What, Again?

So apparently someone may or may not have allegedly tried to assassinate the president last weekend.

Again.

There does seem to be some doubt about this, from what I’ve been able to tell.

On the one hand, I understand why people would be unconvinced. There are a lot of things about this story that don’t add up, for example, and many of those things don’t survive even cursory examination. Nor is this the first time this particular president has gone to that well in order to gin up support from a public tiring of his shtick. How many times can you perform the same trick before the audience gets bored? Only the hardcore base thinks the last two tries were real – human ears don’t heal that quickly, after all – and this administration has such an actively hostile relationship with objective reality that the first thing most Americans thought upon hearing the news was that there was no way this could possibly have happened the way we were being told it happened.

Honestly, if anyone from this administration told me the sun was shining I’d pack an umbrella.

And it’s not like this administration didn’t have a pile of reasons to lie to us about this. This president’s approval ratings are plummeting, his illegal war of aggression is turning into the greatest strategic defeat ever suffered by the United States and he clearly has no idea how to extricate himself or the country from that, the economy is tanking faster than his approval ratings, corruption scandals are closing in on the Oval Office, the president’s accelerating mental and physical decline is obvious for all to see (when was the last time he went golfing?), and for all the misdirection and distraction being thrown at the American people the simple fact is that depending on which estimate you credit anywhere from 40-97% of the Epstein files haven’t been released as required by federal law yet even so his name is mentioned over 38,000 times just in the bits we’ve seen, several of which explicitly describe him as a child rapist.

He has lots of reasons to pretend this happened.

On the other hand, this is the sort of thing you get when a wannabe dictator tries to rule over a population that is seeing its future stolen from them by billionaires and right-wing extremists, that has watched jackbooted government thugs execute citizens in the streets in cold blood, and that regards gun ownership as a sacred right. Maybe it actually happened.  It wouldn’t be all that surprising if it did, would it?  If you can’t see a wave of political violence coming in the near future in the US you haven’t studied history, after all.

What has really been surprising to me is the fact that most of the country has forgotten about it already. It flamed up in the news cycle for about 36 hours and then the American people collectively decided that – real or not – it wasn’t interesting enough to compete for their attention with gas prices, little Timmy’s school play, or the NHL playoffs.

Dude, people are still talking about the Kennedy assassination more than six decades after the fact and this guy couldn’t get people to care for two full days.

And you know, I get it. I wrote this guy off a long time ago, and at this point the only news I want to hear about him is who his successor will be. That will be his only legacy. There will come a time – sooner than anyone thinks possible, I suspect – when everyone will always have been against him and his regime, and that will be that.

As a historian it is a strange moment to live through. As an American, though, it makes perfect sense.