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Notes -
Trump on his assassination attempt:
Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.
I'm curious what you think the counterfactual world looks like, where Trump comes out instead and claims "There were malicious people at work, and it was all orchestrated by [specific actors]."
What would happen next?
And if you're going off the assumption that Trump is being truthful and fully transparent, then why'd you bring up the election issues?
Are YOU saying that his claims of the election being stolen are credible, since you're here saying that he's honest about such serious matters?
Neat.
Now do the people who don't think Trump was shot at all.
So long as we're addressing conspiracy theories.
Well Bondi hasn't investigated those yet.
/s
The overall problem is that Trump is not a reliable narrator. For this assassination attempt, he came out looking very good, by a centimeter or two. (Can you imagine what would have happened if like the side of his face was blown off, but he survived?)
That led to competing conspiracy theories:
Since Trump came out against the theory favored by (some of) his supporters, that takes all the steam out of it. No reason to expect he would lie on this.
For elections, Trump says basically every one he's in is rigged. If he loses, it's rigged against him. If he wins, it's rigged against him (or they tried to, apparently, in 2024, per his Epstein tweet).
To me, the “he faked it” argument doesn’t really pass the laugh test. No one sane is going to hatch a plan in which a guy climbs a roof and shoots a real bullet at his head. No sharpshooter is going to attempt that shot especially outdoors where wind and glares can be a factor. It’s not a reasonable theory because the shot probably 99% of the time ends with the target hit rather than grazed.
The SS wanting a failure I could be convinced of. The reports by rally attendees over at least an hour that went completely unchecked is a pretty big failure. As in any sane person trying to protect a famous person would have at least checked it out sometime between the rally goers reporting the unknown guy on the roof and the actual shooting. I’m completely at a loss for an explanation that isn’t either “these guys are incompetent” or “they set him up.”
I assure you there were serious theories about fake blood capsules. I saw this from both Right and Left people.
Nevermind the real bullets that killed real people.
I mean again, you’re still stuck with having a guy point a real gun at a person’s head with a real bullet in it and really pulling the trigger. It’s a thing you can’t just gloss over. If Trump decided to fake it, he’s either stupid or crazy because if even the slightest thing goes wrong. He moves tge wrong way suddenly, the wind changes, the sun pops out from behind a cloud, tge scope is a few millimeters off, the shooter gets nervous, or he for some reason has to rush tge shot, there’s no way to be sure that this very real bullet fired from a very real gun doesn’t end up in Trump’s very real brain. We know it was a real bullet fired because it hit people in the crowd behind him. And all of this assumes it’s not at 19 year old dietary aide and community college graduate using a rifle he shoots paper targets at in a gun club once a week. A professional sniper wouldn’t dare try it, an amateur would undoubtedly kill his client trying something like this even at close range, let alone off the top of a building several hundred yards away. If you had a top sniper at gun range distance try to graze the ear of a baliastics gel head that’s randomly moving without hitting the rest of the head, I’d be shocked if anyone could do it even 1/20 times.
Oh I completely agree. The theory was something like: "The sniper was shooting around Trump, not at Trump, and Trump had a blood capsule to burst on his ear." People had to die to really sell it.
Nothing here makes sense in terms of risk/reward. And there's objective evidence to disprove it.
And yet.
I'm honestly surprised the shooter was just good enough to narrowly miss a headshot, but then couldn't even get a body shot for his follow ups. He got off at least three controlled shots before Trump ducked down.
(But we do have a number of people on this very forum that apply roughly the same level of credulity to Ghislaine Maxwell having a longstanding poweruser Reddit account, clearly authored by a Malaysian man, for actually not even a coherent motive. People want to believe.)
Or he was such a poor shot that he was aiming at the body, jerked as he pulled the trigger, and the shot just barely missed the head. Thus the lack of body shot follow ups: he was that bad of a shot.
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