F**king Mondays: Trump Shooting Part II, Musk's Disgusting "Joke", Vance Loves Putin, and the Great Election Steal

It's that time of the week again!

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! Your favorite column to get the week started! In the round up today:

Another assassination attempt on Donald Trump

And here we go again. There was another assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend, this time by 58 year old Ryan Wesley Routh. Reported the NYTimes:

The latest incident happened Sunday afternoon at Mr. Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., where Secret Service agents spotted a person concealed in the bushes and holding a rifle while Mr. Trump was golfing. Secret Service personnel shot at the man, who fled and was taken into custody during a traffic stop a short time later, investigators said.

Mr. Trump was a few hundred yards away when the gunfire rang out and he was not injured — unlike in the previous attempt, when he was shot in the ear at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.

Social media is of course spiraling completely out of control, much of it directed by X overlord Elon Musk, who thought this was an appropriate tweet after the event:

Musk took the tweet down after an outpouring of outrage and tried to play it off as a “joke”. But the damage was already done and now it is deemed fact in MAGAland that Democrats are trying to assassinate Donald Trump. Trump also took to the airwaves to blame Democrats, telling Fox News that: “[Ryan Wesley Routh] believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it. Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

It is obviously a terrible thing that there have been two attempts on Trump’s life, and no want should want to live in a country where political assassinations are a regular occurrence. But let’s be honest about who is responsible for the violent rhetoric in our political culture.

Both sides have not incited their supporters to overthrow the US government or overturn an election. Both sides have not urged White Nationalist groups to “stand back and stand by”, and both sides have not waged war on immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and other vulnerable minorities for political gain. Trump’s rhetoric is uniquely violent and dangerous, and his presence in US politics has had catastrophic consequences for a significant number of people — including himself.

It is also worth noting that the shooter in Pennsylvania, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican, and the shooter at Mar-a-Lago appears to be a 2020 Tusi Gabbard supporter, and backed (at least on social media) Vivek Ramaswamy in 2024. Routh was also a pro-Ukrainian activist, so had multiple political personalities that were entirely contradictory.

The would-be assassin should obviously be condemned, as should any liberal engaging in violent rhetoric. But Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their supporters don’t get to lecture anyone on why this keeps happening.

Just like Putin’s plan

When asked on “The Shawn Ryan Show” how a Trump administration would end Russia’s war on Ukraine, JD Vance put forward a plan that appears to have come directly from the Kremlin. Reported the Times:

Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump would sit down with Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans and say, “You guys need to figure out what a peaceful settlement looks like.” He went on to outline what he thinks a deal would entail: The Russians would retain the land they have taken and a demilitarized zone would be established along the current battle lines, with the Ukrainian side heavily fortified to prevent another Russian invasion.

While the remainder of Ukraine would remain an independent sovereign state, Mr. Vance said, Russia would get a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine.

“It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions,” Mr. Vance said. “I think that’s ultimately what this looks like.”

Victoria J. Nuland, a former senior State Department official who helped shape the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, said Mr. Vance’s plan was very similar to what Mr. Putin had repeatedly offered as peace terms.

“This is essentially the proposal put forward in February,” she said. “And why? Because it is a great gift to him.”

I’m not going to suggest that Vance is a Russian plant/asset etc, but I do think the media needs to start asking the Trump campaign some very hard questions. Vance’s suggestion that Ukraine give up all the territory captured by Russia and pledge not to join NATO is not a peace plan in any meaningful sense of the term. It is a plan for Ukraine’s complete capitulation and an explicit acknowledgement of Russia’s victory. Why exactly do Trump and Vance want Russia to win this war, and why is it in America’s interest to let an enemy nation invade a US ally?

How to overthrow an election

We are heading into very, very dangerous territory as November nears and Donald Trump continues to sink in the polls. Trump has been planning to steal the election since he announced his bid last year, but now the plan is playing out in real time:

The GOP has already engaged in some dry runs this year by contesting and refusing to certify elections at the state level, but the full frontal assault appears to be happening now. The GOP’s plan is simple: repeat 2020, but with far better planning and execution.

Central to the plan is to undermine the integrity of the election before any votes are cast. This means a constant stream of propaganda from Trump and his allies (including Elon Musk who is now a major source of election disinformation). This means conspiracies about mail-in voting, conspiracies about dead people voting, and conspiracies about Democrats “importing” immigrants to vote for them. The concept is straightforward: if the public believes Democrats are trying to steal the election, it becomes easier for Trump to steal it himself.

He did exactly this in 2020, but the legal challenges were so ludicrous even Republican judges threw them out.

In 2024 however, Trump appears to have solved this problem by bullying his party into electing MAGA candidates to state legislative offices, and highly partisan judges in key swing state courts. Writes former Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig:

The Republicans are also in the throes of electing Trump-endorsed candidates to state legislative offices in key swing states, installing into office their favored state election officials who deny that Biden won the 2020 election, such as secretaries of state, electing sympathetic state court judges onto the state benches and grooming their preferred potential electors for ultimate selection by the party, all so they will be positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress, if need be.

Trump has already told us he will not accept the election result if he loses, so none of this is exactly secret. The only way to stop this is to a) expose the plan and loudly and clearly as possible, and b) vote in such overwhelming numbers that it is impossible for Trump to pretend he won.

Easier said than done of course, but then that is why democracies are so fragile, and why stopping despots from breaking them is so unbelievably difficult.

Hope everyone has a great week!

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