Happy Bastille Day to our many French readers and listeners. We observe the occasion with the annual fête nationale editions of both my weekend music show and our Song of the Week. Tonight, we shall have a kinda sorta Bastille Day postscript with Episode Four of our current Tale for Our Time - a trip to francophone Africa in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
~We have been marking the first anniversary of the attempted assassination of the Republican presidential candidate. Judging from the reaction on social media, lefties regret only that the US Secret Service is too incompetent to pull off the eighty-sixing of Trump, while a not insignificant number of righties seem to believe it was just another spectacle for the rubes - with Trump surviving the closest call on TV since Ed Ames and Johnny Carson played Frontier Bris. In a certain sense, both are more normal reactions than the official version, in which all kinds of curious anomalies go entirely uninvestigated by either officialdom or the media. It certainly assisted Trump's return to the White House. Here is the follow-up column I wrote a year ago with a pertinent annotation twelve months on:
Not long after I came to New Hampshire, decades back, a chap in Littleton decided to hold up the local bank. Unfortunately, he made the elementary mistake of rolling the ski-mask down over his face not just for the robbery but also to case the joint. A teller at the bank, strolling back from lunch, noticed the ski-masked bloke standing on Main Street peering through the windows for some length of time, and she thought it rather odd. So, when he entered the lobby to hold up the joint, they were ready for him.
That's pretty much what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania - except, instead of a perspicacious bank clerk acting swiftly to prevent the crime, there were vast numbers of Secret Service agents who instead let the guy go ahead and commit it.
In the last seventy-two hours, we have learned there were at least three government snipers in the very building whose rooftop the assassin was trying to access. They sat inside and watched him through the windows, as he arrived and peered up at the roof, and then wandered away.
They watched him when he came back and took out a laser range-finder to calculate the distance between the building and Trump's head, and then left again.
They watched him a third time when he returned with a bulky backpack.
They watched him for the best part of half-an-hour ...and then they let him go ahead and shoot the Republican presidential candidate.
UPDATE! And, a year later, they're all still working for the Secret Service.
When seconds count, the police are half-an-hour away from getting off their butts. The Federalist's Sean Davis asks the relevant question:
Who gave the order to do nothing until after the assassin shot Trump, killed an innocent man on that stage, and fired round after round after round after round?
That's a good way to put it: the Secret Service agents on-site did nothing for half-an-hour because that's what they were ordered to do, by some fellow somewhere in the bureaucracy in a position to give such an order. Who is he?
There were consequences to his decision: A genuine public servant - volunteer fireman Corey Comperatore - died shielding his wife and daughters because the ersatz "public servants" of the Secret Service allowed his killer to open fire.
They sat back and watched as his killer cased the roof, made his range-finder calculations, returned with the backpack, and then ascended to his position. The Secret Service provided no service whatsoever; they were the Secret Spectators: they did nothing until after Mr Comperatore, Trump and the others had been shot.
Why?
Sean Davis's column is a tough read:
Biden's Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump's Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt
But against that dark hypothesis is the state's version of events:
Here's the official story so far: a random 20 year old acting completely alone walked within 150 yards of a presidential campaign rally with a rifle, climbed onto a rooftop in full view of Secret Service snipers, set up his shot and fired without anyone intervening and with no...
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 15, 2024
Mr Walsh does not include the latest government explanation for what happened: per the Director of the Secret Service herself, it would not have been possible to secure that rooftop in advance because it has an ever so slightly pitched gable and so to ask a Secret Service agent to stand on it would have been in breach of health-and-safety regulations.
You might be wondering: er, hang on, in that case, isn't having to take a bullet for the President in breach of health-and-safety?
"Your mission, should you decide to accept it.."
"Excuse me, but did you just say there's a sloped roof?" pic.twitter.com/IFt1ABGjAY
— G (@stevensongs) July 16, 2024
Bonus: CNN reports that in recent weeks the feds had human intel of an Iranian plot to kill Trump. So they had supposedly "ramped up" security - by diverting the experienced guys to Acting Nominee Jill and allocating a platoon of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls to a 6'3" target.
More on the range-finder:
#BREAKING: CNN's John Miller reveals three new details on the gunman who tried to assassinate Donald Trump:
- Earlier in the day, he went through Secret Service security WITH his rangefinder and scoped out the snipers, who spotted him and said they need to keep an eye on him.
-... pic.twitter.com/KpIzAxDRBm
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 16, 2024
As I mentioned on Sunday, at a Trump rally in 2016 the Secret Service confiscated my kid's tennis ball that he happened to have in his pocket.
But they'd have let him keep a range-finder?
I received some pushback from readers when I referred on Monday to the policeman who shinned up the ladder to confront the gunman on the roof as a "village constable". But he was indeed an officer of the Butler Township Police Department - because all the cool guys with the reflector shades and earpieces had been ordered to sit this one out.
Why?
The Secret Service's conduct of security makes perfect sense - if the object of the exercise was the death of Trump on live TV. From the target's conversation with RFK Jr:
Trump can be heard saying that Biden was "very nice" to him in the aftermath of the shooting, and asked him what the shot in the ear had felt like.
Trump said: "It's very interesting. He was very nice, actually, he called me, and he said 'Why did you choose to move to the right?'"
That's an unusually sharp question for Joe. If he'd been that on-the-ball three weeks ago, he'd have won the debate. Interesting that he was able to zero in on the one thing that went - ever so slightly - wrong:
It's impossible to overstate how much of a miracle we experienced on July 13th.
This is how close we came.
I can't stop watching. pic.twitter.com/9jM0gtEgmH
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 16, 2024
Something very disturbing is going on, very deep and yet very high up in the federal government.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the competing summer-vacation charms of Quebec, Afghanistan and Central London. On Saturday Rick McGinnis's movie date offered Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face, while our musical musings included the annual Bastille Day edition of both my weekend music show and our Song of the Week. My Sunday column observed the anniversary of the attempted Trump assassination, and our marquee presentation was my seventy-second Tale for Our Time, Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. Click for Part One, Part Two and Part Three. Part Four airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend flying your drone over the Secret Service parking lot, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
