An operational failure
Last month I wrote (with purely accidental prescience) that conspiracy theory books have probably already been written about the death of Donald Trump, whatever the cause and however ordinary that death might be. All that remained was to fill in the details. Unfortunately, those books remain in their respective drawers. Had I been actually clairvoyant I would have included the words “or attempted assassination.”
Within minutes of Trump’s attempted assassination, conspiracy theories went flying. That was going to happen no matter what. Something, no matter how innocent or explainable by other means, was going to look “odd” to somebody, or a collection of somebodies, and those supposed oddities were going to get gathered together with still more oddities that other people had thought of. And those oddities would quickly find their way into a manifesto of paranoia and published as a meme demanding answers RIGHT NOW, dammit.
I say it again: that was going to happen no matter what. Let me put it another way, there existed no set of circumstances, no matter how banal, that an attempted assassination of Donald Trump was NOT going to become an instantaneous conspiracy theory. Such are the paranoid and silly times we live in.
Then there’s what really happened. A colossal negligence, what the British amusingly refer to as a cock-up, what the head of the United States Secret Service called an operational failure, is what actually happened. Nobody really expected anything untoward to occur in a lazy Pennsylvania backwater during yet another of Trump’s interminable Nuremberg-style rallies.
So, US Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle admitted to a Congressional committee on Monday that her agency’s failure to protect Donald Trump from an attempted assassination was the “most significant operational failure … in decades.” Many are calling for her resignation. All demand to know, and with reason, how the Secret Service could be so incompetent as to allow a 20 year old looney to scale a roof and open fire with his father’s AR-15 assault-style rifle.
Don’t look for answers in the Deep State or false flag operations. The answer can be found in Hanlon’s Law. Hanlon’s Law goes like this: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” In the case of the attempt on Trump’s life, the stupidity came in the form of languor. In the mundane routine where nothing significant happens, security becomes lax, protocols become routine, measures once crisply executed become perfunctory. It’s ordinary human nature, and ordinary human nature doesn’t exist in the fabulous world of the endlessly paranoid conspiracy theorists.
The good news is that the shooting incident in Pennsylvania has done very little good for Donald Trump, and may in fact have hurt him. Trump’s obvious attempt to milk it for all its worth, his melodramatic insistence that he looked death in the eye and didn’t flinch, is falling flat to the mundane circumstances of the actual assassination attempt. For one, and I point this out to the considerable dismay of conspiracy claques everywhere, Trump didn’t stand defiantly with his fist in the air after he was shot at. He instead immediately dove for cover. His defiant “courage” only made its appearance several seconds later, when it became clear he was going to be okay and he was out of danger. Make no mistake, Trump is a coward, and his cowardice was on full display that day.
Moreover, the decision by President Biden not to run for re-election and the rise of Kamala Harris have stolen the rest of Trump’s post-assassination-attempt thunder. Trump is furious about that. He hates that Biden and Harris now have all the focus. He wants it back. But the reality is his moment of fake heroism has passed, and if anything, it’s hurt him. Kamala Harris is now the star of the show, and her star will continue to rise. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.