Never one to miss an opportunity to brag, President Donald Trump decided that the Angel Families event at the White House on Monday was the perfect time for him to big up himself over how many people have attempted to assassinate him.
Wait, what?
Reasonable people might take stock of multiple attempts being made on their lives in a different way. They might reflect on the fragility of life, contemplate their own mortality, do some soul-searching about how this all came about, and what makes people so angry and fixated that they try to kill you.
But Trump is not a reasonable person by any metric, so for him this is just another opportunity to boast that he is extremely important. “You read about all these crazy shooters, but they only go after consequential presidents. They don’t go after non-consequential presidents.”
In case you are wondering which other presidents count as consequential, as far as assassination attempts are concerned, Trump name-checked Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. “They were consequential. They only go after consequential. So maybe I want to be a little bit less consequential.”
Before Trump so thoroughly captured the GOP, think how furious they would all be about this erasure of John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of former President Ronald Reagan.
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Of course, this world’s weirdest braggadocio that he’s “got a lot of people gunning for me” happened at an event that had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump or assassination attempts. Rather, it was for “Angel Families,” the term Trump invented last year for people who have lost family members in crimes by immigrants. Trump had declared Feb. 22 “National Angel Family Day, where he would be “paying solemn tribute to the second anniversary of Laken Riley’s murder.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, holds a poster with photos of murder victims Sarah Root and Laken Riley as she speaks on Capitol Hill, Feb. 27, 2024. House Republicans have passed a bill that would require federal authorities to detain unauthorized immigrants who have been accused of theft, seizing on the death of Laken, a nursing student in Georgia.
So solemn! Such a tribute! Those families were probably so very comforted by Trump explaining how he’s so consequential.
He also used the time to push his lies about elections, unhappy even in victory: “I got, probably, 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated in this election too.”
Also, per Trump, if he had been elected in 2020, anyone who was killed by an undocumented immigrant would instead be alive today.
Trump has to do quite a bit of self-soothing here, as he can’t condemn the latest assassination attempt as the product of some left-wing progressive plot. Instead, it looks like Austin Tucker Martin, who breached Mar-a-Lago’s north gate armed with a gun and carrying a gas canister early on Sunday and was killed by Secret Service, was actually a staunch Trump supporter who was foolish enough to believe Trump genuinely cared about breaking up a pedophile cabal.
Instead, those supporters have been faced with the fact that, rather than bringing down the deep state Democrat pedophile cabal, Trump instead seems to be engaged in a whole-of-government effort to protect Epstein and hide his own involvement.
Hence, the pivot to bragging that racking up attempts on one’s life is good, actually.
This latest security breach follows several attempts on Trump’s life, the most notable being in Butler, Pennsylvania, at a rally on July 13, 2024, when a bullet grazed his ear.
Trump’s need for approval, to be seen as the bestest and the mostest, is boundless. And apparently, even assassination attempts are no exception to this rule.
