“No man, no problem”

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“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).

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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. 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.

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:

1. it was in character for him as he enjoyed making such reductionist amoral remarks


2. 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.

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.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar may be the most famous assassination of all time, but it is far too distant from our current day to be anything more than a historical curiosity. Like millions of others, it is the assassination of JFK that has the strongest hold on me. I would guess that Oliver Stone’s JFK is what sparked the interest in this event for most Gen Xers, but I was already heavily into it thanks to some TV network special that aired on the 20th anniversary of the shooting in Dealey Plaza. I cannot for the life of me remember on which network it aired, but I am certain that it was what ignited my lifelong interest in the subject. To this day, I still collect whatever new material is published or released pertaining to it.

I’ve shared this image before with you. When I was little boy, everyone used to smoke. My older uncles in Canada all had these matchbooks. They didn’t have matchbooks (or any other items) emblazoned with an image of any other US President or world leader. JFK was to them very special; he was both Catholic (one of us!) and an anti-communist. His elimination was to them (and in the eyes of many, many others) a martyrdom of sorts, and the official conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone defied all logic and reason. The US House of Representatives went on to conclude in 1978 that JFK was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The assassination of JFK was also a flex.

“We were one inch away from civil war”, was a common refrain on social media in the 72 hours that followed the shooting of Donald Trump. I disagreed (of course), asking those making that claim to reveal to us who the two sides in such a civil war would be. To engage in a hypothetical, it would not be beyond reason to assume that some scattered and highly localized violence would have ensued if Donald Trump did not turn his head at the exact moment, but none of the centres of power in the USA would have moved into open violent rebellion against the regime if he kept his head still when the bullet arrived. In a state on the verge of civil conflict, even an attempt to assassinate the leader of the opposition should have resulted in some violence, or at least mayhem. Nothing of the sort has happened since the shooter pulled the trigger, making his action anti-climactic.

Being an assassin’s target has been Trump’s fate since he first dared to pick up the populist mantle back in 2015. Yet when I try to discern the overall significance of the act, I find myself having difficulty in doing so. Trump may be a populist firebrand (actual or opportunist, the choice is yours), but he is in essence a 90s Clinton liberal. This is what makes the past eight years all the more confusing. Trump is not some sort of revolutionary figure, he is well within the bounds of post-Cold War elite opinion, with his stance on immigration being the only real outlier. His crimes seem to be being both a unlikable figure for many people, and having opinions that are slightly outdated. His current campaign is running on on moderate platform to woo over disaffected centrists. The man is clearly not the second coming of Adolf Hitler.

Many of you have heard me in the past say that at best, Trump is a Calvo Sotelo-like figure. Calvo Sotelo was the leading anti-Republican speaker in the Spanish Cortes in 1936 during the rule of the leftist Popular Front. Sotelo was a firebrand in the Cortes, and he flirted with the forces of reaction IN reaction to the extremist leftism that was then rocking Spain. But he was not a revolutionary figure. Sotelo occupied a space within the confines Spanish democracy, and was still on the side of the governing system despite these flirtations. His words in the Cortes were purposely delivered to serve as a warning of what was to come if things did not cool down.

(Note the date of my post. That is the most recent example, but I have been comparing Trump to Sotelo since 2016).

Things did not cool down, as Sotelo was assassinated by the bodyguard of PSOE leader Indalecio Prieto. Note the date of Sotelo’s assassination:

Sotelo’s killing was followed four days later by the launch of the failed coup by the Spanish Generals that led to that country’s brutal civil war. Many people, including Franco, have claimed that the assassination of Calvo Sotelo is what convinced a lot of Spaniards to finally reject the failed democracy known as the Second Spanish Republic once and for all.

This is where the comparisons between the today’s USA and 1936 Spain end. The system of governance in the USA is almost 250 years old, and has been very, very stable for most of its existence. Spanish democracy was barely five years old at the time of Sotelo’s assassination. Furthermore, all the centres of power in the USA today are committed to the ruling system. In 1936 Spain, almost no one was. The military was already committed to the coup that they would launch on the 17th of July, and the anarchists, communists, and most of the socialists were only paying lip service to the republic, using it to try and force through their own systems of rule (or lack thereof, when it came to the anarchists). If Trump was killed on July 13, 2024, no centres of power in the USA would have reacted like the Spanish right did in Spain in July of 1936.

(BTW, this is the perfect time to announce that I will be publishing the next entry of the Spanish Civil War series next week. Coincidentally, it covers the period in which Calvo Sotelo is assassinated. -ed)

The desperation of the powers-that-be to regain total narrative control is palpable. The presence of media that diverges from their narrative eviscerates the Potemkin Villages that they routinely erect to deceive us.

For the past four years, it has been demanded of us to not believe our lying eyes and instead trust them when it came to Joe Biden’s mental faculties. We were supposed to blindly accept that his mind was as sharp as ever, and that his ability to perform his duties as President of the United States were without question.

Meanwhile, everyone chose to believe their own eyes…except for those whose interests were best served by the fiction of the Potemkin Villages that dotted the landscape. Only when the long-obvious fact of his mental decline could no longer be hidden did the charade finally come to an end. “Yes, we know that the Emperor has no clothes.”

Joe Biden committed the gravest sin that any politician could ever make: he could no longer deliver what his backers demanded of him. That meant that he had to go. If he could win the election, then any momentary mental lapses would continue to be covered up or rationalized. His role was to win power, and to serve those that put him in power. But as of a few days ago, the Biden Family realized that they too were disposable.

Certain commentators are engaging in point-scoring (who can blame them?) by claiming that his removal is a coup d’etat of sorts. He is a sitting President of the United States, and if his mental decline is the reason for him pulling out of the race, then it begs the following question: just who is running the country? It is this specific issue that is the most important one with regards to Biden’s abdication. Joe being replaced on the ticket is largely a sideshow as whoever takes his place will continue to pursue the platform of the Democrats should they get into office.

Just who is running the country right now? Who has authority regarding the nuclear codes?

The fix was in some time ago. If it is true that Biden was set up to fail in a debate that was held far too early in the campaign season, then whoever was responsible for that deserves a raise and a promotion. What we do now know is that a concerted effort was made to “convince” the Biden Family to accept Joe’s removal from the ticket, and that the Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer were just a few of the big names involved in this conspiracy. If investigative journalism was still a real thing these days, we would soon be reading a minute-by-minute account of how Biden was sent to the glue factory. Somehow, I doubt that we will read the story of his removal from the scene. Joe is now gone for good.

This too was a flex.