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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   25342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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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.

Gotta trust left wingers to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Trump's approval are in free-fall. The best way to kill Trump's movement is to wait for the midterms. Why would you hand him a narrative victory?

I have a prediction: no one will care. The right tried and failed to do this with Charlie Kirk and there they had an actual body. It's just not that easy to rile people up over something that didn't happen.

I have a further prediction: the Trump scandal train has no breaks, so within a week this will be overtaken/displaced by some new headline about corruption or war with Iran heating up again or Border Patrol murdering some more people or one of a hundred other topics.

Why would you hand him a narrative victory?

Coordinating 70 million people is hard.

The right tried and failed to do this with Charlie Kirk and there they had an actual body. It's just not that easy to rile people up over something that didn't happen.

In what sense did Charlie Kirk’s assassination not happen?

It did happen. I am contrasting it with a failed presidential assassination attempt, which aren't even all that uncommon.

They aren’t that common. Obama and Clinton had no serious attempts. Bush II had one, Bush I had one that was broken up in the planning. Reagan, Carter, Ford, had one each. To have one President get three serious attempts is pretty odd.

Lucky enough, Wikipedia has a whole list of security incidents for each president. Here's Obama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Barack_Obama

There's tons of very real threats to be concerned about, they just typically get caught beforehand because they're stupid. Such as this one where before the murder spree (they also seemed to have ridiculous plans for it too), they bragged to friends about shooting a church.

Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart, two men with strong white supremacist beliefs, allegedly planned a murder spree of 88 African-Americans (14 of whom they were planning to behead)[24] in Tennessee, many of whom were to be young students at an unidentified, predominantly African-American school. They allegedly planned to end the spree by driving their vehicle toward Barack Obama as fast as they could and shooting at him from the windows.[25][26] The two men were arrested on October 22, 2008, after they bragged to their friends about firing shots at a church in Brownsville, Tennessee.

Or this one where a guy got shot by his wife beforehand.

According to his wife, James Cummings was not happy that Obama was elected president, and planned to set off the bomb at his inauguration. She also claimed that her husband was frequently physically, mentally and sexually abusive towards her and their daughter, citing this as her reason for the murder. Amber Cummings pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but was given a suspended 8-year sentence plus six years of probation by Justice Jeffrey Hjelm, who ruled that she would not face prison time due to "extenuating circumstances".[31]

There's also examples like this guy who shot at the White House, but didn't hit anyone (and also Obama wasn't there at the moment anyway but he didn't know).

On the night of November 11, 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fired a Romanian Cugir semiautomatic rifle from his car parked on Constitution Avenue. At least seven rounds struck the White House, though no one was injured. He was arrested five days later in a hotel in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Obama was not at the White House at the time of the shooting. Federal prosecutors launched an investigation to determine if Hernandez acted out of hatred for Obama.[37] Writings by Hernandez and testimony from those who knew him showed that he believed President Obama was the Antichrist and the Devil.[38]

Now maybe we don't count these as "serious attempts" but then I'm curious as to how we do define that. People building bombs, making detailed plans and even shooting at the White House itself seems like a serious attempt to me, even if like most would be political killers it's done in some of the dumbest ways.

IDK if it's actually more attempts on Trump, if secret service is just failing more for some reason, or if these would be Trump assassins are simply smarter than the would be Obama ones and don't get caught early for moronic reasons as often. That is possible, for example the latest attempt on Obama in 2023 was by a guy who was literally live streaming his scoping out of the Obama house. Even this recent guy thinking he could rambo past security isn't that dumb.

Committing violence, especially as a member of a tribe that isn't constantly inundated in low-grade violence, is very hard to actually bring yourself to do. Look at the Zyzz ICE ambush where they shot like once each and then immediately surrendered, that's how capable the vast majority of people actually are of violence. People who actually go that far (and even this guy fairly immediately surrendered instead of going out in a blaze of glory as he'd probably have expected of himself) are inherently very rare.

There, on the other hand, will always be a way-larger supply of stupid blowhards and/or people who might be willing to try a driveby shooting. The fact that Trump's actually getting sufficiently riled up people to get a decent supply of honest-to-god assassination attempts is reflective of the current moment of radicalization.

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