradition of far less relevant candidates receiving Secret Service protection

• (b) Trump's team had asked for his security package to be beefed up but the Secret Service refused

• (c) Democrats in Congress filed legislation to strip Trump of his secret service detail altogether (under the pretext of his being a felon).

All the above points taken together suggest that there is not only a desire but the will to diminish Trump's security that was acted upon at least to some extent. It is incontrovertible that the importance of Trump’s personal security was as a practical matter politically toxic and under real pressure to be kept to a minimum.

Additionally, there was already a precedent for reducing security ahead of an event where the necessity of enhanced security is self-evident in the ‘Trump era’: the rejection of Trump’s offer for 10,000 national guardsmen for January 6.

II. Relating to the investigation

1) The FBI for now is the lead agency tasked with "investigating" the assassination attempt. 'Weaponization' isn't sufficient to capture the extent of the woke infestation and partisan capture of the agency - the FBI is basically a Stasi without the torture chambers. So you can bet that this investigation will maximally conform to political control and necessity, facts be damned.

Moreover, even those who aren’t militant apostles of woke ideology nevertheless still identify with or at least feel somewhat partial to the perpetrator here. This in itself is a major bias that would be acutely manifest in the findings and whatever reports are ultimately issued.

2) All social media of the alleged shooter have been completely scrubbed from the internet, so the cover up is already in full force.

3) Although the uniquely high profile and importance of this case might force authorities to reveal more than they would like, the Vegas shooter offers an instructive case study demonstrating that they can lockdown information and investigation results as hard as they locked down the whole of society for covid. Of note is that the FBI in particular has been ruthless in destroying the lives of internal whistleblowers, so even if there are well-intentioned people on the inside, it is a very good possibility that they would choose to not come forward or leak information.

4) Republicans in Congress are at best functionally useless and often have conspired with Democrats in the House to pass abominations funding all of the tyranny, abuses, weaponization, wokeness and general insanity of the Biden regime for over 18 months. It is far from certain (charitable framing) that Republicans in the House will be willing to use actual leverage to compel forthrightness or transparency from the federal government regarding this investigation.

III. Political Consequences / Impact

This section is inherently more speculative. However, it is useful to raise awareness of oft-ignored aspects of the political system that play a tangible role in shaping political outcomes.

1) Trump will get a boost from a "sympathy vote" (this description is a bit of a misnomer because it encompasses multiple distinct types of voters who are animated by different emotions and logic but conveys the basic idea)

2) The image of Trump is probably going to be one of the defining iconic images and political moments of this century. Besides for the intrinsic power and allure of the photos of Trump standing tall, bloody and defiant - people naturally gravitate to boldness and courage in a leader - the fact that it is already widely presumed that it will be one of the most iconic political moments itself exudes a mystique that people innately want to feel like they were a part of, which means more people voting for Trump on the margins. Additionally, the contrast of Trump's defiance and courage in the face of death with Biden's feeble disposition and cognitive dementia will also likely be a powerful influence in favor of Trump - Trump took a live bullet better than Biden can take a live question. Ouch.

3) That said, it is still far from certain that he wins in November:

(a) Democrats already had a massive election operation that can generate a few million 'excess' votes that are illegitimate. This edge has been enhanced to some degree by adding some portion of the ~10,000,000 new illegal aliens to voter rolls. (It is not important that the illegals themselves vote, just that they exist in the system and generate a ballot that will be mailed out to an address from where activists/organizers can collect them, fill them out and mail them back in (or put them in drop boxes).)

(b) The Democrat base will never vote for Trump or abandon Biden (or whomever is the nominee) in the face of an impending ‘Fourth Reich’. At best some may choose to sit out the election.

The GOP base however could also suffer a bit of a depressed turnout - even a small difference here can make a huge difference in election results not only for president but for the thousands of down ballot races across the country as well - because of Trump's adopting a series of leftist policies, such as jailbreak (let the criminals out of jail) or being openly pro-abortion (excluding the last trimester) / jettisoning the pro-life language and policy aspirations from the GOP platform and media. (I apologize to anyone offended by this critique, however it is true and is the sort of thing to overlook at your own peril.) On the other hand, some of the ‘anti-woke’/anti-far-left who might have voted for RFK or not at all might find a new willingness to vote for Trump because of the assassination attempt and the subsequent fallout.

(c) Republicans have been on a massive losing streak in actual elections, significantly underperforming both expectations and polling since 2020. This is especially peculiar and troubling because there has never been a political climate so toxic to the party in power, but it has (so far) failed to reverberate in electoral outcomes at all. It remains to be seen if this can fundamentally change the political climate.

(d) Four months is a lot of time for something equally unorthodox and unexpected to happen. I would not be surprised if there was at least an attempt on Biden’s life. The FBI already conceived, funded, organized and managed a faux attempt to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 in order to hurt Trump’s election prospects. So it certainly stands to reason that they would deploy this sort of entrapment scheme again to at least lessen the impact of the failed assassination of Trump by swooping in to prevent “in the nick of time” an assassination of Biden (or another prominent Democrat).

Any of these could reset the political environment in unpredictable ways.

4) The Democrats will definitely attempt an 'October surprise'. Their activists and antifa-Brownshirts are clearly willing to do anything to keep Trump out of office. So it's hard to predict the future. That said, there does seem to be a greater degree of immunity in the water table of the culture against spurious Democrat insinuations or faux-scandals targeting Trump or Republicans.

5) Democrats/DC establishment are presumably going to redirect some of their resources and energy into hardening the bureaucracy against a potential Trump victory, so that they can thwart personnel, policies and directives designed to purge or at least weaken the hold of woke ideology or personnel, mooting much of the victory of the election itself. This is something that if not appropriately managed threatens to render moot any attempts to purge wokeness out of government. Also critical to remember is that any anti-woke policies can be annulled as soon as they reclaim the White House.

(As a general matter, I don’t think people appreciate how daunting and severe the obstacles for a successful Trump second term are. Every policy and action will be enjoined and/or struck down by the lower federal courts, and SCOTUS will at best only partially pare back reckless judicial activism from the bench (see: first Trump term). Plus the savage propaganda and probably outright violence from the left in response to, say, a mass-deportation program will be like an unending tsunami of ‘resistance’. We will be treated to an unending stream of heartbreaking tragedies of emotional trauma, distress, cruelty etc that are the unavoidable byproduct of rounding people up and deporting them over the border, especially in the hands of pathological liars and sociopaths in the media who will distort, contort and weaponize every picture to look like literal concentration camp imagery. Which would in turn lead to a cratering in the currently broad population consensus for such a policy.

Then there’s the potential for ‘violent resistance’ - if they see they are losing policy-wise, the rational response (in their position) would be for instance to sabotage infrastructure (e.g. logistics for deportation, drilling rigs). And so on.

Additionally, it remains to be seen if Trump would actually implement his policy visions. His personnel choices during his first term were mostly disasters, and he had little if any control over the federal bureaucracy. Any action he takes to reign in and control the executive branch will be immediately challenged and enjoined by federal courts, where they will be bogged down for years as the various cases plod along indefinitely. The economy is likely to tip into a depression sooner or later - which will be an albatross around Trump’s neck - and the Fed will be more than happy to turn the screws during a Trump presidency. And so on. This is just a couple of examples of the obstacles and savagery a second Trump presidency would face.

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Objective of writing this article

The purpose of this article is to highlight and organize a series of relevant premises into a coherent structure that makes it easier to think through and analyze the myriad takes and hypotheses about the assassination attempt and its political significance. Obviously, I have no claim of special knowledge and could be just as wrong as the next guy. The value here is primarily in pointing out and organizing various premises/facts/history that are (1) widely acknowledged to be true; (2) are obviously relevant to the issues at hand; (3) incorporated by most people into their thinking without realizing it; (4) but also easy and likely to be overlooked at a conscious level; and (5) taken together help to organize and structuralize thinking about this matter. Thinking about something from the vantage of having a conscious awareness of concretized facts and premises is incomparably superior to muddling through relying on a quasi intellectual-emotional hybrid intuition that mushes all the various points into a blob that “feels” a certain way without having clarity about how all the pieces fit together. And it’s much more satisfying.

I am not asserting any conclusion or theory about the assassination attempt here, the point is to assist others (and myself) to reach their own conclusions.

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The central issues here - certainly those of critical importance - are:

1. The intent of the culpable/relevant actors involved (including *everyone* even marginally involved with designing and implementing security for Trump and other protectees of the Federal government)

2. The practical state and disposition of the various relevant governmental and social agencies/organizations.
   (For the record, much of the evils perpetrated by massive bureaucratic entities are the result of inertia holding in place decades of incremental changes that collectively add up to a seismic recalibration of an institution into an unrecognizable entity compared to e.g. 50 years ago (or these days sometimes even compared to 10 years ago). Basically the banality of incremental evils.)

1. This is not an endorsement of the CDC prior to being taken over by woke insanity, just an observation that the CDC was more capable of doing (and did) actual science stuff before its abject wokeification.