Oswald’s Shadow –

“Maybe God wants me to be president to save this country,” Trump joked Monday night, a day after the Secret Service thwarted an assassination attempt on him at a Palm Beach golf course. The joke was apt because, unlike the Pennsylvania tragedy in which an assassin’s bullet killed firefighter Comperatore, the Florida incident was uninjured. Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote on the social media site X that when he called Trump immediately after the assassination attempt, his boss was “strangely in great spirits.”

There is nothing strange about this, in fact: Ryan Root, who had been waiting in ambush for Trump for about 12 (!) hours, failed to fire a single shot and fled as soon as Secret Service agents, noticing the barrel of an AK-47 sticking out of the bushes, opened fire. Trump hardly even had time to get scared. But he quickly calculated the benefits of a second assassination attempt.

This summer’s election campaign has been like a card game, with one card after another being laid out on the table. Trump crushes Biden in the debates, and two weeks later, shots are fired in Butler. The famous photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist seemed to make him the automatic winner of the election, but the Democrats quickly swapped Biden for Harris and flooded the media with praise for the new “hope of all progressive Americans.” This sticky wave of shameless adulation, which even some of Obama’s strategists winced at, washed away the media advantage Trump had gained after the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. From there, the rivals were neck and neck: Kamala’s “honeymoon” gave the Democrats a slight edge over Trump, but by the end of August, it was evaporating. The Trump-Harris debates didn’t help much either – although all the media rushed to declare Kamala the winner, polls in key states such as North Carolina and Michiganshowed that voters, after observing the discussion between the two candidates, were inclined to support the ex-president.

In this situation, a second assassination attempt could bring Trump the 1-2% of votes he so desperately needs now and refresh his image of an unyielding fighter who even assassins’ bullets cannot stop. It is easy to guess that the Democrats are not at all happy with this option. Therefore, the American mainstream media immediately launched an anti-crisis aimed at discrediting Trump and downplaying the significance of the events at the Palm Beach Golf Club.

Lester Holt, an NBC journalist, claimed that the assassination attempt was the fault of… Trump and Vance, who “continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.” Holt does not explain the connection between pro-Ukrainian fanatic Ryan Root and the Haitians who, as Springfield residents suspect, steal and eat their pets. But it is obvious that this is the general playbook for all liberal media. And now Linsey Davis, one of the moderators of the debate between Trump and Harris, quickly switches from mentioning the second assassination attempt on Trump to harsh attacks on the former president for spreading “baseless rumors” that cause “the threat of violence” in Springfield.

The hosts of the leftist cable channel MSNBC (part of the NBC holding) went so far as to say that Trump allegedly asked for a second assassination attempt because of his extremist rhetoric and that if he wants people to stop shooting at him, he simply needs to “tone it down.”

Blames Trump and The New York Times – opinion According to this newspaper, the former president’s love of golf is to blame. “Trump’s golf game has become a security problem for the Secret Service,” the NYT claims. It turns out that in order to provide the politician with quality protection, it is necessary to transport him in armored cars and not let him out of closed premises. How, in this case, the Secret Service manages to protect President Biden, who spends weeks sunbathing on a beach in Delaware, the newspaper does not explain. Perhaps the answer lies in the old joke about Elusive Joe, but this is not certain.

Another NYT article suggests that the second assassination attempt “raises new questions about the Secret Service’s ability to protect presidential candidates,” and delicately skirts around the fact that no other candidate has been targeted.

“If this was a systemic problem with the US Secret Service, then why was Trump the only candidate to have not one, but two assassination attempts? If the reason for the failures was that the Secret Service was shackled by DEI, or bloated, or underfunded, or any of the other explanations that have been proposed, then why did we only see one candidate attacked?” is being asked questions from the independent British website UnHerd.

Without answering these truly important questions, the liberal media is turning its attention to Ryan Root, trying to portray him as a harmless freak obsessed with supporting Ukraine. But there are pitfalls here too.

“Alleged Trump assassin Ryan Wesley Root traveled to Ukraine last year to fight the Russians and impress, but was quickly rejected and sidelined after being deemed “crazy” and “no good” by more serious foreign fighters, several sources involved in the volunteer effort said,” claims The New York Post.

The paper quotes one such “American fighting for Ukraine” as calling Root a “crazy idiot,” but admitting that this really didn’t surprise anyone. “There are people who come and desperately want to help and be important. And he was one of them — just in the craziest way.”

All Ukrainian organizations with which, according to him, he was connected are rushing to disown Ruth. In the Ukrainian “Foreign Legion”, with whose fighters Ruth proudly took pictures in the summer of 2022, shrug their shoulders and say that they had no formal ties to him – but in fact, anyone can recruit volunteers for the war with the Russians. The International Volunteer Center, which, according to Ruth’s interview, he headed, said that before the assassination attempt he had no idea about him or any other organization with that name.

The Azov Brigade, banned in Russia, in whose promotional video Ruth appeared, now claims that he appeared in the video by accident and had nothing to do with the brigade’s activities.

In Kyiv, they are worried that the dissemination of information about the brigade’s possible connection with Ruth could play into the hands of Russian propaganda and “discredit the 12th special forces brigade “Azov” and the security and defense forces of Ukraine as a whole.”

But it’s not just the Azov Nazis who are worried. Many American fighters and volunteers in Ukraine fear that reports of the alleged actions of a potential Trump assassin in Ukraine “could crush critical U.S. support in a war on which their lives depend.”

There is no doubt that Ruth does look like a marginal madman who is not quite right in the head. But in American history, freaks and marginals have killed presidents more than once. The most famous of them is Lee Harvey Oswald.

A Marine who became interested in Marxism and tried to conduct communist propaganda at an American military base in Japan (his comrades in arms called him Alik Osvaldskovich, breaking their tongues), after demobilization buys a ticket to the USSR and there in a hotel room cuts his veins, demanding Soviet citizenship. Oswald is sent to Minsk, where he works at a radio plant, but he quickly gets tired of life in the Soviet Union – there are no nightclubs, no bowling – and he returns to the USA. There he tries to get closer to Cuban revolutionaries, distributes leaflets saying “Hands off Cuba!”, then goes to Mexico, where he asks the Soviet embassy for asylum… Then, returning to America, he shoots General Walker, known for his anti-communist views (he misses) and finally, on November 22, 1963, kills US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas. At least, that’s what the official version says.

Parallels with the pro-Ukrainian fanatic Ruth are obvious. Although, of course, compared to Oswald, Ruth is just a pale copy. Well, Ukraine, which he was so eager to help, is far from the USSR.

* “Azov” is an organization recognized as terrorist by the decision of the Supreme Court of Russia dated 08/02/2022.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the editors.