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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
I am approximately a security denier. I think almost all security is pretty much just theater when it comes to ability to preempt planned attacks. I was at the Boston Marathon last week and the security around it is so obviously just exactly and specifically targeted at the horrible bombing that happened; perhaps that exact, specific thing would be prevented with the new security, but it would obviously do almost nothing to prevent the other angles of attack that a determined individual would present. The obsession with clear bags and a finish-line adjacent perimeter is very silly when considering the whole host of threats that could exist. Really, all you can do for any of these things is have some armed and trained guys hanging around to handle observed threats in the moment, to react to what they're seeing in front of them. Everything else is just hardening against previously observed attacks to make people feel like they're safe now.
The good news is that this actually most works anyway because there just aren't very many determined attackers. The bad news is that it sometimes fails because there isn't a great way to stop the President from getting shot or a big public event from turning into a mass casualty event. How do our civic norms survive? If things go well, the same way they always have, which is to say that about one out of ten Presidents is assassinated and another chunk get shot, and things just keep ticking.
The thing is assassination almost never accomplishes anything, because the problems people care about are systemic and not caused by any one person. Part of the reason the supervillain archetype is such a prominent theme in fiction is because it gives you a world where you just need to kill the bad guy and everything magically gets fixed.
Here in the real world, you shoot the UHC CEO and nothing changes, because it turns out UHC CEO is a role, not a person.
The UHC CEO is a role, but Donald Trump is not. Most presidents probably aren't, and Donald Trump definitely isn't.
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I think that if Trump had been assassinated in Butler it would have been "successful" insofar as it would have influenced the upcoming election. the GOP convention was scheduled to begin the following week, and while it probably would have gone forward as an opportunity to eulogize Trump, it wouldn't have actually selected a nominee. While there was some controversy over Biden's passing the baton to Harris, it was nothing compared to the all-out war that would have happened in the Republican Party if their nominee had been killed on the eve of the convention. J.D. Vance, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis all had claims to the nomination that were equal parts credible and ludicrous. Haley had won the second most primary votes, but those all came from people specifically voting against Trump. DeSantis probably would have been the nominee if Trump hadn't run, but he got even fewer votes in the primary than Haley, had a frosty relationship with Trump, and there's no way of proving what would have happened besides taking the word of Ron and other people who want him to be the nominee. J.D. Vance was the named heir apparent, but that wasn't public at the time, and anyone claiming that he was Trump's pick would just be accused of being self-serving, similar to people fighting over a will based on "what dad really wanted". And that leaves out opportunists who would throw their hat into the ring as "compromise candidates", and people who would throw their hat into the ring as full on Trump stans who would claim that none of the candidates represent the true MAGA spirit.
I guess, but I think the aesthetic difference is disproportionate to how this would have played out in practice.
In terms of policy, how is Trump any different than Bush 2.0, proceeding along the expected trajectory? You get more wars, a bunch of hot air about immigration but nothing actually happens, a bunch of pork, and... this is exactly what you'd get no matter which Republican won. The only difference with Trump is you get this chaotic, hog-in-the-China-shop, WWE Smackdown aesthetic, rather than the typical Bain Capital, business-suit psychopath aesthetic. But the policy is the same.
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it." -Mark Twain
Bush didn't go out of his way to alienate every other US ally than Israel. That's a pretty major policy difference.
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Ask USAID. Ask the Ayatollah Khameni (either one). Immigration changes actually did happen. So did tariffs. So did a rooting out of DEI in government; it wasn't complete but it happened.
Heritage Foundation, not Trump. Any Republican would have done this.
That would be more wars in the Middle East for the donors, which Trump explicitly ran against. At least the typical Republican would have done the Captain America PR campaign correctly and made the war popular for 1-2 years instead of making it unpopular from the outset (Pew shows 44% strongly disapprove vs only 18% strongly approve, and the economic consequences haven't even hit yet)
Ruled unconstitutional (by 2 of his own 3 justices lol). Lutnick made bank off of the confusion, though. Hard to imagine that wasn't the plan.
No, not a chance.
He just did them another way.
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It's a similar thing that happens with the war on drugs over time. You can lock up or kill a few drug traffickers and lower supply, but demand stays the same so the price increases and pulls in more drug traffickers looking for bigger payouts. You can interrupt this process over and over and over again, but you will never win as long as people want drugs. Now interrupting can be a way to get some demand lower. Forcing people off their addictions will lead to at least a few kicking their habits and driving it underground can help prevent addictions from starting.
It's not useless and there's a reason why drug legalization doesn't solve the issue either, and if anything makes it worse. But that's important, either. The war on drugs method also fails, just not as extreme because ultimately the only thing that will truly stop drugs is for people to not want drugs.
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