Trump Assassination Attempt Megathread:

Please please please can we stop the conspiracy theories from blowing up in this thread? Can we not act like them?

Conspiracy theories aside, I'd like to see people mocking the injury with little red ear clips, just like these assholes mocked John Kerry with purple heart band-aids:
I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to think that the actor turned politician decided to act like he was getting shot for attention. He's a reality show host that says shocking things. I don't think it's a far stretch to say he would fake an assassination attempt when it's in every other movie in Hollywood. This is in his wheelhouse.
- NYT photographer got the photo of the bullet, it seems that TMZ's reporting that it was glass from the teleprompter is not correct:
  https://x.com/spectatorindex/status/1812293722832318726
- This is literally a conspiracy theory.
- So walk me through how that conversation goes in your head. Trump is just this side of senile, so he definitely couldn't have come up with a convoluted plot involving his attempted assassination, so it 100% would have had to be a suggestion of someone else. So let's walk through the conversation that must have happened for this to have been a fake assassination attempt.
  "So Mr. Trump, I think that the best thing to do to ensure you're going to win the next election is to have someone shoot very near you. Maybe the bullet will graze you, maybe it'll hit the teleprompter and send shards of glass your way. But either way, it'll be a very close thing, and you'll suffer a minor injury along the way."
  Do you honestly think that Donald Trump, the guy who got out of the draft because of bone spurs, the guy who gets queasy at the sight of blood, the guy who has spent the last 2 months talking about how he'd cling to a battery to get electrocuted instead of taking his chances with a shark, would be ok with being shot at? Seriously?
  Because if that's what you think, you and I don't occupy the same universe.
- There aren't sufficient words to describe the lack of intelligence in this comment.
- someone died, plus the shooter. At least one other attendee was injured.

Whelp... Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey's Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

Sonia Sotomayor's decision not to retire during Biden's term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.
We're going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.
Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump's, they're going to be brushed aside.
For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

Fucking vote
Democrats aren't just jumping ship over this bullshit. The actual voters, the people, not the talking heads, are pretty entrenched in Not Trump. Votes aren't changing over this, and the Democrats know what's at stake. At the end of the day there's more blue than red and it was an L for Trump as soon as he said he was running.
- And the end of the day I dont give a shit that he got shot. So did 50. Its not changing my vote. He's been calling for violence and got some. I worry this will cause more political violence.
- Votes aren't changing but the Trump voter was severely demoralized before this.
  Trump's debate performance was fucking awful. Yes, Democrats are worried about Biden for good reason, but Trump won no favors during the debate.
  This event has galvinized Trump and even given him a photo-op that makes it look/feel like he was ordained by God himself. I shit you not, that's what people will be praying for and seeing today now that its Sunday. If you know anything about conservatives, that's whats going through their head today on Sunday.
  With that, a lot of them will see it as their holy duty to vote Trump in November. Expect record turnout. We will need to do everything to drum up the anti-Trump vote now to keep up with them.
I always used to wonder how the Weimar Republic fumbled the ball so hard. Now I know.
Also, in Christian eschatology, isn't it a big deal that the Antichrist suffers a near fatal head injury before his ultimate victory?
- Also, in Christian eschatology, isn't it a big deal that the Antichrist suffers a near fatal head injury before his ultimate victory?
  No, because everything in that damn book is made up and doesn't matter.
- To be fair this wasn’t near fatal. This was a graze at best.
Sonia Sotomayor's decision not to retire during Biden's term is looking like yet another D own goal
She’s 70. She can easily make it 5 more years.
- 5 more years.
  Ohh, ho ho. Yes. 5 more years when we will have our...next election.
- 5 more years and then run for president after that.
- I believe I read somewhere she has some kind of condition that could impact her longevity though.
All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden
STOP with this stupid rhetoric. If Biden steps down, it will be game over for the Dems.
And no, Trump has no real chance to get back into the White House. Trump will lose. He already lost as a sitting president while trying to illegally stay in power. The fact that people keep forgetting this is beyond stupid.
This incident will just encourage more people to vote. Good.
- Trump lost by around 50,000 votes in swing states, in the middle of a bungled pandemic response. In 2020, Biden was polling significantly higher than Trump; today he is polling significantly lower.
  All this before that picture of Trump fist-pumping after being shot, which is going to be widely juxtaposed against Biden's inability to walk down 2-3 steps.
  I don't know where this idea that Trump has "no chance" comes from.
- I give 50/50 odds that Harris can do about as well as Biden, the more I think about it.
  But there's very few Democrats who can reasonably replace Biden today. And most of those do not have access to Biden's fundraising (Harris does have access to that and gives her a huge leg up).
  I still think that Biden staying on to serve as a political shield for Harris... and then resigning in January is the best path forward for Democrats. Harris still has to deal with womanizers and racists. All the adults recognize that she's the real President Candidate moving forward already, so its not like she needs to actually step into the political firezone.
  I'm leaning to 50/50 now because Harris feasibly could benefit from some kind of VP pick herself to shore up support. Or she could go down in flames as the racists / anti-women vote turns out against her. Hard for me to say, but its a feasible path IMO, if people really want to replace Biden to replace him with Harris.
  EDIT: However, the idea that Biden should resign for some no-name / non-existant Democrat who hasn't stepped up despite 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, now 2024 elections is fucking nuts. Your mysterious secret savior doesn't exist, and they'd never step up 3 months before the election to ruin their chances at 2028 anyway.

Of course they have to identify the shooter with his First, middle, and last name, as is tradition… and it was a 20 yr old registered Republican? Wonder what the story on that will be?

I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.
A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I'd rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.
A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don't really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.
Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that's what your parents told you to do when you got your driver's license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that's what everyone did, or maybe you've had a change of heart since registering.
There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.
Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.
Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it's a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it's a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.
They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.
Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn't go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.
Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.
Just plain ol' mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn't going to get you very far because it's not based on anything approaching logic.
- I'm actually in the first camp as well, I'd rather have some amount of control over who the opposition is, and I like to keep tabs on what kind of rhetoric/propaganda the other side is pushing on their base. It looks like the shooter may have been in this camp as well, based on the reporting I've seen. A BBC story notes he was a registered Republican, but that he had made a donation to a liberal political group, ActBlue, in 2021. So I think it's probably going to be pinned on Democrats trying to be the violent ones, even though it has literally been Trump & co stirring up shit for years and basically guaranteeing that something like this would happen.
- I reg'd as R as a 20-something, but have only voted R once (2000 election), just never bothered to change my registration once I realized voting R was a bad choice.
- I heard on the news that he donated to ActBlue™ so that definitely tells some of the story.
Sounds more and more like he was a libertarian who didn't like Trump. Doesn't fit so cleanly into the media narrative, but there's definitely a lot of folks who fit that description politically in the US. Right leaning in a lot of ways but don't like authoritarianism. That part of the electorate also tends to own the most firearms, and there are no shortage of them in PA.

I’m getting multiple reports that some people can’t see it for some reason. Could be Federation, could be they blocked the user who posted it.

checks username

It's the second option and for good reason.

Which is..?
Yup, I blocked them too, not exactly sure why, but they've earned a spot on a fairly short list.

So how does this megathread work, do we all pitch in and buy a shooter or?

I blame the news media. After years of fear mongering. Will make a crazy parson act up. Sadly it did. But they not going to change. They're not going learn from this. The news media are do what they been doing. Like nothing happened.

How long before right wing media is claiming the shooter was trans?

Black Mexican illegal immigrant liberal trans.
Early reports are that he was a registered Republican. But early reports are often wrong.
CNN is speaking to Evan Perez, Senior US Justice Department Correspondant, confirming the information first reported by the New York Post.
Also on Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-identifies-thomas-matthew-crooks-subject-involved-trump-rally-shooting-2024-07-14
NBC:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-rally-shooter-identified-rcna161757
- Oh you silly goose. I said right wing media. Facts and truth don’t matter to them.
- Considering that his registration is tied to his actual address it is hard to get that one wrong.
- Early reports are that he was a registered Republican
  Okay admittedly we all know it's not a false flag. But could we all just collectively pretend and shout it from the rooftops like Republicans do? That would be so cathartic.

Trump would probably be much safer in prison.

That's it.

It's either a trump election win and civil war from him dismantling one too many of the elements of US government.

Or trump looses the election, incites a civil war, and the craziest actually do it.

Either way, as this even proves: Get. Your. Guns. Whilst you still can.

Why would Trump losing incite civil war? Who is going to take any weapons from anyone? Who is going to enforce the law? They aren't going to fight themselves. They want a civil war and they want the Dems to just make one mistake to cause it.
There is no way to say that there will be that many of them. There will be a few. But nothing on a scale of civil war. That's some dumb neck beard fantasy. If the Dems win it will be ok. Until the next 4 years.
- Trump losing would throw the "stolen election" nonsense into overdrive. Hence the civil war.
You will find that civil wars in a digitalized surveillance state are very short lived and that the masses don‘t actually hold all that much power apart from the few things they‘re legally allowed to do. So unless tens of millions just stop showing up to work across the country, I don‘t see how the citizens have any leverage whatsoever once the election is over.
Okay, Tim Pool. Whatever you say.

Yeah lol. For me, I figured out it's because I blocked Ozma.

Chris Hedges tweet...

My thoughts on the assassination attempt on former President Trump:

The assassination of Trump would not remove the yearning of tens of millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking, attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based science and journalism long before Trump did. Cults are a product of social decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode in another financial crisis.

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression, which have impoverished the working class, fostered endless war, militarized our police, created the largest prison system in the world, licensed corporations to exploit the most vulnerable and transferred wealth upwards into the hands of a billionaire class, neuters the press, Trump's critics and the Democratic Party.

Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like resistance movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience, especially strikes, and non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, rather than Trump, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals, feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a bankrupt Democratic Party -- whose presidential candidate is in clear cognitive decline -- that is a full partner in corporate oppression and cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny.

source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1812526737982726267

At best it might've given us a win for the White House but this is just one election. Even if Donald Trump wins and voluntarily leaves office afterwards his GOP successor will be even worse I'm sure. The best thing about Trump is how much of a lazy grifter he is. It wouldn't surprise me at all if barely anything changes at the federal level because he's too busy trying to line his pockets with taxpayer money. The DeSantises and Ramiswamys of the US want to hand over the country to the corporations and churches and they're fine doing it for pennies on the dollar.

New York Post is the first to identify the shooter. Not linking it here because, well, New York Post... but it is being floated out there on non-social media.

Edit CNN is speaking to Evan Perez, Senior US Justice Department Correspondant, confirming the information first reported by the New York Post.

Also on Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-identifies-thomas-matthew-crooks-subject-involved-trump-rally-shooting-2024-07-14

NBC:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-rally-shooter-identified-rcna161757

What the fuck is with all the jokes about missing Trump? Assassinating a political candidate is nothing to be happy about, no matter how you feel about them.

- I have no empathy for most politicians or the harm they have done out of greed.
  I'm not in favor of a single individual being judge, jury, and executioner.
  Our system for dealing with corruption is insufficient and infected by the corrupt.
  Other than some Ghandi-level mass nonviolent resistance, one is likely to just end up on the streets (as designed by the corrupt in question), or the way things are going, soon a wall.
  It sucks...
- And you think this would help your cause? This would only motivate the right and make them more brazen. You can change things using violence, and if you do they won't last. It's up to the people to defeat them in the elections. Your focus should be on grassroots movements to change the people's minds, not resort to violence like this. This same thought process is what led to J6 riots.
It's self defense. He's been threatening our lives for years. If you can't see that, you are speaking from a position of absolute privilege. Stop victim blaming.
Just to clarify... Would you've said the same thing about Hitler? Americans, specifically Republicans, are very hot about their gun amendment and how it shall be used against some sort of authoritarian uprising. Now one of their nutjobs ended up attempting exactly that. Or he's a boogaloo dumbo who thought this would incite a civil war.
He probably got hit in the head, but there was nothing in there 🤣🤣🤣
How about this isn't simply a matter of not liking someone? He is a very real threat, and in all honesty, this should have been an official military act. And they wouldn't have fucking missed. This man can absolutely not be allowed to take office. It cannot happen. And the law doesn't seem to be making sure he doesn't.