Well, it's the morning after, and remarkably few new additional facts have emerged overnight. So I thought we'd focus on the minimal amount of salient information - before the Democrat-media complex do as they did with the first Trump assassination attempt two months ago and memory-hole the thing. Incuriouser and incuriouser: that's the motto of the American press. An attempted presidential takedown is now so routine, most US TV stations didn't even bother breaking into their crappy football games.
But there's a few things that strike me as curiouser than they should be:
~First up, the last-minute change in the Republican nominee's schedule. The alleged perp was outside the Trump International Golf Club for twelve hours, which was long enough to figure out the most vulnerable spot: the hole closest to the exterior fence.
And yet the golf game was not on the candidate's official schedule, and was a comparatively last-minute addition. So how did Mr Routh find out about it? The unusually long motorcade arriving at the club? No. The would-be killer was on site hours before Trump - from 1.59am on Sunday, apparently. How did he know his target would be headed his way? Per the Secret Service, at suddenly scheduled events such as yesterday's the security is more ad hoc and improvised than at, say, a rally in Pennsylvania, and therefore the candidate is potentially more vulnerable.
So again: How did the alleged perp know to case the joint at two in the morning?
London's Daily Mail, if not yet The New York Times, The Washington Post or any other American paper, is considering the possibility that he was tipped off by a "mole" within the Secret Service. If that sounds like an old Austin Powers gag, well, yes, but merged with the beloved horror-movie trope: the calls for assassination are coming from inside the house.
The best-case scenario for the USSS is that they're totally incompetent: it's just about possible to explain Butler, PA that way. It cannot easily be stretched to cover what happened at West Palm Beach.
~Second, I'm used to all the talk about insufficient assets. But how does a guy get to hide in Trump's shrubbery for twelve hours? In the wake of 9/11, not far from me on the New Hampshire/Quebec border, they introduced motion detectors and infrared cameras so that chaps like myself couldn't tootle back and forth on the old bootlegging tracks and hiking trails. The technology was a bit crude at first, full of false positives for meandering deer and bear and moose, etc. But they've improved it somewhat - and, in any case, even on the Pittsburg/La Patrie line, a motion detector pinging for twelve hours would attract the attention of even the dopiest border guard.
But not for the Secret Service.
~And then we have the man himself. Like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, he favours the triple-barrelled style: Ryan Wesley Routh. And there are further echoes of 1963 in all his strange pre-kill foreign travel - not Russia this time, but Ukraine:
My friend Jamie Rejent interviewed Ryan Wesley Routh (the man that attempted to assassinate Trump) at a train station on the border of Poland & Ukraine back in April of 2022. Ryan was on his way into Ukraine to "Occupy" Kyiv with his flags and his tent.
🎥 Insta: Jamie.Rejent pic.twitter.com/O5Sp3aBTDm
— Geoff Pilkington (@geoffpilkington) September 16, 2024
I'm familiar with that station. Mr Routh is supposed to be a construction worker in North Carolina, yet he is also a pro-Ukrainian activist, widely interviewed by leading publications in the US and abroad, and with a remarkable level of access:
WOW THE TRUMP SHOOTER MET WITH UKRAINE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE 🚩 pic.twitter.com/c41X9rmniP
— Chief Trumpster (@ChiefTrumpster) September 15, 2024
So, in the middle of a war, Ukraine's Ministry of Defence can find time to meet every week with a man who subsequently tries to kill Donald Trump?
His contacts in Washington are pretty good, too. From The New York Times:
In the interview, Mr. Routh said he was in Washington to meet with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission "for two hours" to help push for more support for Ukraine. The commission is led by members of Congress and staffed by congressional aides. It is influential on matters of democracy and security and has been vocal in supporting Ukraine.
For a "North Carolina construction worker", he seems surprisingly at ease in the chancelleries of power. By sheer coincidence (of course), just about the first person of prominence to pooh-pooh Trump's latest brush with violent death was Routh's fellow Ukrainian activist Rachel Vindman, the wife of the Hero of Impeachment One and sister-in-law of a Virginia congressional candidate:
You doubled down you psychopath pic.twitter.com/p4OBD9McWY
— Mostly Peaceful Memes (@MostlyPeacefull) September 16, 2024
Mr Routh claims to have met with high-level officials in Kiev and Washington. Along the way, did he also meet with the Vindmans?
It is at least possible to pass off the Butler guy as the stereotypical lone nutter. Ryan Wesley Routh is a tougher peg for that hole.
It is now almost a decade since the alphabet-soup agencies began their efforts to subvert Donald Trump (and America's so-called "democracy") by setting up George Papadopoulos in a London wine bar, etc. Is it such a stretch to suggest, on the evidence of the last two months, that elements in the Deep State have now cut to the chase and are trying to kill him?
We are close to a point of no return here, but the Dems are determined to blow past that.
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