“This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”—Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)
It finally happened.
For eight long years, one of the most inevitable events in all of modern history finally took place: the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
I was already in bed when the shooting took place, but for some reason I woke up at around 2am and did what I have programmed myself to do over the years: pick up my phone and scroll the news.
“They finally did it”, I thought to myself. “They finally did it!”
They. They.
Instinctively, I had somehow already concluded that it was not a “he”, but “they” that did this to him. My mind involuntarily rushed to the conclusion that this was not the act of a “lone wolf”, but of a conspiracy. And why shouldn’t it have done so? For eight long years we have been relentlessly bombarded by media that this man was a threat to democracy, a threat to world peace, and “The New Hitler”. If he was indeed the New Hitler, then the only thing to lament in light of the shooting was the fact that the assassin had missed his target by an Act of God. This is what consistency would demand.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was the culmination of eight years of his constant demonization, the inability of Hillary’s campaign to defeat him, the neutering of his Presidency, his sidelining during the days after J6, and the failure to politically assassinate him by locking him up in prison. If he could not be politically nor legally liquidated, all that remained was his physical elimination. First came the political, then the legal, and finally the physical. It is this sequence of events which has left me convinced that this was indeed a conspiracy.
I try to be responsible when writing on my Substack, but at the same time I have a duty to be truthful with my readers. I am doing my best to keep an open mind about this event and am trying to keep my powder dry, but I, like you (and like Joan Didion in August of 1969 when she heard the news of the slaughter at the Polanski residence) was not in the slightest bit surprised that it happened. We all saw this coming, and not one of us was thrown off key when it finally took place.
The stage was clearly set for it to happen, and certain powers-that-be tried their best to set the state perfectly for it to occur. Per
:Back in April of this year, nine House Democrats introduced a bill to strip Donald Trump of his Secret Service protection under a bill that they called the “DISGRACED Former Protectees Act”, which you can find here.
This bill did not make it into law, but its attempted passage is indicative of how the path was being cleared for Donald Trump to be physically liquidated at some point in the future.
Am I saying that someone somewhere called up this failed assassin and said “hey, we need you to kill Trump”? No, I am not saying this. It’s far too early to leap to such conclusions, and as mentioned up above I do have a duty to be responsible in my writing. Speculation and theorizing are best saved for the comments section below, or on social media (it’s a lot of fun to do, I will concede).
What I am saying is that paths have been cleared for a gunman to try to take Donald Trump out. We are already seeing how poorly the Secret Service performed on that day, and even some sitting GOP Senators and House Representatives are taking the agency to task over it, with demands for the head of Director Kimberly Cheatle.
Think about the sequence of events that led up to this assassination attempt. Think about the hysteria and demonization that propelled it. Think about the role of the FBI in targeting Donald Trump and many of his supporters.1 Then think about how the FBI was tasked with investigating the attempted assassination. The cleanup crew arrived on scene to cover the failure up in a nice and tidy way. None of us were taken aback by the events of that Saturday, just like none of us were surprised when Jeffrey Epstein conveniently “committed suicide” in his holding cell, either.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was a flex of power. Only through an Act of God did he survive.
“No Man, No Problem”
The line above has been attributed to Joseph Stalin, and I have little doubt that he would have uttered such a thing for two reasons:
it was in character for him as he enjoyed making such reductionist amoral remarks
his record of bloody purges speaks for itself
The elimination of an individual is an act of last resort in which all other approaches to change the target’s behaviour have been exhausted, leaving physical liquidation the only remaining solution to the perceived problem. It also serves to warn others to not act in a similar manner, lest they too eat a bullet. This act, one most often borne of desperation, is climactic. This is why such acts enthrall so many people, especially those like myself.
I was too young to fully comprehend how the murder of John Lennon affected so many people so deeply. I saw the images of the people holding vigil in front of The Dakota on the Upper West Side, but my mind could not yet process it. Less than four months later, John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. I remember watching the video on television, but was unmoved. The film of that attempted assassination was too short, and not much could be seen. The main reason for the lack of impact (at least for young Nic) was because the Secret Service did a fantastic job on that day.2
The first assassination (attempted or successful) that did resonate with me happened later that same year: on October 6, 1981 the Islamic Jihad assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. That one stuck with me, and it has stayed with me for one, very specific reason; the video from the scene of the assassination was quite graphic, and it was broadcast everywhere.
At exactly 2:27 you can see a man whose right arm has been obliterated thanks to the assassins:
That image burned itself into my memory, and has never once left. I brought this up before in a previous essay, and several people belonging to my age cohort let me know that they too had the exact same thing happen to them. We do not realize just how easily we are influenced in our formative years until we have the benefit of hindsight to give us perspective on it.