It produced none of the dramatic footage of the last attempt, but another “attempted assassination” of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is being investigated, the FBI has confirmed. Court documents allege the shooter spent nearly 12 hours near Trump’s International Golf Club in Florida before being sighted, confronted and fired upon by the Secret Service.
Ryan Routh, who has a long history of criminal convictions, has been charged with possession of a firearm as a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number, and is being kept in custody as the investigation continues. Routh previously cropped up in the media in 2023 in his capacity as a foreign fighter in Ukraine. He had told The New York Times that he was prepared to die for the cause.
Within hours of the incident, the hashtag #StagedAssassinationAttempt began to trend on X. Because nothing is ever real to anyone anymore.
Blue MAGA
Inevitably, there is a MAGA-style arm of rabid Democrat support, slowly inching its way towards the conspiratorial and cultish filter on the world we associate with the harder end of the right.
Take Ron Filipkowski, who has become a fixture of the highly online Democrat (or at least anti-Trump) cohort and accrued nearly a million followers by quickly picking up unflattering and damaging footage and information about various Trump-adjacent figures. He also posts allusive, “just saying”-type stuff such as the following (in the aftermath of the first attempt on Trump’s life):
A recurring theme of the conspiracy-addled Democrat response has been the speed with which Trump’s campaign pushed out fundraising emails after the story broke. Which relies on the assumption that it’s weird that Trump, one of the most passionately loathed politicians in the world, would have messaging ready to go on the off-chance a second person tried to murder him on the campaign trail.
Unsurprisingly, the anti-Trump movement hasn’t had a monopoly on conspiratorial thinking. Several fake accounts purporting to be the shooter emerged almost immediately, implying Routh was part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Fuck feelings, except in this case
A lot of Republicans, like Donald Trump Jnr, who recently found the story of the brutal hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in 2022 very funny, are now shocked that the incident — in which no-one, including the alleged shooter, appears to have been hurt — isn’t eliciting the appropriate reverence from some quarters.
Indeed, Trump himself seems to have become suddenly aware of the harm that repeated inflammatory rhetoric can cause.
“[Routh] believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” he told Fox News Digital, before showing characteristic restraint in arguing Democrat rhetoric “is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out”.
X marks the clot
Elon Musk, the Trump-supporting owner of X — and what would happen if the Borg assimilated every unbearable guy you’ve ever spoken to at a party and then someone gave them several hundred billion dollars — did largely what you’d expect of him.
Musk made a vaguely conspiratorial “joke” about how “no-one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”, followed by the raised eyebrow emoji. He later deleted the post. You may say that’s not funny, but we think Musk was playing the long game: the US Secret Service is investigating him for the comments, which I think you’ll agree is very funny.
Of course, Musk, in turning misinformation on the platform from a flaw to a business model since his take over, is one of the many reasons that nothing is ever real to anyone anymore.
