Another episode today in the strangest, frightful, and somewhat horribly anxiety-inducing American political year in our history with supposedly a second attempt to assassinate the T-Rump — he’s okay, and due to the diligence of the Secret Service, was apparently never in any danger, though, the plot does thicken.
The entire news cycle this Sunday afternoon is weighed down with background/details/info on the incident — in a nutshell:
So here's what law enforcement says happened: Trump is golfing around 1:30 on Sunday. Agent going one hole ahead of him finds a man with rifle in the bush/tree line. Agent fires at him. Trump is evacuated. Man flees & is later captured. Leaves gun, backpacks, camera on scene.
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) September 15, 2024
I’m sure you’ve read/heard/viewed TV about it already from various media sources, the MSM all being about the same with Dawsey’s sequence in order. And you can click on the appropriate links, Google it, or just follow your standard thousand-times-daily news scroll as additional information is updated and posted. It will be discussed ad nausea and in a more comprehensive form for the next period of infinity.
However, the T-Rump maintains (from The New York Times live blog):
Trump has been talking to friends and allies throughout the afternoon, according to two people briefed on the scene inside Mar-a-Lago, and has cracked jokes about how he was frustrated he couldn’t finish his golf game.
[…]
Donald Trump sent out another fund-raising email connected to the incident at his golf course earlier today. “My resolve is only stronger after another attempt on my life,” he wrote. And the URL for his campaign site now directs to a related fund-raising page that reads, “I am safe and well, and no one was hurt. Thank God! But, there are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us.”
Of course.
The apprehended shooting suspect, a weird-ass guy named Ryan Wesley Routh, aged 58, has reportedly been arrested eight times previously for minor offenses and appears from all I’ve read a more Republican-aimed person — he supposedly has a “self-proclaimed involvement” in the war in Ukraine, also claimed to have fought in Ukraine, had been living in Hawaii and was formerly a construction worker in North Carolina.
According to political journalist Prem Thakker on X: ‘Ryan Routh voted for Trump; donated to Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Tom Steyer, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren; and then has tweets like this yearning for a Nikki Haley/Vivek Ramaswamy ticket — which is to say it’s a bit hard to put him in a convenient little political box.‘
One odd ingredient came at the end of the Associated Press account:
Snyder (Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder) said his deputies “immediately flooded” northbound I-95, deploying to every exit between the Palm Beach County line to the south and St. Lucie County line to the north.
“One of my road patrol units saw the vehicle, matched the tag and we set up on the vehicle,” Snyder said, “We pinched in on the car, got it safely stopped and got the driver in custody.”
Snyder told WPTV that the suspect “was not armed when we took him out of the car.”
The man had a calm, flat demeanor and showed little emotion when he was stopped by police, Snyder said, saying the suspect did not question why he was being pulled over.
“He never asked, ‘what is this about?’ Obviously, law enforcement with long rifles, blue lights, a lot going on. He never questioned it,” Snyder said.
As time goes on additional shit on Routh and the circumstances of the attempt at a T-Rump assassination will be forthcoming. It’s just weird.
And also earlier today, T-Rump did a dumb-ass thing if he’s seeking votes:
This and Haitians eating pets ain’t winning lines. https://t.co/cybtOmTez9
— Jonathan Landay (@JonathanLanday) September 15, 2024
Background (if you don’t know already) via The Washington Post this afternoon:
Former president Donald Trump took his bitterness over mega-pop star Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to his social network, declaring in an all-caps tweet on Truth Social on Sunday, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
[…]
As Trump’s post reverberated around the internet on Sunday, the Harris Walz campaign issued a press release titled “Trump’s Bad Week (Taylor’s Version). It did not mention Trump’s tweet, but embedded the titles of some Swift songs into a series of talking points. “The American people want to be Out of the Woods of the chaos and division of the Trump era, leave behind the Blank Space of Trump’s broken promises, and Begin Again by electing Vice President Harris to ensure America’s future of opportunity is Long Lived,” the release said.
Are we in a fruitcake version of The Twilight Zone, or not, yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Deux Saltimbanques: l’Arlequin et Sa Compagne,’ found here.)