Day of the Horns

 

I'm no conspiracy theorist, although I do believe that we'll never really know the actual circumstances behind John F. Kennedy's assassination.

I refuse to believe that the sniper who fired at Trump on Friday was a Republican plant, that Trump, the GOP, or the Secret Service would approve of planting a 20-year-old introvert with no military training to fire at a candidate and not hit, but just graze, his head. I wouldn't put it past Trump or the GOP, but I can't believe that the Secret Service would condone a gunman killing random people in the crowd while shooting "toward" a candidate. 

And yet what we clearly see with our own eyes doesn't add up logically.  How was a gunman able to command a rooftop with a clear view of the campaign stage and well within the range of an AK-17?  In the early aughts, I used to work in an office building what was within the flight path of one of the runways of Marietta, Georgia's Dobbins Air Force Base. George W. Bush used to like to use Dobbins when he visited Atlanta, and every time he came or left, there were Secret Service gunmen on the roof of our building and all of the many other high-rise office buildings in the area, just in case some sniper might want to take a shot at Air Force One as it came in for a landing or took off. But a rooftop within 140 yards of the campaign stage? Nah, no need to secure that.

Right-wing theorists consider this flaw in security as evidence of a "deep-state" conspiracy to eliminate Trump. The fact that there's credible video of people at the rally who spotted the sniper on the roof and tried to alert police and security to no avail doesn't exactly refute their fears.

But watch the video of the stage for the reaction of the candidate and his security immediately after the shots were fired. Secret Service staff immediately, as per their training, threw themselves over the candidate to sacrifice their bodies as human shields, but as they hustled Trump off stage, his first and only words were that he needed to get his shoes (which somehow came off in the melee).  Surprisingly, instead of whisking him offstage, they paused and allowed him to retrieve his shoes and put them on. Then they allowed him to stand up, exposing his head, and give a clenched-fist salute to the crowd. Three times.

They didn't know if the threat was over. The Secret Service snipers that were in the area apparently made quick work of taking out the gunman and reporting that "the threat had been neutralized." But were the agents on stage so sure there was no other threat, no other gunmen, that they allowed Trump to pose and preen for the cameras? And if they were so sure there was no more threat, why take him off stage at all? 

It all makes no sense. Either the Secret Service was in on a "deep-state" assassination attempt and were giving the gunman or gunmen another chance to take a shot, or they were in on a GOP false-flag operation to make it look like as assassination attempt to add to Trump's list of grievances and his persecution complex. Or maybe they're just that incompetent, but if so, why have there been no close-calls on a President or a major political candidate since Reagan back in 1981?         

The whole thing makes so little sense and I'm afraid we'll never get an explanation. I heard on the morning news that the head of the Secret Service told a reporter that the building the gunman used had a sloped roof and for safety reasons they decided to secure the building from the interior. But that doesn't pass the red-face test for credibility. 

The most rational explanation I can think of is that a naïve, 20-year-old gun enthusiast just got incredibly lucky, caught the Secret Service asleep at the switch, used a ladder to get on the roof of a building that had agents on the inside but not on the roof, and found himself in the one cognitive blind spot of the security detail. He was able to get off a few shots, missing the candidate's head my mere millimeters but grazed his left ear. Or he hit a teleprompter and a glass shard cut the ear.

If that were in a movie, I would find it all implausible and just as outlandish as any "deep-state" or GOP conspiracy theory. And the sad thing is, we'll probably never learn the truth.