Strictly ballroom

An undocumented Latina child not being available, Stephen Miller uses his pregnant wife as a human shield

One of many reasons that a lot of people were saying immediately after the incident at the WHCD — calling it an “assassination attempt” is perhaps a bit of stretch; the guy was never anywhere close to the room Trump was in, and wasn’t even on the same floor of the hotel when he was apprehended, so it was more of an assassination gesture — that the whole thing seemed staged was that Trump instantly started talking about how the incident illustrated why it was absolutely imperative that his stupid fucking ballroom be built, if only for security purposes.

Like a troop of trained parrots, the entire right wing propaganda apparatus leapt into instant action, repeating this claim endlessly within minutes of Trump making it.

Given what we know about the assailant, it’s practically certain that the incident wasn’t staged, but was rather just another in a long line of severely disaffected young men (and the occasional woman) working out their inner turmoil (I would say demons but the fundies are taking that metaphor very literally these days) via some plan to unleash spectacular public violence, as a way of Becoming Someone.

BTW on a side note it’s notable that several members of the normally staid and not particularly prone to paranoia commentariat here at LGM are still Just Asking Questions about whether Thomas Crooks really shot a high-powered rifle at Donald Trump in Butler PA in July 2024, because for among other reasons an American flag was raised behind Trump just moments beforehand, in the way one would if one were framing an iconic staged photograph of Trump’s heroic fist pump, plus that ear wound apparently healed miraculously, etc etc etc. But this kind of thing just illustrates how Trump and Trumpism are, in the classic fascist fashion, destroying public trust in any kind of shared truth. (“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).

And I very much agree with Erik that it’s striking how even much more nearly successful presidential assassination attempts have somehow taken on an air of not really that big a deal/scripted unreality. I wrote this three days after the Butler attempt:

This post is about an impression I’ve picked up on, one which seems widespread at the moment, both in my experience and that of other people. It is this: There seems to an air of, for lack of a better word, unreality surrounding the still less than 72-hour-old assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

By “unreality” I mean the following: The assassination attempt somehow has the air of a pseudo-event, a false flag, a deep fake, a staged bit of what-if history from a cheesy docudrama. Perhaps the most accurate way of capturing the flavor of the thing is that it seems like a piece of kayfabe, to use the professional wrestling term. (Trump is in many ways a figure that is both analogically and quite literally out of the world of pro wrestling — a genre which blends the real with the fictional in psychologically complicated ways.)

To employ that discourse further, the assassination is a “shoot” that comes off as a “work;” that is, a bit of unscripted historical reality that, aesthetically and psychologically, seems fundamentally scripted and contrived by manipulative authors.

Now I want to be very explicit about my belief that the odds that the assassination attempt was really a scripted “assassination attempt” are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from zero. Why then does the whole thing seem scripted, at least in the sense that, to the extent I can discern this, the vast public seems largely untroubled by and uninterested in this event?

Ultimately, the fact that Trump immediately latched onto the incident to promote his ballroom, and the instantaneous echoing of this by the propaganda networks, wasn’t evidence of some sort of pre-arranged kayfabe, but rather of how the entire right wing political ecosystem is a remarkably calibrated grift machine, always ready to leap into action in the eternal quest to steal everything that isn’t nailed down and crowbar up as much of the rest as possible.

Beyond that, Trump’s veritable obsession with this topic illustrates how his various narcissistic monomanias work (the quest for the Nobel peace prize is another classic of this genre):

In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s incident, Trump chose to focus everyone’s attention on his current obsession: the ballroom for which he demolished the East Wing of the White House.

Posting multiple times about it on Truth Social, he sent a message that everyone on the right, from politicians to pundits, seemed to receive: In the wake of this shocking event, we must talk about the ballroom.

“What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE. It cannot be built fast enough!”, Trump posted.

If you don’t recall every president since the Civil War DEMANDING a large ballroom, you must not be a history buff.

Perhaps Trump deserves some credit for not letting the possible assassination attempt cause him to lose focus. Because this has been a curious feature of many of his recent appearances: An event starts out to be about a serious subject like the war in Iran, but before long, he starts rambling on about the ballroom.

But is the problem revealed by this event really that gala black-tie Washington dinners are held in insufficiently hardened locations? After all, security operated just as it was designed to do, and the shooter never even got to the same floor as the president. This reaction is reminiscent of the way Republicans always respond to school shootings, arguing that we certainly can’t examine our gun laws; all we can do is turn your local elementary school into a fortress.

One of Trump’s defining features is the petty stupidity of his various obsessions. There’s an interesting unmarked category kind of thing going on here as well. Imagine what the reaction would be if a woman president — Kamala Harris, say — went off the rails constantly to talk about her obsession with what is essentially a matter of interior decoration. The Scientific Fact that women are obsessed with trivial matters of domesticity rather than with the Great Questions of State would, I’m hazarding a wild guess here, be commented on once or twice by our village elders.

But Trump gets a pass on this, like he gets a pass on everything else, because [grand unified theory goes here].