On Sunday, there was a second assassination attempt in eight weeks on former President Trump’s life.
About 2:00 p.m., a gunman appeared outside of Trump’s international golf course in West Palm Beach. At that time, Trump was apparently at the turn between the fifth and the sixth holes, not quite to them yet; he was a couple of holes behind.
Meanwhile, Secret Service agents were advancing a couple of holes ahead of President Trump. They reportedly saw the barrel of a gun between the bushes on the golf course, roughly 400 yards away from Trump. The would-be shooter had a pack of ceramics that were meant to block any sort of incoming shot from the Secret Service.
He had a rifle, an AK-47 with a scope. He also had a GoPro. He was ready to film his attempted assassination of President Trump.
It is unclear whether he got a shot off. It appears that he probably did not. The Secret Service saw him in advance. They shot at him. He then proceeded to flee in his car but a nearby bystander saw the license plate and gave it to the police, and the suspect was picked up by the police about 20 minutes later.
The police announced that the shooter was there to assassinate Trump, and that Trump does not have full perimeter protection, which is typically given to the sitting president of the United States but not to the leading Republican nominee for the president of the United States or the former president.
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Part of the problem in terms of security is that either Congress Avenue, a major thoroughfare, would have to be shut down or Secret Service agents would have to be outside the fence when the former president is on the golf course. That would have been the obvious solution.
But the local sheriff said they didn’t have the staff available to even secure the exterior of the fence, which is where this person set up for the shot. It’s a chain-link fence, so it’s not as though the shooter had to hop to get over the fence.
The New York Times reported yesterday:
The Secret Service significantly bolstered Mr. Trump’s protective detail after coming under intense criticism following an attempt on his life in Butler, Pa., on July 13. That beefed-up detail, which includes additional agents and enhanced on-the-ground intelligence, might have played a role in the outcome this weekend, current and former officials said.
Yet the fact that a gunman was able to get a semiautomatic rifle with a telescopic sight so close to the former president, roughly 300 to 500 yards away, underscored how many urgent problems exposed in Butler remained unresolved — and how difficult it is for the Secret Service to respond to an unpredictable and increasingly violent political environment.
Except for this: This is not super-tough stuff. Anyone could have foreseen that if a man has a 50/50 chance to be the next president of the United States, the most controversial person in modern American history, playing golf at a club that he owns, which he does fairly regularly, it seems well within the possible purview of the Secret Service to actually secure a fence that is not all that far away from the golf course.
What would have happened if the Secret Service had missed this guy hiding behind the bushes? Let’s say he had not been a complete moron, and instead of hiding behind a couple of backpacks at the exterior of this fence, he was hiding behind some sort of obstruction. The Secret Service wouldn’t have been able to see him from inside the golf course.
Let’s say he had waited until President Trump had moved up a hole or two. He’d have been right next to President Trump.
The White House needs to authorize full Secret Service protective detail for the former president of the United States.
President Trump issued a statement almost immediately, saying, “There were gunshots in my vicinity, but before rumors start spiraling out of control, I wanted you to hear this first: I am safe and well. Nothing will slow me down. I will never surrender. I will always love you for supporting me.”
By the way, politically, his message here should be this: No bullet is going to stop the change.
That should be the message right now. Kamala Harris is making the case right now that she is an agent of change, when she clearly is not.
President Trump should be making the case: No bullet will stop the change.
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The reality is that we have an extraordinarily polarized political environment in which a presidential candidate is the victim of two separate attempts at assassinations. When that happens, there should be some questions raised about the temperature of our rhetoric.
The only person who’s guilty of attempting to kill the former president of the United States and current frontrunner for the White House is the attempted assassin.
But when you raise the temperature and the political rhetoric in a country, you are turning up the heat beneath a pot of boiling water and, eventually, it starts to boil over.
We’ve been entering an increasingly violent era. That is particularly true since the Black Lives Matter summer, in which widespread political violence was greenlit by the legacy media.
We’ve now seen two separate assassination attempts against President Trump. I do not think that is a massive coincidence. Radicals are roaming around. They can find each other on social media and find support. Not only that, but they’re also being told day in and day out that Donald Trump is a deep and abiding threat to the republic.
There is a difference between saying that you don’t like Trump’s policies or you think Trump’s policies are bad for the country, and saying, as Democrats have been saying for years, “Donald Trump as president of the United States would end elections in the United States” or “Donald Trump and his supporters are a threat to the very social fabric of the United States.”
Those are different statements. The same day that this assassin went out and attempted to shoot Trump, the Harris/Walz campaign put out an ad by Bernie Sanders in which he said, “Donald Trump is extraordinarily dangerous. He is a threat to our democracy. He is, among many other characteristics, a pathological liar.”
These are the kinds of terms the Left routinely uses about Trump. “He’s a dictator in waiting. He’s Hitler without the mustache.”
They say this while constantly declaring that Donald Trump needs to turn down the rhetoric, that Donald Trump is apparently the font of all evil rhetoric and overstatement in the universe. They themselves are perfectly innocent.
The hell they are.
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