A Reader’s Question on the Trump Assassination Hypothesis

I want to thank a reader for engaging sceptically and civilly with the conclusions I drew in my previous piece about the attempted Trump assassination. I’m responding with this piece because the reader has prompted me to articulate in more detail the uncertainties that are inherent in my conclusions. As I said in one of my comment responses: no-one, including me, should be fully on board with my arguments!

Although I remain unconvinced by the evidence the reader put forward to disprove my hypothesis, the process of engaging with their challenge got me to face up to the flaws in my argument. So I will first explain why the reader’s evidence was not compelling enough to shift my position and then, as an exercise in intellectual honesty, I will explain my own lingering doubts which were there before the reader questioned my conclusions but which resurfaced more clearly as a result. However, I don’t believe these doubts detract from the overarching message I tried to convey, and I will explain why.

The first comment I am addressing is this one:

“Scott Ritter did a video in which he opines that the Deep State tried to take Trump out. If true, that would falsify your hypothesis.”

I agree with Ritter that the security breaches that led to the attempted (or ‘attempted’) assassination were allowed to happen. While this is an assumption shared by both of the first two scenarios outlined in the main piece I wrote, the difference between scenario one and scenario two is one of motive, which is where Ritter and I depart. In scenario one, they are motivated to get rid of him. In scenario two, they aren’t, which is why they didn’t. To recap on those scenarios:

Ritter is a proponent of scenario one – he thinks the deep state was motivated to remove Trump from the picture because he is a threat to The System. However, on the evidence I can see, Trump strikes me as a System asset posing as a rebel, and I therefore struggle to believe that The System would be motivated to remove him. I therefore lean towards scenario two – a staged spectacle of a botched assassination attempt by a lone gunman to exploit the event for political capital. 

Underpinning Ritter’s argument is an assumption (weak in my opinion) that Trump is a threat, ergo they tried to kill him. While I think I’ve given lots of reasons why I think Trump is not a threat to The System, Ritter’s arguments for why he is a threat hang solely on the MAGA slogan – Trump is MAGA, the Establishment is not MAGA, the people want MAGA. This kind of analysis is, in my view, not serious. Pundits merely asserting that Trump is a threat to the Establishment, without articulating a robust rationale for that belief, is not evidence that the deep state wanted him dead. It still boggles my mind that analysts like Ritter can assert Trump is a threat to The System and not allow Operation Warp Speed to gnaw away at their consciences. It wasn’t his fault, they say. They tricked him. Whether he’s a fool or a knowing stooge is frankly splitting hairs; either way, he’s not a threat to the Establishment!

To the extent that Ritter does try to provide evidence, it’s the same evidence I’m using to prove the opposite of what he’s saying! I’m referring here to the Vance VP selection which Ritter thinks is a sign of Trump’s anti-Establishment political acumen, whereas I’m saying the exact opposite. Fair enough then. One of us is wrong. Ritter argues that Vance is a good pick by Trump because Vance is a serious MAGA proponent. He glosses over the fact that Vance was one of Trump’s most caustic critics within the Republican party and doesn’t explain how Vance magically transformed into a Trump/MAGA fan. The clue to how that happened negates Ritter’s argument entirely. Vance is a Silicon Valley appointment foisted on Trump by Thiel. Vance made his peace with Trump and Trump has accepted him because Thiel would appear to have more power than Trump in making his appointments. None of this enters Ritter’s calculations.

Ritter asserts that Trump is highly independent in the sense that no one influences his choice of appointments and he alone decides policy on the core issues that matter to him. In trying to advance the argument for Trump’s independence, he comes unstuck for a number of reasons. Where to begin?

At the big picture level, he seems oblivious to the reality that the terms ‘deep state’ and ‘the Establishment’ are accepted terms precisely because most mature adults understand that a US president’s influence on American policy is extremely limited. The Biden presidency has reinforced the existence of the deep state like no other presidency could have. It’s proof that you can quite literally put a dementia patient in charge of the White House and every aspect of US-NATO empire policy, including and especially the war machine, will hum along quite nicely and get ramped up when empire imperatives demand it. The US empire needs a president only to fool the audience that their ‘democracy’ is real. Ritter more than once asserts that the US actually has a democracy, and I would counter that this is frankly not an assertion that a respectable alt-media pundit should be making without severe qualification.

His argument about Trump’s independence of mind also ignores the fact that the excuse that Trump supporters fall back on most for his numerous first term failures was that he appointed the wrong people and they ran rings around him. One small problem here – they’re describing how the deep state works, except that they’re painting it all as a ‘mistake’ by Trump! And as I argued, Trump has already begun making that ‘mistake’ again with the appointment of Vance.

Another reason that Ritter puts forward for Trump being an anti-Establishment threat is that he arose outside of, and is independent of, what he calls the “duopoly” – more commonly termed the uniparty system that presents a fake red/blue alternative to get people to endorse the same end product with different customer branding every four to eight years. I do not agree that Trump is outside the duopoly or uniparty. Trump needs the Republican Party and the Republican Party needs Trump. The MAGA and ‘draining the swamp’ slogans have attracted a large demographic that is tired of the uniparty, but the beauty of that situation for the Establishment is that the MAGA demographic still has to vote Republican to get their candidate in office. And when MAGA man is in office, the Republican party still ends up doing what the Republican Party always does. The uniparty wins.

If Trump was not truly complicit in the uniparty sham (or ‘duopoly’ as Ritter calls it), his base would be big enough to allow him to run as an independent and he’d win the presidency without the Republican Party. But he can’t do that, and nor does he want to. MAGA, though powerful in its own right, is still a faction of the Republican Party that needs the party to gain any sort of political power. The MAGA faction can’t go it alone, while without the MAGA Republican vote, the greater Republican Party would be severely weakened. They need each other.

To repeat: Ritter’s rhetoric scores no points with me. His rhetoric is intended for an audience that has already accepted at face value that Trump is a threat to the Establishment. He therefore doesn’t need to try very hard to justify his position to them, and I’ve tried to show above that his assertions are weak. All Ritter has done is to confirm that he is firmly in the first of my three camps but he hasn’t provided evidence to convince me that I should shift from scenario two into the first camp.

The reader provided more “support for Trump as enemy of the globalists from the Duran”. In my view, however, that conversation was not evidence of anything except more wishful thinking by MAGA cap wearers:

-          They acknowledged The System ran rings around Trump in his first term on appointments and pretty much everything else, and then basically expressed the sentiment that hopefully this time it’ll be different. Here’s a hopey-changey quote from Alexander Mercouris that captures the whole spirit of the discussion: “He seems to have a better understanding of the forces he would be up against now than he was then, but those forces remain incredibly strong and whether he really can prevail against them is another matter completely. I’m not sure that he can…but he is shifting the dial in American politics more and more to his side.”

-          In a recent interview that was dissected by Mercouris, Trump invoked the spirit of late 19^th century President McKinley, an America Firster on US trade. Ergo, this time Trump has a protectionist programme ready. Really?

-          McKinley was from Ohio and Vance is from Ohio, ergo this is a sign from the gods.

-          Like Ritter, they croon over the Vance selection. To reiterate: from where Thiel’s sitting, it certainly is a great pick because Vance wasn’t really Trump’s pick! He’s a Silicon Valley deep state choice – Thiel’s choice.

-          They discussed Trump mentioning the disturbing prospect of Jamie Dimon as Treasury Secretary and then dismissed this as a joke by Trump. It’ll be interesting to see how hard our MAGA pals are laughing if Trump follows through on that ‘joke’ in December.

To sum up, The Duran discussion in its quality and content was no different to the Ritter viewpoints. Commentators like The Duran have invested their hopes in a saviour. You can hear them ask troubling questions about their saviour, only to dismiss them without good reason because if you’ve invested your hope in a saviour, then you must believe that they will save you. That is the whole point of hero worship.

Let’s move to my own assessment of the weaknesses in my arguments. I think I can do a much better job of cutting myself off at the knees than Ritter or The Duran can. Here’s how I could be convinced that the deep state really wants Trump dead.

In ruling out scenario one, there are at least two problems with my interpretation and assessment of deep state motive, or lack thereof. The first is that Trump may well be a threat to The System in ways that are not apparent to me. There is a tendency for freedom lovers, precisely because we are freedom lovers, to ascribe too much effectiveness, ingenuity, and skill to the deep state in its ability to control events, institutions and people. I may be susceptible to this. The System does make blunders. Let’s explore how both Trump and the System may have blundered their way through his last presidency.

I expressed the view that Trump’s win in 2016 was an accident. He may have been totally unprepared for it. Both he and The System were caught off guard. Much, if not all of the next four years, was about extending his role in The Apprentice to the world stage and essentially ad libbing the whole performance from one day to the next. He had no real ideas and even if he did, he certainly had no execution strategy. He was winging it the whole time – pretty much what he has done all his life, which is a luxury one has if your father leaves you a few billion dollars to play around with.

There is potential here for considering a different type of dilemma for the deep state. It is possible that while Trump was not an out-and-out threat, he introduced an element of unpredictability to their planning and execution that they found unnerving. It didn’t stop deep state business-as-usual, but it might have been a bit like being the CEO of a large corporation and having to go into the office with your three-year old because the baby-sitter didn’t turn up. Kids, like wild animals, are very unpredictable. By 2020, The System was glad to see the back of Trump and it may have even rigged the elections to make sure he went back to the creche and stayed there. I have not gone too deep into the rigged elections rabbit-hole but I think there’s an even chance that rigging happened.

What we may now be seeing is something a little more complicated than what my original piece posits. On the one hand, The System may be dealing with a Trump who is by no means a radical, and who therefore looks like a deep state team player for all the reasons I stated – Zionist Papi Warp Speed. But on the other hand, The System may not yet have succeeded in completely neutralising him by making him an offer he can’t refuse. Add to that the fact that the Republican Party can’t shake him off (much as they’d like to) because MAGA and draining the swamp is a genie they can’t put back in the bottle, and only Trump can converse with that beast.

This potentially adds up to a threat to the deep state of another four years of unpredictability with Trump running amok on the domestic and foreign stage. If you’re going to present a puppet as an illusion, it should at least glide around smoothly on the stage, as Obama did. It ruins the act when the audience sees the strings breaking. If this more nuanced perspective is plausible, it explains why The System could be more motivated to remove him.

There is another way to look at deep state motivation for an assassination attempt that has nothing to do with whether Trump is an asset or liability. Genuine assassination plans may have been hatched and motivated to create maximum chaos that the deep state might seek to then harness for control objectives. Think civil strife, states of emergency, and so on. Again, this would shift the deep state motive dial from low to high. The motive for acting would not be based on Trump being a threat but rather on creating conditions for exploitation.  

What both of these potential holes in my analysis highlight is that we will probably never know what motivated the US security apparatus’ actions on 13^th July.

I still marginally favour scenario two because the evidence required to make the first scenario more of a goer – Trump being a threat – is still not overwhelming enough for me. Implicit in the embrace of scenario two is that Trump has now made his peace with the deep state, or that some sort of bargain has been struck that is acceptable to him. And I still find it very hard to believe that straightforward incompetence was at play in scenario three. Bottom line is, if they let it happen, then the speculation has to be around why – namely scenarios one and two.

I am not claiming to be right; I am claiming to have a theory. I can find evidence for Trump in league with the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC) and others can find evidence to the contrary, although Ritter and The Duran don’t convince me at all. If both sets of arguments have some credibility, that might support the possibility I floated here, which is that he is neither asset nor liability – simply a loose cannon.

Ultimately, I cannot invest any hopes in ‘saviours’ and ‘heroes’, but especially not Zionist Papi Warp Speed! Two giant red flags right there. Given that Trump passes what is ostensibly the most crucial OCGFC test – fealty to Israel – I would question any evidence that claims he is a thorn in the side of the globalists. Zionism is The System stress test: start there and you can’t go far wrong.

In summary, I still maintain that scenario three is just too implausible, which leaves you with scenarios one or two. And it doesn’t really matter which one of these you go for in the end because both have the fingerprints of the deep state all over the crime scene. However, opting for scenario one still makes less sense to me and is sadder because not only does it entail opting for a ‘hero’, but it entails opting for a hero who does not fit the hero bill in any way, shape or form.

Ultimately, it matters not whether The System failed or succeeded in its attempt to execute either scenario. What matters is our recognition of its attempt to manipulate us and the game in general, and our reaction to it. My message remains unchanged. Hold your ground, not in order to wait for a knight in shining armour, but because there will be no knights in shining armour. In fact, that is a test we must pass to earn our freedom – demonstrating freedom from a dependence on someone ‘better’ or more powerful than us. The System is programmed to grind saviours down and spit them out. On the other hand, you and millions like you, are the heroes you have been waiting for all your life.