Tuesday, July 16, 2024

OK, Let's Take One of the Conspiracy Theories Seriously, Just For the Sake of Argument

I'm not seeing a lot of this one, but I'm seeing some of it:

"The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was faked by Trump / the Trump campaign."

Do I believe that to be the case? No.

Why don't I believe that to be the case? Because I've seen no evidence to suggest that it's the case.

But I can make a case for how it's not impossible.

  1. The conspirators recruit a naive, troubled 20-year-old who's also clearly a poor marksman (cut from his school's rifle team). He's the "patsy." Precisely what he believes himself to be doing or why is unknown -- perhaps he thought he was a local recruit to the "Trump Security Team?" -- but he's induced in some way to crawl up on a rooftop with an AR-15 so that he can be shot dead when ...
  2. An actual shooter, who can put bullets where he wants them to go, opens fire and intentionally hits a few bystanders to cause panic, while ...
  3. Donald Trump ducks down behind the podium, slaps the side of his head with a small packet of fake blood, lets himself get dogpiled by Secret Service agents, then gets up, raises his fist, and yells "fight." Instant "the man meets the moment" energy.
How many conspirators would that require? At the absolute minimum, Trump and the two shooters. But really several others. There'd need to be a doctor willing to hide the fact that there was no real wound. There'd need to be either an operation to distract the Secret Service probably involving several people, or one or more conspirators within the Secret Service, or both.

And then everything would have to go perfectly.

And then everyone involved would have to either remain silent, or be silenced, or be discredited if they talked.

"Not impossible" is not the same thing as "plausible." It would take credible evidence to get from the former to the latter, and I haven't seen any such evidence yet.

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