There’s an incredible irony that right when he was enduring the worst week of his presidential race, Trump has been handed an election-winning lifeline by another attempt on his life.
My instant reaction to news of the latest assassination attempt on President Trump was brief.
“WTF??!!” I posted on X.
Those three letters probably summed up what most people felt when they discovered that another lone gunman had gotten a few hundred yards from the former president and current presidential candidate.
How could this have happened again, just nine weeks after a bullet grazed Trump’s ear and came so perilously close to killing him in an attack during a rally?
And the more I learned about this latest incident, the more bewildered and angry I became.
Everyone knows that Donald Trump loves playing golf most weekends when he’s at his main residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
And everyone also knows that he usually plays at his own Trump International Golf Club.
So any would-be assassin would have no problem working out when Trump was playing there, because they could just monitor the very public movements of the lengthy presidential motorcade from his nearby home, Mar-a-Lago.
In fact, it’s the most obvious place for a shooter to plan an attack, isn’t it?
For four hours or so, your target is exposed in the open air, and golf courses have endless places to hide, from large bushes to big trees and fences.
That’s why I would have assumed that after the catastrophic security failure in July, when that shooter was able to lie on a roof 150 yards from a Trump rally stage, the Secret Service would have made damn sure nobody could get that close to their protectee again.
I was sadly, shockingly wrong.
This new gunman was able to hide behind a chain-link fence on a corner of the course, just 300 to 500 yards from Trump, armed with a scoped AK-47 assault rifle and a Go-Pro camera to presumably film the shooting, and wait for his prey to arrive.
