Happy Monday!

Or should we say Manic Monday? Yesterday, Joe Biden caved to pressure from his own party and threw in the beach towel for the 2024 presidential 3lection. Even though he endorsed Kamala Harris to take over, it’s looking like the Democratic National Committee is heading for some form of open convention in Chicago next month. (Shades of ’68 when Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy led to an open convention in Chicago that descended into violence and chaos.)

Meanwhile, Republicans are demanding that Biden immediately resign the presidency, arguing that if he is incapable of running a campaign, he’s incapable of running a country. 

We talk about Biden’s withdrawal in “No Mo’ Joe: Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race.”

John Zmirak also weighs in with “Run Kamala Run.” 

This unprecedented (if not completely unexpected) news overshadowed Trump’s return to the campaign trail Saturday after the failed assassination attempt only seven days earlier, open talk of a second shooter, and further examples of just how far the Secret Service went to make things easy for 20-year-old wannabe assassin Thomas Crooks. 

“Threat to Democracy? I Took a Bullet for Democracy”

Donald Trump held his first rally since the assassination attempt in Michigan on Saturday. Joined for the first time by new running mate J.D. Vance, Trump addressed — and at times entertained — a crowd of thousands.

No longer wearing a big bandage on his damaged ear, Trump spontaneously dragged a union guy up on stage. He blasted the Democrats trying to kick the duly elected Democratic nominee to the curb. He even made fun of his comb-over.

Donald Trump roasts himself for his “severe comb-over” 🤣

“I looked up there I said ‘WOW’— look at that, wow. That’s like a work of art” pic.twitter.com/3RegJ7ZbCb

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 20, 2024

And Trump directly took on the (dangerous) Democratic talking point that he is a “threat to democracy.”

“Threat to democracy?” Trump said, “I took a bullet for democracy.”

But a third of Democrats say, “No, you didn’t.”

“No, You Didn’t”

In a shocking display of just how serious a psychosis Trump Derangement Syndrome really is, one-third of Democrats surveyed in a new poll believe Trump was not actually shot. 

“Trump is capable of anything,” one shooting denier in Ohio told Fox News. He thought the whole thing was staged, and Trump wouldn’t care if his supporters got killed in the process.

One of the leading figures pushing the possibility is former ESPN host Keith Olbermann. “Why is Donald Trump lying about the assassination attempt?” Olbermann posted on X last Thursday. “Five days later there is no confirmation, not even an anonymous statement, from law enforcement or a medical authority that he was hit by a bullet.” 

So the AP photographer that got that shot of the bullet whizzing by Trump’s head was in on it too? There’s not enough tin foil in the world to cover that hot dog. 

On Saturday, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), who was White House physician for three U.S. presidents and has been traveling with Trump, released a statement, detailing the injuries.

Olbermann doubled down Sunday morning, denying that Jackson is a doctor. (But I bet Olbermann thinks Jill Biden is one.)

A reminder: Ronny Jackson isn't a doctor. Which is perfect, because Trump wasn't hit by a bullet.

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) July 21, 2024

Prediction: At some point real soon, Olbermann will do a 180 and say Trump did miraculously survive a shot to the head … thus proving he is, indeed, the Antichrist. If Olbermann doesn’t say this himself, somebody else on the far Left will. 

Meanwhile, The View’s Joy Behar is giving Olbermann a run for his money for worst case of TDS. The shooting has turned her into a theologian. Behar says that Trump proclaiming God spared his life proves he is “very narcissistic.”

Joy Behar: "When something like this happens to you, like this assassination attempt, and you say something like ‘God was watching me,’ that is a very un-Christian thing to say because it’s very narcissistic." pic.twitter.com/R4E7m8XISm

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 19, 2024

You Gotta Be Kidding: Crooks Flew Drone Over Rally Site? Secret Service Blew Off Meeting with Locals?

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle will be appearing before the House Oversight Committee today. And boy, is she in for a well-deserved ride.

With each revelation, it is getting harder to accept that Thomas Crooks’s ability to take a near-fatal shot at Trump was merely the result of an innocent cascade of catastrophic errors. By Breitbart’s count, there were at least nine major Secret Service failures in the incident.

On Friday we learned your would-be assassin actually flew a drone over the rally site a few hours before the event.

Don Jr. was aghast, pointing out that the Secret Service would not even allow him to fly his own drone near Mar-a-Lago.

Just to underscore how crazy this all is, I was once prevented flying MY OWN drone off of the beach at Mar-a-Lago by USSS because my father was inside the house…
Now we have one literally scouting his speech!!! 🤬 https://t.co/M3BAENqT4f

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 20, 2024

And now this latest bombshell dropped Sunday morning on Fox News by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who’s heading the Senate investigation into the incident. “The Secret Service did not even attend the 9 o’clock security meeting with local law enforcement” the morning of the rally.

Oh, Man: There May Have Been a Second Shooter

Johnson stressed that his investigation is only preliminary, but that he has seen some “extremely convincing [evidence] online” from experts suggesting there may have been a second shooter.

Johnson also talked about how local officers who got on the roof and took photos of the dead Crooks were told to send their pictures to a particular ATF agent. (The locals assumed he was Secret Service.) Johnson called that “very strange.” Even stranger is that when Johnson’s people tried to contact that agent, they found  “he’s gone dark.”

“No, We Did Not Deny Trump Extra Security. That’s an Outrageous Lie! … Oh Wait, Yeah We Did.”

The Washington Post is reporting that top officials within the Secret Service repeatedly rebuffed requests from agents assigned to Trump to increase the security around the former president. Trump’s detail wanted more agents and “snipers and specialty teams” to help with outdoor events and large public gatherings. They also requested magnetometers.

The bosses who rejected the requests cited “lack of resources.” (How many hundreds of billions of dollars has the Biden administration spent protecting the Zelenskyy regime in Ukraine? And they certainly didn’t mind forking over the bucks for 80,000 new IRS agents to go after American taxpayers.)

However, the Secret Service, after initially calling the allegations “absolutely false,” now admits some past requests from Trump’s campaign for increased security were rejected.

We’re also learning from whistleblowers that most of those agents guarding Trump that day weren’t actually  Secret Service, but agents from Homeland Security. In other words, they had semi-trained scrubs protecting the GOP nominee.

In an interview with Jesse Watters set to air Monday, Trump says no one warned him the Secret Service was tracking a suspicious man at the rally. “Nobody mentioned it,” he said. “Nobody mentioned there was a problem. I would have waited for 15 (minutes).”

When you had Trumpers screaming — a woman in a red shirt, she was screaming, “There’s a man on the roof.” And then other people said, “There’s a man on the roof who’s got a gun.” And that was quite a bit before I walked onto the stage. So you would have thought somebody would have done something about it.

You’d think. Unless …

Mayorkas More Upset About Female Agents Being Criticized Than His Agents Failing

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the same guy who personally refused to provide protection for Joe Biden’s other rival, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., seems more concerned that people are criticizing the short and in some cases seemingly inept female agents at the Trump rally than he is about the failures of his Secret Service. He calls the criticism “insulting.”

Listen, Mr. Open Borders. You have two options and only two: One, your agency allowed undertrained, underequipped agents to protect a presidential nominee — part of a catastrophic series of failures proving the staggering incompetency of the Secret Service, which directly reflects on your staggering incompetence. Or your people deliberately set the stage for your boss’s rival to be assassinated.

It’s either one or the other.

Along the Stream

Today’s Afternoon Tea is serving up the latest in the Saga of Joe Biden.

We’ve got a special piece from Wendell Vinson and Dave Donaldson, cofounders of CityServe International: “America Needs a Prayer Meeting”

Plus, from Yael Eckstein, “In the Face of Hatred and Division We Must Choose Unity and Hope.”

 

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.