I'll Keep Banging This Drum until Somebody Listens

The threat to President Trump and Vice President Vance hasn't gone away and it won't

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I’m like a dog with bone, or a little boy with a drum, but frankly I don’t care. This is serious. Deadly serious.

The threat to President Trump and the Vice President is real. It would probably be an exaggeration to say the threat is getting worse, since Trump was nearly killed twice on the campaign trail, so I’ll just say the threat is as bad as it has been and I don’t see evidence of it going away any time soon.

I’m not privy to what goes on behind the scenes, the security preparations and the intel briefings and all of that stuff. I’m not a Secret Service agent or a presidential staffer. But looking at the situation even as an outsider, on the other side of the Pond, I think there are urgent questions to be asked about the security of the two most important men in America.

First of all, there’s the question of just how well those agencies that failed to protect Trump during the campaign can do so now, even under new leadership. Trump has made Chad man in black Sean Curran—one of the agents who rushed to his defence in Butler, Pennsylvania on that fateful day—director of the Secret Service, and Curran has already started cleaning house. But that doesn’t mean the Service is fit for purpose yet. It may take many months for it to be so. It may take even longer.

As far as we know, the Secret Service is still the same utterly incompetent agency that left it to the hand of God himself or the voice of Shinzo Abe saying, “Over here, Toranpu-san” or just sheer damn luck for the President to turn his head and avoid having it blown clean off of his shoulders in front of the world.

Events of the last week also suggest, at best, a lack of care and attention on the part of those whose job it is to protect the Number One and Number Two. Twice in seven days, the Vice President and his family have found themselves in danger because of pro-Ukraine protesters. The first time, on a family skiing holiday in Vermont, was less serious. Chalk that up as more of an embarrassment if you want.

The second, however, saw the Vice President surrounded outside a convenience store near his home and forced to attempt to reason, more or less nose to nose, with his assailants. Vance did his very best to remain calm, and he did, explaining the administration’s policy towards Russia and Ukraine in terms even a bunch of libtards with chicken Kyivs for brains could understand. But you can bet he felt bloody awkward and uncomfortable, and probably just a little bit afraid, since he was dressed to go buy groceries and, oh yeah—he had his three-year-old child with him.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t protest or, indeed, that the nation’s politicians shouldn’t be confronted with dissenting opinions and raw emotion from the people it is their duty to represent. People should protest, and if you can’t take some rough and tumble with the smooth, politics isn’t for you I’m afraid.

What I’m saying is, a confrontation like that should simply never happen.

The Vice President, with or without his three-year-old child, whether he’s in a flannel shirt and jeans or a business suit, should never be put in a position like that.

And let’s not pretend either that the issue animating the anger of the protesters isn’t divisive enough to make violence, or even murder, a real possibility at any moment.

This was about Ukraine, and Ukraine, we already know, nearly cost Donald Trump his life.

The last time a pro-Ukraine fanatic got within three hundred yards of the President, it was a man called Ryan Routh and he was armed with an SKS rifle and bad intentions.

Remember him?

Ryan Routh went to Ukraine to try and recruit Afghan soldiers to fight against the Russians. He had a crazy plan to ship them into the country via Iran, and he spent months in Ukraine trying to get funding and support for that plan. When he couldn’t get any, he came back to the US and lobbied on Capitol Hill.

In a bizarre 300-page manifesto-cum-autobiography he self-published on Amazon, Routh told the world Trump deserved to die and he gave reasons too: the scuppering of the Obama-Iran deal and Ukraine.

Routh is due to go on trial in September if memory serves, and we still haven’t got anywhere close to the bottom of who he is, what he was doing, why, or indeed who he was connected to. But one thing is certain: the Ukraine war was reason enough for him to want to kill Donald Trump.

Trump’s first would-be killer, Thomas Matthew Crooks, that ugly little freak, also had foreign links. That much has been established. Conveniently enough for hawks like Lindsey Graham, we’re told it was probably Iran, but I’d bet a decent chunk of my Bitcoin wallet it was just as likely Ukraine.

The general atmosphere is febrile, anything could happen. And by “anything” I mean, real political violence. The left is in disarray—the organised left—after a better part of a decade spent trying and failing to mobilise against Donald Trump. There is no mass movement any more. The pussy hats have been put away. BLM are all going to jail for taking out fraudulent pandemic loans. Trump is back in the White House, writing executive orders like a man possessed.

What’s left to fill the void for those committed radicals who remain is individual action, and they have a new hero to emulate: Luigi Mangione.

Never mind that little Luigi wasn’t a leftist ideologue, but was in fact a disgruntled coomer who lost the ability to make amateur porn videos when his back gave out: that doesn’t matter. Mangione provides the model for lone-wolf terror directed at the oligarchs—the rich white men—who rule America for their own benefit and are now reversing, at breakneck speed, decades of leftist Progress in government and society.

Ryan Michael English, a transgender man who tried to murder Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and burn down the Heritage Foundation—bet you forgot about him, didn’t you?—cited Mangione as his main inspiration.

The protesters who are now picketing and vandalising Tesla stores and setting fire to Cybertrucks wherever they see them—one of their leaders went on a podcast and said, yes, Luigi Mangione. He’s our guy.

I’m not trying to scaremonger here. I just want to be realistic and, ultimately, to ensure the President and Vice President are protected as they should be.

Since Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, there have been over 20 incursions by civilian aircraft into the protected no-fly zone over Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago. One happened at the weekend while Trump was playing golf on the very course where Ryan Routh tried to kill him.

The range of threats is broad, and I wouldn’t like to have to deal with them myself, but that’s no excuse. Blackwater founder Erik Prince has offered a private security detail for the President, and if I were him, I’d take it. Just to be sure.