We all know he's a 6'3", 215lb piece of shit who cares about nobody but himself, I'm asking if he does that speech, will that sway that ~2% he needs?
We're still a few months away, and the Trump camp is finding out just how beloved Vance is outside of Ohio. Vance seems to firmly believe that whoever is rich is correct, and whatever Handmaid's Tale shit they want to legislate will work out fine. It's not like the billionaires have ever had their agenda thwarted yet! The polls for both of these men have been notoriously shit, and the fact that it's down to margin of error still is beyond fucking stupid. The Democrats could run ANYONE at this point, and the polls would show a better chance of beating Trump. Right now, Trump's team is telling him that the shooting helps him, and what to say to ensure he keeps that lead. So much of this election is defense, so whoever is NOT being talked about is in the lead. It seems that the shooting playing to Trump's advantage isn't entirely clear yet, but it gives him more options for messaging than it does Biden, who is now limited by Trump's actual victimhood. If this had happened near Milwaukee or any Dem-voting city, the crime and punishment shit would fly. A suburb of Pittsburgh is about as purple as you can get, and they would be legit insulted by the insinuation that their corner of PA is a crime-ridden shithole...I mean, we've all seen It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we know where the real shithole is! Trump knows this is territory he has to win, and whatever the messaging is, he'll only get one shot. They are having a hard time with the sell that the shooting was somehow the Democrats fault, and Trump has to acknowledge that the call is coming from inside the house. He can't leap to any Trumpian conclusions until he gets some credible indication of why the shooter acted the way he did. Once the FBI points out it was because of something Trump did or said, then all this unity bullshit gets cast aside, as he figures out the best way to twist the shooter's motive into something the Democrats did, said, lied about or caused. Trump is probably not trying to go too far into the shit storm of tweets yet, because the motive is still TBD. If Trump goes all full tilt too early, then the FBI reveals it was motivated by a scandal Trump has denied or kept relatively quiet on, he's just went loud on something he needed quiet (the equivalent of Trump screaming "I never even pulled my dick out at that farm, much less stuck in it a goat!"). Also, Trump needs people to keep showing up to rallies. So much of him selling folks on the lie that he won in 2020 was predicated on "look at how many people showed up!" If they stop showing up, it's a death knell for his campaign. If there's one thing we know about mass shootings, they deter people from gathering.... The shooter has credibility, because he put a LOT of skin in the game on whatever it was. This kid knew he was going to die, and he didn't leave an obvious trail of crumbs as to what drove him to it. You're going to have a significant contingent of the electorate believing the shooter's motive more than either side's spin. Whatever conspiracy theory shit he subscribed to will instantly be legitimized. It'll be impossible to understand what evidence he considered, or what made him draw the line. But anything the FBI says he's followed, believed, written, etc. now has a LOT more legs than the average run of the mill nonsense. The stuff trickling out (his classmates saying he's conservative, the Trump signs in his yard) seems very measured, because everyone knows how explosive the biggest pieces to the puzzle will be when they fall. Also, given the self-policing the platforms are doing with fake accounts, I'd say they are very gun shy of letting the wrong narrative run amok, and it fucking up this entire election. The best case scenario for Trump is the shooter turns out to be like Hinckley, and was trying to impress Olivia Rodrigo or some shit, and can be written off as crazy. The worst case scenario is his motive is something Trump can't distance himself from and is pretty grisly (Project 2025, for example). Somehow, yet again, like in 2016, the FBI will probably issue a statement that decides the entire fucking election. Trump saying he's a changed man sounds to me a lot like a lifelong alcoholic saying "And this time...I mean it." Ultimately, I think the thing the shooting changes is turnout. Trump lost the swing states due to a change in suburban, educated, mostly white women. That's a section of the electorate he's not winning back, post Dobbs. If he convinces enough of his base to show up, it may make up for that loss. However, that same base has eroded due to covid, and a stated lack of faith in the election itself. If we get to 2024, and Trump's base has lower turnout, he'll only have the big lie he himself spouted to blame.
News is reporting that the Trump 2016 campaign had the shooter's dad in a database of strong supporters, specifically targeting gun-owners. This opens up a new possible motive: the shooter just really fucking hated his dad.
Girls be like: "Dad, I hate you and that's why I brought home this unemployed drummer." Boys be like: "Dad, I hate you and that's why I brought home the corpse of the 45th President."
oh man can you imagine if the shooting happened somewhere like Chicago or Baltimore? Shit, might as well just call the election now
The memes are coming hard at the USSS lady that said the sloped roof was to blame for not securing it.
The shooter's dad called police to report him missing at 11pm that night, and thought he'd taken his rifle to the gun range. I wonder if they said, "yeah we're not going to fill out missing persons paperwork. We know where he is and he's not coming back." CNN did a sync video compiling the rally footage with the by-stander footage. How in the world there are people on the ground just casually filming and pointing at the shooter so far ahead of the actual shooting is crazy. Watching the people trying to get aid to Corey Comperatore is tough to watch. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-n...g-07-17-24#h_8d7d65aa55f6666750e2bddddc1a17e6
"The entire county, state, and nation are on fire after someone shot at Trump, and both my son and my gun are missing, but surely he's just at the range and is the only 20 year old in America who hasn't checked their phone in eight hours." Good TV is good TV, regardless of your politics.
Where did you read about his dad? I thought he had already been quoted in a newspaper by that afternoon. EDIT: maybe I have my days mixed up and he was quoted the next morning.
Has anyone seen confirmation trump was shot or what kind of treatment he needed? Not like it matters much, but you’d think if he had a hole in his ear or needed it stitched or something he’d be parading that around right? Like the number of stitches and showing off the graze wound and everything rather than just a comically large bandage? edit: just realized that I can actually speak with some authority on this, since I infamously almost shot my own hand during a ND while removing the slide to clean my pistol. In my case, the bullet came close — I was, deservedly so, mocked on here for “shooting [myself]” however it didn’t actually hit or break the skin. Just came close. Got plenty of gunpowder and burns and shit on my palm. And that distinction is a big one, both in terms of semantics, and in terms of treatment.
No medical report has been released. Media is starting to ask questions. I think the obvious answer is that the grazing was incredibly mild, and he's just playing it up because he didn't get for-real-for-real shot like Reagan did. Dude...just...how are you still alive?
There's images of the vapor trail made by the bullet, and I'm sure someone has pieced together footage to show it nuzzle his noggin. I'd imagine they bandaged it up, and once they see how it looks, they will do plastic surgery to repair it. No point in bragging about it, if he won't even have a scar, and there's not a ton of photos of it, none of them particularly gnarly. The plastic surgery likelihood is why the bandage is comically huge. It's equally likely he went down hard and skin broke when the Secret Service tackled him, but...meh.