Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.
The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.
Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.
I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.
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I wouldn’t either. What I would find doubtful is him trusting in the marksmanship of that rando kid that tried at his outdoor rally, to miss instead of accidentally tagging him.
The second guy just generally reeks of crazy dude.
The part that gets me is how utterly unbelievable it is that the Secret Service did not secure a nearby roof with a clear line of site to where Trump would be speaking and then allowed a kid with a rifle to climb up there during the speech and they didn’t notice? Cops noticed. Audience members noticed. But the Secret Service didn’t? They just didn’t notice a huge gaping hole in their defenses while guarding a former president and current candidate? I know the saying is that you shouldn’t ascribe to malevolence what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but come on. Incompetence just cannot do this kind of heave lifting.
I mean… the Secret Service hasn’t exactly been exuding competence these past few years…
They frankly don’t have the manpower to secure every rooftop, that’s not a reasonable expectation. He was spotted earlier on the roof supposedly, but they can’t simply start shooting at every guy on a roof. A guy on a roof at a public gathering is not a confirmed threat.
Now if they saw his rifle because he had lifted it, instead of keeping it laid down, that would look suspicious to me.
That could certainly be the case but they were working with other law enforcement agencies and have already admitted that they did not give clear instructions to local police that the rooftop needed to be secured.
Also,
No, but a guy on a roof with a rifle, particularly a rifle pointed at the target you are supposed to be protecting, sure as hell is a confirmed threat. Had they been paying attention to that roof, they certainly would have shot him before he got any shots off. Just like the agent in Florida started shooting immediately when he saw a rifle barrel sticking through the fence at the golf course.
Yes, if a rifle is sighted. He crawled up to the peak of the building, he was not particularly visible. If you watch the video, the secret service snipers were already scanning that direction with motivation, so they were aware something might be up. Likely looking for visual confirmation of a gun.
There was not much time between when he peeked the roof and when he started firing, partially because an officer comes the roof and saw him, which rushed the shooter. If the police officer hadn’t dropped off the roof when the shooter turned to him, that might have prevented the shooter. But I don’t necessarily feel your average cop has enough training to move towards danger with a high likelihood of being shot in that situation.
More important, in my opinion, is the fact that the secret service snipers do/should have that type of training and FLINCHED AWAY FROM THEIR SCOPES/RIFLES AND HAD TO RE-ACQUIRE THE SHOOTER after he had already started shooting. That was the most insane part to me, and definitely cost them several vital seconds. Their training definitely didn’t show in that moment.
Don’t even get me started on them letting Trump have a photo op before the area was secured with his head and chest fully exposed, unmoving, and perfectly silhouetted seconds after an assassination attempt or the 5’5 agent hiding behind the podium and then pretending to give body coverage to someone a foot taller than they were. Not like the upper chest and head are vital areas or anything.
Agreed. But until a rifle is sighted all you could do is call it in and have someone go check it out. You also wouldn’t want to just focus in and watch the guy when you’re supposed to be watching an entire area for any potential threats.
He could have told someone to do it, and then completely forgot about the entire thing. He doesn’t need to be told the details.
But I think only him getting shot it the ear was fake. That’s a perfect spur of the moment thing to act like a victim.
A really minor grazing could draw blood as seemed to happen at the first attempt, but heal within several days, which explains all the evidence I’ve seen.
Dramatically exaggerating a minor wound to maximize the benefit to him seems exactly what Trump would do in that situation.
That’s operating under the assumption that Trump was actually shot and it wasn’t just a blood pack. His ear looked perfectly normal a few days later.
Plus there’s the fact that he was spotted by security with his rifle like 20 minutes before he started shooting.
Spotted earlier with a rangefinder, not a rifle. You also wouldn’t need a big chunk of your ear missing or something to make a little bit of blood splatter. A graze could do it, and could easily be covered up a day later by some makeup or his usual orange bodypaint.
The evidence just isn’t very convincing.
Ultimately that’s the problem, the evidence isn’t very compelling either way. Could it have happened exactly the way Trump claimed? Yes, it’s certainly possible, and Trump also isn’t likely to sign off on someone actually taking a shot at him. On the other hand that gaping hole on the secret service security perimeter is very suspicious, and Trump is exactly the kind of person to fake an assassination plot to drum up support. Lastly the bleeding ear (which Trump hammed up considerably in the following days) could be explained either by a very small graze or a blood pack.
It’s just a very weird situation with lots of upsides for Trump but one possibly very bad downside if things go wrong. Trump is a natural born grifter so it’s very easy and tempting to assume anything shady and beneficial to him that he could have had a hand in, he did.
Ok but this feels like ascribing a level of competence to trump and his team that feels unrealistic. Without evidence in favor of it I’m hesitant to consider conspiracy especially considering where conspiratorial thinking has led a lot of people
While yes, it is theoretically possible some blood pack was the culprit, I’d think that’d have shown up in some photos by now. He was surrounded by people recording him after all.
I also don’t find the security hole to be very suspicious. I think overall people give the Secret Service far more credit than they deserve. It’s not some foolproof organization with unlimited resources and no history of big fuckups. It’s a moderately staffed organization with a whole bunch of different duties that stretch their resources, and that is prone to occasional failures and people not taking the job sufficiently seriously. I recall a bunch of them getting drunk and hiring prostitutes while overseas a number of years ago?
Really I don’t find it that weird at all, the simplest explanation seems to fit all the evidence perfectly well. People just don’t like boring answers when there are exciting alternatives.
I don’t subscribe to the fake attempt for the first one but Trump did appear on the WWE (was it still WWF then?) and he did have Hulk.Hogan at the convention. If anyone knows how to use fake blood or how to cause a scratch that bleeds profusely for the crowd, it’s those guys.