The first pinned post can be found here:
https://lemmy.world/post/17530961
That’s where all the engagement and comments can be found, and I’d encourage everyone to participate there.
The reason for THIS post is to direct everyone there.
I’m getting multiple reports that some people can’t see it for some reason. Could be Federation, could be they blocked the user who posted it.
Here’s hoping you all can see THIS one and move over to where everyone else is engaged.
Please please please can we stop the conspiracy theories from blowing up in this thread? Can we not act like them?
Conspiracy theories aside, I’d like to see people mocking the injury with little red ear clips, just like these assholes mocked John Kerry with purple heart band-aids:
Because “when they go low we go high” was a stupid strategy, and not only did it not work, but it paved the way for Trump to win.
Making rhetoric that connects with the idiots and bigots in America who are old enough to vote is, annoyingly, a required part of political campaigns here, especially if your intent is to peel any of those votes away from populist candidates. It’s just social engineering.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to think that the actor turned politician decided to act like he was getting shot for attention. He’s a reality show host that says shocking things. I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say he would fake an assassination attempt when it’s in every other movie in Hollywood. This is in his wheelhouse.
NYT photographer got the photo of the bullet, it seems that TMZ’s reporting that it was glass from the teleprompter is not correct:
https://x.com/spectatorindex/status/1812293722832318726
There very well could be bullets. One person died. However, I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say he would sacrifice someone to gain what he wants to gain.
He has been proven to manipulate with the Russians for the last election. Is it that big of a leap to think he would stage a dramatic scene for sympathy? Plus he walked away without any harm.
Uh huh. You are selling that he’s that important and that people care that much. I don’t buy it. Go forth with your blind eyes. Mine see a better truth ;)
So walk me through how that conversation goes in your head. Trump is just this side of senile, so he definitely couldn’t have come up with a convoluted plot involving his attempted assassination, so it 100% would have had to be a suggestion of someone else. So let’s walk through the conversation that must have happened for this to have been a fake assassination attempt.
“So Mr. Trump, I think that the best thing to do to ensure you’re going to win the next election is to have someone shoot very near you. Maybe the bullet will graze you, maybe it’ll hit the teleprompter and send shards of glass your way. But either way, it’ll be a very close thing, and you’ll suffer a minor injury along the way.”
Do you honestly think that Donald Trump, the guy who got out of the draft because of bone spurs, the guy who gets queasy at the sight of blood, the guy who has spent the last 2 months talking about how he’d cling to a battery to get electrocuted instead of taking his chances with a shark, would be ok with being shot at? Seriously?
Because if that’s what you think, you and I don’t occupy the same universe.
Be creative. Let’s say you are a decision maker in Trump’s orbit. You think now is a good time to do something big to fire up your base.
Do you tell trump and risk bad acting or do you set it up without his knowledge? I believe the injury is genuine but that doesn’t rule out the idea that the situation was set up to have a minimal chance of permanent injury to the candidate while giving him incredible PR and the chance to look strong.
I would think the smartest play would to be near him say 10 yards where it would “look” close enough. Actually take out the sacrifice. But then go down and act as hit with a blood pack or cut himself on the ear when he was on the ground. The graze is just an illusion. Kind of like the bullet catch trick if you are familiar with magic tricks.
Whelp… Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey’s Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.
Also:
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Sonia Sotomayor’s decision not to retire during Biden’s term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.
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We’re going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.
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Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump’s, they’re going to be brushed aside.
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For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.
Democrats aren’t just jumping ship over this bullshit. The actual voters, the people, not the talking heads, are pretty entrenched in Not Trump. Votes aren’t changing over this, and the Democrats know what’s at stake. At the end of the day there’s more blue than red and it was an L for Trump as soon as he said he was running.
And the end of the day I dont give a shit that he got shot. So did 50. Its not changing my vote. He’s been calling for violence and got some. I worry this will cause more political violence.
This is absolutely going to yield more political violence. And that’s something Trump has been trying to make happen for a while now.
In that context, and also considering he was deep into the professional wrestling for a while, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if at least some of this was staged. This whole bit in particular seems super fishy. Like… how in the fuck did the secret service detail not coordinate overwatch with the cops, or just do it themselves?
Votes aren’t changing but the Trump voter was severely demoralized before this.
Trump’s debate performance was fucking awful. Yes, Democrats are worried about Biden for good reason, but Trump won no favors during the debate.
This event has galvinized Trump and even given him a photo-op that makes it look/feel like he was ordained by God himself. I shit you not, that’s what people will be praying for and seeing today now that its Sunday. If you know anything about conservatives, that’s whats going through their head today on Sunday.
With that, a lot of them will see it as their holy duty to vote Trump in November. Expect record turnout. We will need to do everything to drum up the anti-Trump vote now to keep up with them.
I always used to wonder how the Weimar Republic fumbled the ball so hard. Now I know.
Also, in Christian eschatology, isn’t it a big deal that the Antichrist suffers a near fatal head injury before his ultimate victory?
Its not even a graze.
It turns out it was glass that exploded somewhere and shards that hit Trump. The bullet never got close. The kid was a terrible shot (thank goodness for that. A Trump martyr would be even worse than the current situation IMO).
300m with an AR15 isn’t too difficult, but it does take training and practice to consistently hit at that range. And the relative speed at which secret-service killed the kid proves that (the Secret Service marksmen returned fire accurately and precisely. A job well done on that front).
We’re incredibly lucky this was a punk ass kid who didn’t know how to use his new toy. Then again, this all is much worse for Democracy anyway.
Sonia Sotomayor’s decision not to retire during Biden’s term is looking like yet another D own goal
She’s 70. She can easily make it 5 more years.
5 more years.
Ohh, ho ho. Yes. 5 more years when we will have our…next election.
I believe I read somewhere she has some kind of condition that could impact her longevity though.
All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden
STOP with this stupid rhetoric. If Biden steps down, it will be game over for the Dems.
And no, Trump has no real chance to get back into the White House. Trump will lose. He already lost as a sitting president while trying to illegally stay in power. The fact that people keep forgetting this is beyond stupid.
This incident will just encourage more people to vote. Good.
Trump lost by around 50,000 votes in swing states, in the middle of a bungled pandemic response. In 2020, Biden was polling significantly higher than Trump; today he is polling significantly lower.
All this before that picture of Trump fist-pumping after being shot, which is going to be widely juxtaposed against Biden’s inability to walk down 2-3 steps.
I don’t know where this idea that Trump has “no chance” comes from.
I give 50/50 odds that Harris can do about as well as Biden, the more I think about it.
But there’s very few Democrats who can reasonably replace Biden today. And most of those do not have access to Biden’s fundraising (Harris does have access to that and gives her a huge leg up).
I still think that Biden staying on to serve as a political shield for Harris… and then resigning in January is the best path forward for Democrats. Harris still has to deal with womanizers and racists. All the adults recognize that she’s the real President Candidate moving forward already, so its not like she needs to actually step into the political firezone.
I’m leaning to 50/50 now because Harris feasibly could benefit from some kind of VP pick herself to shore up support. Or she could go down in flames as the racists / anti-women vote turns out against her. Hard for me to say, but its a feasible path IMO, if people really want to replace Biden to replace him with Harris.
EDIT: However, the idea that Biden should resign for some no-name / non-existant Democrat who hasn’t stepped up despite 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, now 2024 elections is fucking nuts. Your mysterious secret savior doesn’t exist, and they’d never step up 3 months before the election to ruin their chances at 2028 anyway.
I give 50/50 odds that Harris can do about as well as Biden
Those odds are terrible.
“Hey, take this gun. Point the gun in between your eyes, then pull the trigger. If the gun doesn’t fire, I’ll give you a million dollars. The gun has 50/50 odds that it will fail. Wanna play?”
Of course they have to identify the shooter with his First, middle, and last name, as is tradition… and it was a 20 yr old registered Republican? Wonder what the story on that will be?
I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.
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A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I’d rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.
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A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don’t really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.
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Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that’s what your parents told you to do when you got your driver’s license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that’s what everyone did, or maybe you’ve had a change of heart since registering.
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There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.
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Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.
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Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it’s a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it’s a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.
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They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.
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Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn’t go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.
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Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.
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Just plain ol’ mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn’t going to get you very far because it’s not based on anything approaching logic.
I’m actually in the first camp as well, I’d rather have some amount of control over who the opposition is, and I like to keep tabs on what kind of rhetoric/propaganda the other side is pushing on their base. It looks like the shooter may have been in this camp as well, based on the reporting I’ve seen. A BBC story notes he was a registered Republican, but that he had made a donation to a liberal political group, ActBlue, in 2021. So I think it’s probably going to be pinned on Democrats trying to be the violent ones, even though it has literally been Trump & co stirring up shit for years and basically guaranteeing that something like this would happen.
I heard on the news that he donated to ActBlue™ so that definitely tells some of the story.
Sounds more and more like he was a libertarian who didn’t like Trump. Doesn’t fit so cleanly into the media narrative, but there’s definitely a lot of folks who fit that description politically in the US. Right leaning in a lot of ways but don’t like authoritarianism. That part of the electorate also tends to own the most firearms, and there are no shortage of them in PA.
So how does this megathread work, do we all pitch in and buy a shooter or?
This is actually a scrum about yesterday’s failed deployment. I’ll add your suggestion to the Miro board.
I’m getting multiple reports that some people can’t see it for some reason. Could be Federation, could be they blocked the user who posted it.
checks username
It’s the second option and for good reason.
