Carl von Clausewitz, the renowned Prussian military theorist said "War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." Those other means are primarily the use of violence. The inverse is also true. Politics is a form of war where the threat of violence takes the place of actual violence. In politics, people jockey for so-called leadership roles where they can tell the rest of the people to do everything the leader's way. Those who don't risk fines or incarceration. If they resist their punishment, they risk armed violence. Ergo, politics is the threat of violence. War is the next step, the actual use of violence. Thomas Crooks, a random 20 year old guy from Pennsylvania. tried to ratchet politics, the threat of violence, into war, the actual use of violence by attempting to assassinate Presidential candidate Donald Trump. He was only a few millimeters away from being successful. Luckily for Trump, Crooks was rejected when he tried out for his high school shooting team.
Naturally, conspiracy theories have sprung up in the aftermath. Democrats floated the theory that the whole thing was a false flag operation to turn Trump into a martyr. That seems unlikely. Trump's ear is too close to his skull for that to be believable. Trump, who has played the martyr ever since he was elected in 2016, now gets to actually be one. It will probably make the difference in getting him elected. Others have floated the theory that the Secret Service was somehow either complicit of incompetent. The roof that Crooks shot from is only about 400 feet from the podium from which Trump was speaking. It has a clear line of sight to the podium. The Secret Service did not secure it. Several bystanders tried to alert police to an armed man on the roof in the five minutes before the shooting started. There was no police or Secret Service effort to check those reports out. Yet, somehow, Secret Service snipers on another rooftop managed to locate and kill Crooks within seconds of when he started shooting. Complicit or incompetent? It was probably one or the other. The Secret Service's primary task is to prevent assassinations of presidential candidates. Only the bad aim of the assassin prevented their total failure on that task.
An interesting footnote, after months of requests by the Robert F Kennedy presidential campaign for Secret Service protection, the Biden administration finally decided to provide it. No such luck for Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate or any of the other third party candidates. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields.