[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
It is unsettling to realize that the shocking assassination attempt on Donald Trump less than four weeks ago seems to have already faded into the distant past.
This shooting of a former President and current presidential candidate is an historic incident that should have sparked serious, bipartisan, national self-examination, and a demand for answers not only about the would-be assassin but about the jaw-dropping security lapses that facilitated the shooting. Instead, the mainstream media has managed to shift the focus of the news cycle to the ginning up of enthusiasm for the Democrat candidate, a hopelessly inept and disliked far-Left radical installed as candidate via an internal coup directed against the sitting President.
Meanwhile the purportedly bipartisan investigation into the July 13 assassination attempt continues to collide with bureaucratic stonewalling. This is not helping to allay widespread suspicion on the Right that the Democrat Party itself, desperate to derail the juggernaut of the Trump campaign, might have played some sort of role in the shooting.
As columnist Benjamin Weingarten put it on X:
It remains inexplicable how Secret Service could have failed so glaringly and in so many different ways — we’re just supposed to chalk it up to sheer incompetence and unpreparedness. Perhaps more notably, we know almost nothing about a shooter who profiles as the perfect patsy.
This is a massive, massive scandal that cannot be allowed to fade away.
Not only is it being allowed to fade away, but the news media is making sure Republican concerns are dismissed as conspiracy-mongering. On July 31 the New York Times complained that “Right-wing lawmakers and candidates have made baseless suggestions that the shooting was orchestrated by Democrats or government actors.” The article went on to accuse the Right of “trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories,” “promot[ing] groundless claims that suit their political narrative,” and “drawing unsubstantiated theories and grievance-driven suspicions once relegated to the right-wing fringe into the mainstream of their party.” Loaded language like “insinuated” (used five times) and “misinformation” (twice) hammered home the point. In fact, the Times and other left-wing outlets like The Washington Post have gone overboard trying to delegitimize such suspicions as fringe lunacy – which in itself suggests that the state media has something to hide.
The Left cites such examples as Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane, who told Glenn Beck, “I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but at the same time, I don’t want to, you know, rule anything out because I don’t put it past some of the people in our government to do anything necessary to hold on to power.” Considering the Left’s ruthless lust for power, Crane’s perspective seems more based than baseless.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance, too, stated last Saturday, “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that. So they tried to impeach him. They failed at that. So they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Vance did not specify the Democrat Party but from the context it’s clear he was referring to those who want Trump kept out of the Oval Office by any means necessary. These days the Democrat Party is practically defined by that mission.
Are Crane, Vance, and others merely “trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories”? Let’s take a brief, objective look at the Democrat Party’s messaging and actions regarding their arch-nemesis Trump prior to the shooting.
As FrontPage Mag contributor Lloyd Billingsley sums up in a forthcoming article, echoing Vance: “Democrats had previously attempted to imprison Trump, drive him into bankruptcy, and have his name removed from state ballots. The Democrats also compared Trump to Hitler, portrayed him as an existential threat to democracy, and attempted to deny him Secret Service protection.”
Then on July 8, President Joe Biden upped the ante by telling Democrat donors, “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” (Had Trump said something similar, the media would be apoplectic over his incitement to violence.) A mere five days later at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, a young gunman who somehow gained access to an unsecured rooftop with a direct line of sight to his target less than 150 yards away, got off eight shots – right under the noses of the Secret Service – that missed killing the Republican candidate by the thinnest of margins (and also, of course, killed a Trump supporter and seriously wounded two others).
The Secret Service response on the scene was so inept – right down to panicked female agents fumbling with their weapons and sunglasses – that outrage and stupefaction briefly reigned on Capitol Hill, eventually causing director Kimberly Cheatle to resign against her will. Cheatle is a left-wing ideologue whose self-professed focus at the Service was boosting the number of female agents. It later came to light that she also was behind the push to destroy the cocaine stash discovered in the White House last summer, apparently to suppress evidence that likely would have put Biden’s drug-abusing son Hunter at the center of another security scandal.
Cheatle is only one anti-Trump player, however, in the Deep State culture that seems to suffuse every government agency from the IRS to Homeland Security to the FBI, an organization Americans now distrust as having been politicized by the Biden regime against political opponents like parents protesting education policies. Up the chain of command is Homeland Security honcho and open borders enthusiast Alejandro Mayorkas, Cheatle’s boss; and of course, the buck ultimately stops with Joe Biden, who has done as much or more to publicly demonize Trump as anyone.
As a curious aside: a Chinese citizen was arrested a week ago after repeatedly trying to enter Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. The 38-year-old claimed he had documents tying the Chinese regime itself to the assassination attempt, although it’s unclear whether any were turned over to authorities. Perhaps the individual is just mentally unstable; but if he is telling the truth, then this adds a whole other layer of suspicion to the CCP-beholden Democrat Party’s possible malfeasance in the shooting. Why has there been no update?
In a recent episode of the Freedom Center podcast The Right Take with Mark Tapson, I asked pundit and author Kurt Schlichter whether the Secret Service assassination debacle resulted from ineptitude or malice, He pointed out that “there comes a point at which gross negligence is so grossly negligent that it effectively becomes indistinguishable from malice.” So, whether out of incompetence or malice, responsibility for the near-assassination of President Trump must be laid at the feet of the Democrat Party.
Why is Republican leadership not pressing this issue harder? The issue of the Democrat obsession with demonizing Trump as Hitler 2.0, fear-mongering about him as A Threat to Democracy™, and even inciting violence against him? If the situation were reversed and Joe Biden had been the target of a MAGA loyalist sniper, Democrats would have seized upon that and weaponized it relentlessly to crush the Republican Party’s chances in November, regardless of whether the Party had any connection to the shooting. Republican lawmakers need to push the investigation into the Trump shooting back to the forefront of the national conversation, demand transparency and answers, and blast the Left for creating the conditions in which an assassination attempt was inevitable, and for the leadership failures that allowed it to be carried out.
Again, we cannot allow the Left to bury this massive scandal; the country can and should only move forward after a committed Republican push ensures that the truth is brought to light for the American people, and the Democrat Party is held accountable.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior