At the End of Empire

The dots act within the patterns of history. They do not know where it is headed or choose its direction. But they help it get where it is going.

Source: Getty Images

Thursday, July 18, 2024 

Bill Bonner, writing today from Poitou, France

Ask Bill who he thinks was behind the assassination attempt on DJT?  Does he think a 20-year-old kid just woke up and decided to kill a former President that day? Let me grab my ladder and Dad's rifle and shoot the former, and likely, new President of the USA? The story is so preposterous...  

—A Dear Reader  

On the surface, the story does seem preposterous. The US has seventeen different secret service-type agencies. On or near the scene in Butler, PA were dozens... hundreds... thousands... of people on the payroll charged with protecting the government and its operatives (including aspiring Commanders-in-Chief). Local cops. State cops. FBI. Homeland Security. ATF agents. Army. Marines. The list goes on and on.  

All were armed with the latest robo-cop gear... the latest intel, coming from snoops and spooks all over the country... and the latest crime-busting tactics.  

How could they fail to stop a callow amateur, shooting from an obvious vantage at the man who must be the most obvious target in the whole world?  How could a kid with an aluminum ladder foil a billion dollars’ worth of trained, professional security? 

It is so preposterous... it must be true, right?  

The premise — laid out by the former Chinese ambassador to the US — is that America has changed dramatically from the country we grew up in. 

What caused the change? Where does it lead? 

And the botched ‘assassination attempt’ on Donald Trump? How does that fit in?

November 22, 1963

We were fifteen years old when JFK was murdered. That assassin didn’t miss.  

We recall how the nation mourned... and how everyone remembered where he was when Kennedy’s death was reported. No one joked about it. And no one forgot it. 

Mrs. Kennedy, still wearing the blood-stained suit she had worn in Dallas, had stayed with the body until it was brought into the White House. There it lay, for twenty-four hours, guarded by Green Berets. 

The next day, the casket was laid onto a horse-drawn caisson. Three hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue and a whole teary world watched on television as the procession slowly marched to the Capitol. The crowd fell silent as the caisson went by... followed by a riderless horse, Black Jack. The only sounds were muffled drums and the clank of horses’ steel shoes on the pavement.  

In the rotunda of the US Capitol, Jackie Kennedy took her two children in hand to kneel beside the coffin. She had asked for a closed casket; her husband’s head had been shattered. Outside, another quarter of a million people lined up in near freezing temperatures... the line was said to stretch for forty blocks... to say farewell.

One of the last mourners, at 2:30am was former heavyweight boxing champion, Jersey Joe Walcott, who said simply: ‘He was a great man.’ 

And then, there was the doubt... who really did it, and why? Did the dots know the pattern of which they were a part? 

Kennedy had announced his clear intention to pull away from war. Dan Denning comments: 

The Kennedy ‘Peace Speech’ was on June 10, 1963. At 11:45 [minutes into the speech] he makes the point you did about no nation suffering more than the Soviets in World War Two. At 19:44 he talks about the ongoing negotiations in Geneva for a 'general and complete disarmament.' 

Kennedy had already noted that the CIA was out of control and vowed to break it ‘into a thousand pieces.’ Later, at American University he clearly aimed to follow through on Eisenhower’s warning and prevent the firepower industry from getting control of America’s government.   

Did the secret service/CIA/military, industrial complex strike first…conspiring to kill Kennedy? Did they organize it with the Cuban mafia... or did they merely forget to report the threat from Lee Harvey Oswald, whom they had been following for years? Or, did they have no conscious involvement, none at all... maybe it was just one of those coincidences that make history – getting rid of the one the man who might have stopped America’s degeneration into a warfare state? 

Was not Lenin shipped to Moscow on a special train provided by the Germans? Was not the young Stalin sent to Siberia... and allowed to escape? Did not Abraham Lincoln go to the theater, even though he might have preferred a quiet evening at home? 

The dots act within the patterns of history. They do not know where it is headed or choose its direction. But they help it get where it is going.  

In the mainstream media, Trump’s star has risen. He has achieved a kind of folk hero status. He survived a bullet. He survived ridicule and derision. He survived salacious reports about p#$$y grabbing and paying off a porn star to keep quiet. He survived grand juries, as well as state and federal prosecutions. He survived four bankruptcies and three marriages. 

Now, he is even more likely than ever to be our next president. By contrast, Joe Biden’s election prospects are dim. Poor Joe’s brain seems to be clouding over day by day... while Trump’s brain, such as it is, is sharp and clear.  

Outside of the mainstream, meanwhile, opinions are more nuanced. Some analysts see the US drifting into such lawlessness and violence that a 20-year-old kid shoots a former US president. Others wonder whether the Secret Service really wanted to keep Trump alive. Still more daring is the thought that maybe the powers-that-be set him up. 

‘We can’t trust the politicized FBI to handle the probe of the Trump assassination bid,’ writes Jim Bovard in the New York Post. 

Then, who can we trust? Where are our ‘great men’ today? 

Tune in tomorrow. 

Regards, 

Bill Bonner