THEY'RE GATHERING EXCUSES FOR A TRUMP LOSS, AND THEY'LL DEPLOY THEM UNTIL JANUARY 6

Okay, here we go:

The ongoing investigation into the attempted assassination of President Trump points to the likelihood that Thomas Crooks was not acting alone and potentially had a handler. pic.twitter.com/1hDP1VSlPX

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) July 23, 2024

Ana Paulina Luna is a sitting congresswoman, albeit one who posed this way the year of her first (unsuccessful) House run:

Another Republican member of Congress, Eli Crane, wonders about a second shooter and claims to have heard reports that, as one conspiracy-minded site puts it, the home of gunman Thomas Crooks "was scrubbed, cleaned and even silverware removed, prior to the investigative units arriving."

These are some of the less "respectable" Republicans in Congress. But if right-wingers will never find what they'd love to find -- a Democratic/"Deep State" conspiracy to assassinate Trump -- they can at least count on crackpots in their party planting the idea of an assassination conspiracy in the minds of many GOP voters.

But you don't need to believe that there was more than one gunman, or that Crooks had a government "handler," to say what M.D. Kittle of The Federalist says in response to reports that the Secret Service would like Donald Trump to limit himself to indoor rallies:

As The Washington Post first reported Tuesday evening, the U.S. Secret Service is “encouraging” the Trump campaign to halt the large-scale events his supporters have grown accustomed to....

Shutting down the outdoor events would smack of election interference, a way to stymie a successful means of campaigning.

You just need to believe that the Secret Service was incompetent, and now the Democrats and "Deep State" have decided not to let a crisis go to waste, to use a Rahm Emanuel phrase that Republicans love to throw back in Democrats' faces.

All of this will come into play if Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November.

We know Republicans will say the election is rigged. But not all of them will say that undocumented immigrants voted and fake ballots were fed into the drop-off boxes and ballot readers. Recall that after the 2020 election, there was the crazy theory of election fraud -- the things Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell said -- and the "polite" theory, which, after 2020, was advanced by commentators such as Mollie Hemingway in her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. From the publisher's description of the book:

Big Tech, wielding unprecedented powers, vaporized dissent and erased damning reports about the Biden family's corruption. And Democratic operatives, exploiting a public health crisis, shamelessly manipulated the voting process itself. Silenced and subjected, the American people lost their faith in the system.

Republicans genuinely believe that the Hunter Biden story, if fully aired before Election Day 2020, would have thrown the election to Trump, and that accommodations for (understandably) COVID-fearful voters tipped the election to Joe Biden. But they didn't really get the "polite" stolen-election theory out there until it was too late. (Hemingway's book was published in October 2021.) This time, they'll want the "polite" version and the crackpot version out there simultaneously, while they still have time to overturn the election results.

So if Harris wins, they'll argue that discouraging Trump from holding outdoor rallies made a massive difference in the final vote, whether or not there was a Vast Liberal Conspiracy to shoot Trump in the first place. This will be one of many arguments they'll make, and it all might be enough to persude Trumpified election officials to refuse to certified a Harris victory.

I agree that the Secret Service ought to be able to protect Trump at an outdoor rally, but I don't understand why not having the option to do outdoor rallies would make any difference in his vote totals -- rally attendees are invariably superfans already, as are the people who watch the rallies on TV and online, and how many attendees or viewers care about the nature of the venues?

As for the "Democrats shot Trump" theory, let's ignore the fact that Democrats aren't psychopaths and ask why it would be to their advantage to do that. After the failed assassination attempt, the media was ready to declare Trump a demigod, a tough-as-nails American hero, which was entirely predictable. The shooting hasn't massively improved his standing in the polls, mostly because he's the same jerk he's always been, but it could have if he'd maintained a posture of humility. And if Trump had died? There would have been a huge outpouring of sympathy for the GOP, and the replacement candidate might well have been Nikki Haley, who led Biden by 9 in a March New York Times poll, and by 16 in a February poll from Marquette. Why would Democrats want that?

In the next few months, Republicans will describe everything they possibly can as election interference. Let's hope the guardrails hold.