Have you heard that the assassination attempt last weekend was faked? Whatever your brand of media, you probably did. This latest version of the “ Trump arranges fake assassination attempt to become more popular” theory goes something like this: Donald Trump and his people planned the shoo—
Okay, let me stop you right there. Donald Trump doesn’t plan things. That’s thinking, which is strike one, and thinking ahead, which is strike two. Strike three is the idea that a lifetime coward would want to put himself in even fake danger and further normalize trying to whack him. While we’re here, though, let’s run down the other reasons the false flag theory is bonkers, beginning with the idea that an assassination planned down to the minute relied on someone crossing the country on time via Amtrak. Good luck with that. We have militias worth of murdering, drug-running, right-wing special forces veterans in Virginia; we can’t hire locally? False flag operations are like war: They are meant to advance your political objectives by other means. But it’s anyone’s guess how a stunt like this would benefit Trump’s approval ratings, when a would-be murderer was gunned down at Mar-a-Lago two months ago, and almost nobody remembers or cares. A cabal worth its salt would not have tapped a Caltech grad from Torrance who won Teacher of the Month, seems to have a sincere background in the Christian faith and who wrote an uncharacteristically thoughtful and measured manifesto (by the terms of the genre) that correctly described Donald Trump as a murdering pedophile rapist. The ideal patsy for an inside job remains a Latino Muslim convert with an Antifa background, ideally radicalized via protests in a place like Minneapolis, whose existence alone serves to legitimize Trump’s active war on the First Amendment and the GOP ’s broader white supremacist, eliminationist project. And while Trump might intend to ring in 2029 by pulling a Fall of Berlin in his underground bunker, anyone wanting to make hay of the event wouldn’t have sent him up to the teleprompter to phlegmily gargle and wheeze about his ballroom. That’s what commercials about husky men’s jeans are for.
But chances are, if you engage in social media, you probably stumbled across someone who skipped over such objections on the way to the conclusion. (“Trump not reacting to the Secret Service is suspicious.” Really? You find the delayed reaction of a sun-downing old man who falls asleep in his own meetings suspicious?) But epistemic collapse is funny like that. After decades of experience with a gutless opposition and hunting down dispositive data on blogs, vlogs and muckraking sites — the sorts of links that end arguments — our politically active online citizenry has slowly habituated itself to trusting that any political argument can eventually find its substantiating link. Finish it with the dopamine rush of validation that comes from algorithms feeding people more potent versions of themselves and their preferences, and the mind will expand its dimensions of the politically possible and probable.
To borrow a sports metaphor, the work of epistemic collapse in practice is like watching peak-era Tom Glavine working an umpire. He’d start by hitting the lower outside corner, getting a strike. Then he’d move the ball off the corner and outside the zone, banging away at it until self-conscious umpires were calling strikes on balls six inches outside the zone. For chronically online liberals, maybe it starts with histrionic blogs from former legacy media writers, then pushes outside a little more with a Facebook fan page updated daily from a Moldovan sweat box, until finally they start looping in “investigative” Substackers who are pivoting from failed business-lifestyle blogging to reposting AI glurge of Greta Thunberg telling off Karoline Leavitt , in a left-of-center variant of psychologically compensatory email forwards about “Marine Todd. ”
In any event, by Tuesday afternoon, the assassination was off CNN’s landing page. The fewest steps you could take to reach it as a topic involved the Federal Communications Commission investigating ABC for a joke Jimmy Kimmel made about Melania Trump. That’s a long road to ship all your plans to nowhere, but the administration itself made that choice. Any sympathy for Trump will be burned off by going after Kimmel again — who will make him look like an asshole again — via an FCC protection racket doomed to die in front of a Supreme Court that’s made it clear you can fuck with anything except the money. Those stories pushed the assassination off the front page with the help of a similarly doomed arrest of James Comey that’s either weeks or months away from being memory-holed as something acting Attorney General Todd Blanche “did while going rogue.”
That’s the trouble with labyrinthine and clandestine plans: You can always find someone else online who thinks they’re real, but you can’t put them in the hands of people whose every action says, “There isn’t one.” The same day that the administration was driving the assassination attempt out of the news cycle, Trump flirted with walking away from his catastrophic Iran War and declaring victory by leaving an indefinite naval blockade in place. Good luck to members of America’s Navy holding the line on a diet of cereal made from an old jar of capers an admiral found in a pantry and a bottle of flat tonic water. We’ll have to work the rest of the victory out in post-production. Trump — the person we know, whose repetitive behavior we cannot avoid — can only ever perform one part of that plan, or any plan, and that is declaring victory, irrespective of circumstance. That is the plot of the Iran War , laid out on day one and retold every other minute of Trump’s life . It’s the only story we will ever have to tell.
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