Secret Service failures. Information continues to leak out daily about the extent of the failures of the Secret Service. It turns out that the shooter was known as a suspicious person a full hour before the shooting, when he attmepted to enter the "inner perimeter" with a rangefinder. And yet he was not tracked. Why?
Another failure was that the SS did not have the roof under surveillance, given that it was within easy rifle range of the rally site. It was a flat roof, easily identifiable as a danger point.
The feckless comments of the head of the SS are cringeworthy. First she said that is was the responsibility of local law enforcement to monitor the "outer perimeter". Now she says it in fact WAS the responsibility of the SS, but she is obviously only mouthing words she doesn't believe. It is obvious she neeeds to be fired, but I'm not holding my breath on this.
Another SS failure being talked about in recent days is the SS allowing Trump to stand back up after they had him down on the ground. Commentators say that at this point it was unknown whether there was a second shooter, and the SS agents should have insisted that he stay down for his own protection.
Will this experience humanize Trump? It was well-known that Trump was rewriting his accpetance speech to make it less polemic and more unifying, and at this point there seemed to be some possibility that Trump actually had become more human. Indeed, his speech started out in this vein, but then he went off-script and rambled on with his standard stump speech about the 2020 election being stolen, immigrants ruining the nation, Biden being the worst president ever, and so forth. He is obviously the same old Trump, and the 92-minute speech, the longest in convention history, did his candidacy no good. His base ate it up, but the job of an acceptance speech is to appeal to the nationa as a whole, not just your most rabid supporters.
Historians have been talking about the past experince of politicians following failed assassination attmept. After getting shot in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt had a change of heart and apologized for his past racism. Same with George Wallace in 1972. When he later ran for governor, Wallace actively courted the Black vote, admitting his past advocacy for segregation had been wrong, asnd after the election he went into the black community and thanked them for their support (he got 90% of the black vote). And Reagan is said to have become more sympathetic to others' shortcomings and hardships following his 1981 assassinaton attempt.
Did God save Trump? Trump has mentioned "God" more often in the past week than he has in his entire life before last Saturday. The idea that God intervened to save Trump is, to me, a repugnant idea based on totally false theology. To believe this you would have to believe that everything that happens is happening in accordance with God's will. (Hence the statement from a Senatorial candidate some years ago that if a rape victim gets pregnant, it must be God's will that she have the baby.) I think a better theology is that God does not intervene to prevent bad things from happening to us, but that God will be with us as we navigate our way through the tough times, and this is what we should pray for.
No comments:
Post a Comment