Take for example the live updates posted by the New York Times yesterday, with one headline stating that the second assassination attempt “raises new questions about the Secret Service’s ability to protect candidates”. That’s an incredibly strange conclusion to reach when no other candidate has been subject to an assassination attempt. Rather than raising questions about the Secret Service’s ability to “protect candidates”, the aborted shooting raises questions about the agency’s ability — and willingness — to protect Donald Trump.

If this were a systemic issue with the United States Secret Service, then why would Trump be the only candidate subject to not just one but two attempts? If the reason for the failures were that the Secret Service is hobbled by DEI, or bloated, or under-resourced or any one of the other explanations that have been suggested, then why would we only see a single candidate targeted?

In this case, it very much is for lack of trying that we have little new information about the assassination attempt in Butler, and the American press has largely moved on from the story. We have seen virtually no journalistic task forces — the type that were assembled by virtually every newsroom to pursue mostly false allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia — and no searing investigations into the Secret Service. The media, not wanting to paint Trump as a victim or a near-martyr, has found new things to talk about.

In another story yesterday, the New York Times seemed to assign blame to Trump. The story, titled “Trump’s golfing has been a security challenge for the Secret Service”, claims that the agency prefers armoured vehicles and enclosed spaces to do its job correctly. Putting aside the question of how, in that case, it managed to protect President Biden as he sat on a Delaware beach for two weeks this summer, what we see here is a deflection from the main issue at hand: a leading political candidate has now found himself directly in the line of an assassin’s fire — twice.

And so, on the toughest and most important questions, we have no answers. Who is Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot Trump in July? What were his motives? How did a 20-year-old man with no evidence of professional training climb an unguarded roof just 130 metres from the stage where Trump was speaking? How could he have possibly fired eight rounds before being killed? Why was he allowed to scout the site with a rangefinder in hand? Why was he not neutralised when he was first spotted lying on the roof opposite Trump? Why was that roof unguarded? Why did it take so long to get Trump out of the venue?

Without any serious attempt to answer these questions, there is a risk that public sentiment, already stirred in a cauldron of cynicism and mistrust online, will drift towards conspiracy theory. But even more dangerous are the implications of brushing aside assassination attempts on a former president. A precedent is being set where political violence against a candidate who is not merely disfavoured but who has been positioned by the media as an imminent threat to American democracy itself is met with a collective shrug. That might be the most alarming aspect of all.

---

Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

AshleyRindsberg

---