Heroism In the Age of Incompetence

The Legend of Donald Trump

“In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man /
As modest stillness and humility, /
But when the blast of war blows in our ears, /
Then imitate the action of a tiger. /
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood, /
Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.”
- King Harry [Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.1.3-7]

An instantly iconic photo of Trump after his brush with death. “Fight, Fight, Fight!”

It is no great insight to say that for some time America has been lacking in leadership. Perhaps a man has liked Donald Trump or Barack Obama or some other recent President, governor, or legislator, but our leadership class as a whole is tepid, uncreative, corrupt, dull-witted, and cowardly. There are countless examples of the faults of our ruling class, though perhaps the worst is the Democrats ostentatiously showing their fear of the January 6th riots when most of them were at no risk of harm, the unwashed masses had simply approached them while out of hand. Proudly do they speak of the dangers they claim to have faced in order to encourage the punishment of those who offended them. Many look back at prior eras and wish we had men of such caliber. It is true that men tend to lionize the past, though it is also true that certain periods breed the men most worth of admiration, such as Athens in the 5th century BC, Rome in the throes of its constant crisis from the murder of the Gracchi to the foundation of the Principate, or in our own history, the generation of our Founders. Undeniably, Donald Trump has many problems and in many ways is not a model of leadership: among other things, he is narcissistic, vengeful, undisciplined, and often unserious. However, the world got from Trump perhaps the most stunning display of courageous leadership of the modern era on Saturday, July 13th when a young man named Matthew Crooks fired his gun at Donald Trump from a rooftop.

Incredibly, perhaps by the intervention of Fortune, Trump turned his head at the exact second that what would have been a killshot approached, receiving a wound to his ear. One bystander was killed and two were seriously wounded. After falling to the ground with his Secret Service detail, Trump rose up and raised his fist and shouted “Fight, Fight, Fight!” at the crowd, who were shocked, excited, and enamored to see their leader not only alive, but strong and fierce. In the past some have said he is a coward, a bully who only cares about himself, or a guy who just likes to act tough. He may sometimes seem that way, but when his life was threatened and he was thrown into what is commonly called “fight or flight” mode, not only did he fight, he remembered that he is the leader all of those people rely on. It is not an understatement to say that he responded like the hero of a legend, as if Athena had swept down from the vaulting heavens to grant him protection and fill him with the spirit of war.

While Americans were seeing true leadership for the first time, we were also provided with an extraordinary contrast. Be it incompetence or malice, it is incredible this rooftop from which the shots rang out was unguarded. This is a sign of the failure of our Republic, of a competence problem that is gnawing at us from the inside out. Even if it was malice, leading them to choose not to protect their ward, it was malice carried out incompetently. People love to say what they would do in a high stakes, high intensity situation, and often they are clueless or unrealistic. However, in this instance, any idiot on your block would have known to post someone on that roof. In fact it is said the roof was identified as an important location to secure, and local police were in the building, but the Secret Service was not on the roof. Almost immediately a BBC interview came out of a man saying how they had seen the shooter and tried to alert the police: he seemed credible, but it was also far-fetched. Then a video came out of the crowd pointing at the roof and yelling that there was a man with a gun, visible in the video. It is as if their entire security strategy was figuring everyone would assume the roof was secured so no one would use it to attempt an assassination. It is hard to comprehend the degree of failure that this represents, and perhaps our nation will study it for decades. However, so far the woman in charge of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, has no plans to resign. It does not currently seem like the Biden Administration intends to punish anyone for this offence. The country is left wondering, at what point does neglect in and of itself constitute malice?

It needs to be emphasized again, this is not any sort of “Monday morning quarterbacking.” This was a drastic and insane failure. Some weird kid bought a ladder and ammo at Home Depot and then went to kill President Trump and no one tried to stop him. The shooter was identified over an hour before the shooting and pictures were circulated to the agents but they let Trump on stage after losing track of a suspect. Here is how one former federal agent named Charles Marino described his view of the situation to Financial Times:

“That building should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck as a Secret Service agent.”

“I probably would not take my eyes off that building when first walking there, for at least a good 10 minutes. I would be thinking about the ways that I would need to take that out of play.”

Far from securing the roof, the whole thing went something like this:

Reports say that it was local police in the building, but you get the idea.

Though Kimberly Cheatle claims the “buck stops with me” she does not appear to be accepting any accountability. There has in fact been nothing but excuses. For example, she said this roof was too sloped to put agents on, though from images it doesn’t appear to have a great enough rise over run to put shingles on in a cold climate.¹ This is the god damn Secret Service, it’s obvious that any normal person could walk on this warehouse roof, but they should be able to hang off of the side of a cathedral if it is necessary, I can’t imagine they are too underfunded to set up a harness if so inclined. The hits keep coming in terms of absurdity, but among the worst is that this broad decided to claim the local police were meant to be in charge of this area:

This is not, at all, a situation where “everyone thought someone else was doing it” suffices. I don’t know anything about Butler, PA, but it’s extremely unlikely they have anyone who specializes in providing security for VIPs. Regardless, local police are in no way qualified to act as security for the person of a President, even if it is somewhere like New York where there is a dedicated security detail for the mayor. As the commissioner says in the above video, their duties were solely to deal with traffic and crowd control. It is fitting for our time, that this high level federal incompetent thinks it is appropriate to blame the local police who had nothing to do with her failings.

Conservatives almost instantly jumped on their favored grievance, DEI hiring, as it relates to this issue. It turns out, on top of this woman being in charge, the government has been working really hard to reach the arbitrary goal of 30% of the Secret Service being female. I can’t help but think of an episode of the old Batman show with Adam West where the villain spent years establishing herself as a feminist activist so she could replace Gotham City’s police force with women, who then spent all their time doing their hair and makeup, and then released a bunch of mechanical explosive mice, leading all the lady cops to jump up on tables and shriek [it’s clear that even in the ‘60s this being over the top sexist was the joke.] Perhaps some women are suitable for Secret Service agents, but it is insane that even a job so important as guarding the life of the President is going to be based on group patronage more than merit. In the immortal words of Donald Trump: they are not sending their best.

This is an amazing tweet that Rufo had already deleted by the time I tried to respond to it, but it is too damn good to not share even if he decided it was ill-advised.

The dementia-addled Biden revealed the game in a recent interview with BBC where he referred to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as “the black man” after forgetting his name: he at least remembered why he hired him. Regarding the Secret Service, it’s also a key part of pop culture that these people cover the President, and men have bigger bodies than women, as well as being stronger and faster. At least one of these lady bodyguards seems to have not even tried to help the President:

A female Secret Service agent crouches down by herself behind the ones protecting the former President.

Even if the risk of breaking a nail was too much to go up on the sloped roof, I’m pretty sure one can get a drone for under $100 on the internet to hover over this roof that absolutely everyone identified as a security risk. Of course, I kid, we don’t live in the type of country where if they’re going to hire women who don’t know what they are doing they at least make sure they are hot, these women all seem to be butch. The government is just relentlessly pursuing a goal of making law enforcement agencies up to 30% woman by 2030 across the country for no good reason. I will give them that we did recently learn Hollywood, Florida has a sexy lady detective who appears to be competent, but that is on brand for Florida, whereas to channel the new Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, unhappy childless cat ladies are on brand for the Feds.

One way or another, this disturbed 20 year old made it on the roof with a rifle. We know little about the shooter besides that he looks like a loser who worked a low-skill job and didn’t have a lot of friends. Apparently his parents had already reported him missing, which being as he was an adult and had not been gone for very long, leaves one assuming they knew there was a risk of something happening. It is said he used his dad’s gun so perhaps they noticed it was gone but didn’t want to cause more of a panic than they thought necessary. One way or another this sad little nerd managed to get on the roof and fire at Trump 8 times, killing another man. We don’t know his motive and perhaps we never will, but it’s possible he is just generally disturbed and is of the mass shooter profile instead of ideologically motivated. It has barely been mentioned, but he is of the generation where his most formative teenage years were ruined by covid insanity, maybe this was his revenge? At the same time, the media and Democrats have spent the last 9 years, almost half of his life, intentionally making the public miserable and keeping them in a state of constant panic. Still, while we may like to point out the constant accusations of their invented concept of “stochastic terrorism,” no one actually believes that is a thing, it is simply a cudgel to say your opponents shouldn’t criticize anyone, and the irresponsible rhetoric of Democrats painting Nelson Rockefeller with bad manners as literally Hitler can’t fairly be blamed for this shooting.

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For all of this comic ineptness, there is no rush towards accountability from the Administration, just a mostly standard FBI investigation of a crime. Cheatle was confronted and chased off by Senators at the RNC, but it simply isn’t how these people function to understand accountability. It is funny to note that at the debate which led to Biden’s current problems, Trump criticized Biden for never firing anyone, and apparently even a former President getting shot due to epic incompetence is not enough for Biden to do so. This, of course, in a society where people get fired over stupid things all the time:

It needs to be pointed out in many historical [and current] societies such errors leading to an assassination attempt on someone so important would be dealt with by execution- in fact in republican Rome a soldier would be made to “run the gauntlet” [a brutal form of execution by beating] if he fell asleep on night watch, even if nothing bad happened [Polybius, 6.37.] This failure is far past just resigning, it is in the realm of large-scale criminal investigations, but neither Biden nor Cheatle see it that way. Even so, this is probably going to lead to some sort of penalties, given the backlash and the fact that they appear to be writing Joe Biden out of the plot before the next season of America begins. Yes, as you probably heard, Joe Biden is said to have tested positive for covid, which is apparently still a thing people are doing. While I wish our President a speedy recovery, I must note that it would be the perfect conclusion to an evil and stupid era were Biden, the archetypal representative of the type of person who dies of covid, to have his life end in that fashion, on his third round of covid after receiving countless booster shots.

All of this of course opens up everything for conspiracy theories. It defies human understanding that it is possible for the government to be this incompetent, but this is 2024 in America, we should not underestimate our government’s ability to reach new heights of incompetence. We do need to consider Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” However, this pushes the evil-incompetent matrix to its limits. Further, this Crooks was the sort of person that our spooks are known to target and manipulate into bad acts. It doesn’t help that by an incredible coincidence he was featured in a random video by the capital management firm BlackRock, the center of many modern conspiracy theories, a few years ago. When I saw this I thought it was just people on the internet being crazy, but BlackRock acknowledged it is real, submitted all of their footage to the police, and took the video down. Still, it seems unlikely they recruited him as an assassin after featuring him in the background of a video about his teacher and then never took the video down, it is just bizarre catnip for the conspiracy theorists. Here’s the thing: if there was a conspiracy to assassinate Trump it would be quite small and was also carried out with total incompetence, it being nothing but luck that the shooter was able to fire and seemingly nothing but luck that one of 8 bullets also hit its mark. In short, if this was the work of the CIA, they are just as incompetent as the Secret Service because you can’t make any plan which relies on someone else doing their job this badly. Perhaps unstoppable stupidity met with unmovable incompetence. We will probably never know, but for now I’m going to assume Crooks was just yet another man driven mad by our society.

Alternately, some Democrats went so crazy that no less of a personage than Taylor Lorenz used the term “BlueAnon” in The Washington Post. BlueAnon is of course a term popularized by Aaron Mate and others to reference the deranged nature of many Democrats, particularly when it comes to anything related to Russia. As much as they mock Republicans for being conspiracists, it is the case that high level Democrats spread ridiculous conspiracy theories all the time. In this instance there are two primary Democrat conspiracy theories. The first is that Trump staged this shooting and in essence hired a sharpshooter to hit his ear but not kill him: of course these are the same people who think cops should shoot a gun out of a criminals hand. This can be dismissed entirely, knowing that another man died in the shooting and no one is having someone take that shot at himself with a real bullet. The other is one most notably spread by MSNBC’s Joy Reid which is that Trump was actually hit by shrapnel from his teleprompter after that was struck by a bullet and the bullet did not graze his ear. Taking after Trump’s “birtherism” which they so widely criticized, she is demanding to see doctor’s records about Trump’s ear injury. What is particularly strange about this is that if a bullet hit his teleprompter and Trump was injured by the glass breaking- and this definitely didn’t happen there are clear videos of the teleprompters unbroken, Joy Reid is just an idiot- that still means someone tried to assassinate President Trump and killed a bystander. It is part of the story how close the bullet came to hitting Trump, and part of what makes it so incredible, but the great majority of the meaning of this event is the same if the stage was sprayed with bullets aimed at Trump and the nearest one was 5 feet away instead of half an inch. Still, the closeness is incredible. I can’t verify the forensic accuracy of this video, but this is meant to show what happened if you superimpose a target from the bullet trajectory:

For many this looks like divine intervention. Really, to anyone who holds that there is a greater power governing human affairs it is hard to look at it differently. I personally believe in Fortune, in the ancient sense, and it obviously has plans for Donald Trump [though perhaps this means Barron will not be our Augustus, as Trump dying here would be key to his origin story.] Ever the skeptic, Michael Tracey did not think highly of this view in an excellent conversation with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn at the Republican National Convention, but the mood of the convention is that something saved Trump. He happened to turn his head away from the stage at that exact moment, which he rarely does, to look at this immigration chart:

The immigration chart Trump turned to look at exactly when a bullet otherwise would have killed him.

It seems as if Trump’s immigration policies have already saved one American life: his own.

All of this insanity brings us to Trump’s response. We live in a country where now almost everyone believes some combination of the ideas that the Secret Service is too incompetent to protect the former President and the CIA is too incompetent to assassinate the former President, while many outright wish he had been killed and even the most generous interpretation is that we have mass shootings all the time something like this was inevitable. It all speaks to a profoundly broken country, in a way that even the wave of political violence in the ‘60s did not. As I am always saying, history is a farce this time. There is not much to believe in. And then, like a salve for our souls, Trump showed extraordinary courage and leadership. When it was his life on the line he never forgot who he was and what he was there for. He broke the Secret Service protocols and stood above the agents to put his fist up in what is surely one of the most iconic photos of the last several decades: bloodied but alive, and as ready as ever to lead America, to “Fight, Fight, Fight” for us. He was obviously acting on pure adrenaline: stripped bare, this is who Trump is. Many who always opposed Trump now feel that he has put everything on the line for them:

Machiavelli wrote, “I consider that Fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but that she still leaves the control of the other half, or almost that, to us” [The Prince, XXV.] He proceeds to relate her to a river which sometimes floods, but even so goes where it does not run into well-ordered virtue, avoiding the dikes and dams that would hold it back. If Fortune saved Trump, it is Trump who showed virtue like few remember seeing in his response to the threat on his life. For many of us, this is the first genuinely inspiring thing we have seen from our leadership class for years, or even decades. This is unlikely to be a temporary bump in support for Trump because people are not sympathetic to Trump as the victim of a crime: they are impressed by his courage and leadership. Trump became an instant legend. His deeds have even been acted out by children on the street in Africa:

There are still many reasons to oppose Trump politically. He did bad things as President and will do many more if re-elected, though of course that is all relative to a political class where they are all terrible. But people want a real leader. Trump has many bad or seemingly unrealistic policy positions, though as Walter Kirn said in that same conversation with Michael Tracey above, there didn’t used to be Georgetown policy papers. It used to be the case that every leader went and talked to other leaders and tried to work something out, which is how Trump still views the world.

The Mandarins will never understand the appeal of Trump, even if they see how bad this is for them. We are always told we should be embarrassed for Trump to lead us, but that is only true of over-educated losers who have been indoctrinated into hating their instincts. Trump has an undeniable magnetism and is large and brave. This is what humans naturally want in the chief, unless they have been educated out of it. In many ways it feels like we’ve seen real leadership for the first time. Trump’s victory now seems inevitable, though of course many things could happen, including another bullet finding its mark.

I want to leave you with a quote from Tacitus that I have used before, about a man of the famous Piso family who was forwarded as a replacement for the hated Nero:

“They hated Nero; and they liked Gaius Calpurnius Piso. His membership of the aristocratic Calpurnian house linked him, on his father’s side, with many illustrious families. Among the masses, too, he enjoyed a great reputation for his good qualities, real or apparent. For he employed his eloquence to defend his fellow-citizens in court; he was a generous friend - and gracious and affable even to strangers; he also possessed the accidental advantages of impressive stature and a handsome face. But his character lacked seriousness or self-control. He was superficial, ostentatious, and sometimes dissolute. But many people are fascinated by depravity and disinclined for austere morals on the throne. Such men found Piso’s qualities attractive.” [Annals, XV.48]

Donald Trump has many problems, but after seeing a bullet miss him by an inch, I am as convinced as anyone that he is meant to lead us.

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

1. In roofing, and presumably in mathematics generally, rise over run is how a slope is measured. The bare minimum for asphalt shingles is 2 inches per foot, though because of ice dams it should be 3 inches per foot in areas with snow.