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An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.
Here's a clip. I think I hear shooting sounds at 0:40 and then they react a few seconds later. Dunno how close the shooter actually got, seems like they must've got him further away from Trump?
https://x.com/WomanDefiner/status/2048203588841750754
One can only imagine how toxic fake shooter narratives are going to be this time... I don't like Trump much but how hard is it to believe that people sincerely want to shoot him dead and will even sacrifice their lives to do so? Or that if the Trump campaign somehow faked their own assassination attempts that wouldn't immediately leak, like so much else that they do?
Edit: Apparently the assassin made the world's shittest-looking steam game too and people are shitposting in the reviews:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/945530/Bohrdom/
I'm a huge critic of the "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty" sort of arguments, but I do at least appreciate that the conspiracy theories formed after bad events are logically consistent with that. After all if you do truly believe in the concept then you're forced to deny that anyone tangentially related to you could do bad or else you're admitting that you are bad.
So of course then people have to go with "This Trump shooting was staged" or "the people who beat up cops and planted bombs during Jan 6th were secret fed antifa" or whatever because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs". Not that false flag attempts don't exist at all, but the question really should be, so what?
What does it matter if the guy who shot a police station was actually a boogaloo boy false flagging instead of a BLM protestor? No one is accountable for his actions except for him. To me it didn't make BLM look bad beforehand and it didn't make right wing groups look bad afterwards just cause this individual sucks. I appreciate the consistency but it's still really stupid.
"That guy was nuts, doesn't count" is the pretty standard right-wing defense when confronted with right wing political violence. It only really becomes a problem when there's some reason you can't write off the perpetrator as crazy, e.g. J6 stands out because you can't argue thousands of Trump supporters are all crazy without indicting yourself.
The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups*, whereas the shooters (of all political persuasions) have been lone wolves radicalised by internet memes.
The reason why Trump hasn't been prosecuting "them" for "their" repeated attempts to kill him is that there is no "them".
* Even if the organisers didn't intend for the mob to storm the Capitol, the people who did storm the Capitol did so based on their non-insane interpretation of Trump's speech, and in any case "they" were a group of people who were sufficiently affiliated with organised conservatism that they got the message to come to DC.
This is what I meant by "indicting yourself" - to try and pass of J6 as the act of crazy people entails conceding that Trumpism is institutionally deranged. Since Trump supporters don't generally believe that, the "I can't be held responsible for nominally affiliated lunatics whose ideas I definitely don't share" defense gets put aside in favor of a medley of "no big deal" + "provocateurs" + "actually justified" (which may not be particularly convincing from a logical perspective but provides supporters a variety of escape hatches).
By contrast, lone wolf terrorists may be following some piece of political rhetoric to its logical conclusion, but people can pretty easily justify disavowing them because rhetoric, however incendiary, usually stops short of saying "go forth and kill."
Speaking of derangement, the common response I'm seeing is "I'm disappointed that the newest hoax assassination failed."
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The January 6 protest was organized by mainstream right-wing groups. The rioting was not, and no, "Storm the Capitol" is not a non-insane intepretation of "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
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