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What's shocking is that it took so long for the bullets to start flying.

Today’s newsletter was pretty well in the bag when something rather astonishing occurred in the town of Butler, Pennsylvania, population 13,501.

Until now, for all I know, Butler was probably best known as the home town of Bret Michaels, lead singer of the awful rock band Poison, star of his own reality show Life As I Know It and proprietor of Pets Rock, a clothing and accessories line for dogs and cats.

You know perfectly well what I’m on about.

America, America, God mend thine every flaw

I’m at it for the National Post today: Maybe Joe Biden should stop saying Trump will destroy democracy. Democrats and Republicans are far too comfortable with apocalyptic rhetoric. I’m not entirely comfortable with the headline, but headline writing isn’t easy on the fly.

The main takeaway: What is every bit as astonishing as how close Donald Trump came to certain death - a matter of centimetres- is that it took this long for someone to try to kill him. Which is just as amazing as the fact that Trump’s innumerably vulgar imbecilities have not yet incited any of his lowbrow devotees to take a shot at Joe Biden.

The main point: Choose whatever side you like, but what matters is whether the American people can figure out a way to force their country’s political class to grow up and calm the hell down before it’s too late.

Being an irrepressible silver-lining type of guy, here’s the upside.

Biden’s Democrats and Trump’s Republicans are actually in lockstep agreement on a fundamental, existential question about the predicament of the great American republic. Both sides say the United States is on the precipice of democratic collapse.

Perhaps they’re both right. Maybe they’re both the reason why.

Unless Martians land at Mar-a-Lago or something, this will be the defining photograph of the Trump campaign and Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci will win a Pultizer for it.

No, it wasn’t the Jews or the Deep State or Antifa. . .

. . . or whoever else you’ve read about on Twitter. The shooter is dead. Thomas Matthew Crooks was a 20-year-old registered Republican and $15 teenage donor to A Democratic Party fundraising platform, from a middle-to-upscale neighbourhood in Bethel Park, about an hour away from Butler.

Apart from Trump’s nicked ear and two rally attendees who were badly wounded, a good man was killed. We should spare a thought for him before we move on.

Laura Esposito from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done a fine reporting job here. Corey Comperatore died after throwing himself on his wife and daughters to protect them from the gunfire.

Comperatore was a church-going firefighter, former chief of the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company, a proper man by all accounts, “a superhero” to his daughters. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro has ordered flags flown at half-mast in his honour.

Laura’s story is quite moving, and it’s useful to be reminded that among Trump’s “basket of deplorables” are many brave and decent citizens.

Rest easy, Corey Comperatore.

Can we please turn down the volume just a notch

J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy author and a frontrunner to stand as Trump’s running mate, said this: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Well, you never know, I guess. But please, are you kidding me?

The Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise, seriously injured in 2017 when a Bernie Sanders fanboy opened fire at a gathering of Republicans in Alexandria, Virginia, said the same: “Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”

Okay, but you’d have to be blind drunk on Trumpist bathwater to suggest that the apocalyptic, violent rhetoric of the post-truth American style has been one-sided. Trump has been far and away the most egregious offender, the worst by a country mile.

Political violence to his own ends has never annoyed Trump in the least. What to do about the thuggish insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. capitol building on January 6, 2021, his “patriots”? He says he’s inclined to pardon many of them if he ends up back in the White House in November.

Have we really forgotten this story? It’s only from last November: Top US general taking steps to protect family after Trump death comments.

The news media? Don’t get me started

Whenever the mainstream press attributes some shocking utterance to Trump, it is my custom to wait and check and verify and assess context. I suppose I could be faulted for sometimes being insufficiently vigilant, but usually, the story checks out.

Here’s a fun fact about Saturday’s assassination attempt and the American press. The biggest scoop of the day goes to Gary O'Donoghue. He’s with the BBC. He was the first to interview witnesses who saw Crooks crawling up the sloping roof of the building that gave him a clear shot of Trump.

The people O’Donaghue spoke with had attempted to alert the Secret Service and police on the scene that there was a guy climbing up onto the roof with a gun. Then the shooting started. Watch this interview.

O’Donaghue, by the way, has been totally blind from the age of 8.

He’s a journalist. Forbes’ magazine’s resident “diversity, equity and inclusion expert” Shaun Harper: not so much. Harper thought it would be clever to dash off a quick think piece, with the headline: “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Donald Trump’s Next Appeal To Black Voters?”

The implication, one is left to surmise, is that Black people sustain or survive more gunshots than white people, or something, so hey, Trump, yo.

Forbes pulled the piece from its website almost as quickly as it went up, either to avoid being “cancelled,” embarrassed beyond redemption, or inadvertently allowing Harper to destroy his own career by own-goal stupidity. Mediaite’s got the story.

Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep

All the clever people will be amusing themselves pointing out all the insane conspiracy theories coming from the loudest Trumpist quarters. The Secret Service was in on it! They let it happen!

Well, here’s Dmitri Mehlhorn, the top political adviser to Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. In an email sent to sympathetic journalists on Saturday night, Melhorn wrote that there was a possibility, “which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally. . . that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.”

Moral of the story: Rich Democrats are perfectly capable of being just as stupid and weird as the lowest-brow Trumphat guys.

People kill people. Also, Americans kill people with guns.

My old friend, mentor and colleague Stephen Hume pointed out to me the obvious thing about Crooks’ weapon, which apparently Crooks’ father bought for him. “I note he was using an AR-15 with a large capacity magazine. There are about 44 million of these things in the US, where there are 120 guns for every 100 people. The math of more guns than people suggests that in the U.S., every nut gets a gun - a machine gun, at that.”

Occam’s Razor there. If there are lots and lots of guns available to lots and lots of people, sooner or later somebody’s going to do a bad thing with a gun. That may be the main lesson to take from what happened on Saturday.

I’m not entirely alone in wondering why it took so long

I have a lot of time for Brian Klaas. He’s an American political scientist and an associate professor in global politics at University College London. I quoted him here in the National Post last summer: All Trudeau had to do was stay on script on Russia. Guess what happened.

This is from a piece Klaas wrote for the Atlantic last September:

As a political scientist who studies political violence across the globe, I would chalk up the lack of high-profile assassinations in the United States during the Trump and post-Trump era to dumb luck. Already in 2018, one deranged Trump follower, Cesar Sayoc, sent pipe bombs to public figures (and a media organization) who just so happened to be among those whom Trump most often attacked in his Twitter feed. Thankfully, nobody died—not because the dangers of Trump’s rhetoric were overstated but because Sayoc was bad at building bombs.

This is not to say that the Democratic Party establishment is always congenial and collegial and civil and somehow incapable of inciting an attempt to assassinate the bad man with the orange head.

We shouldn’t so easily disremember that Democrats and a mostly Democrat-friendly media elided and bullshitted their way through the George Floyd eruptions of 2020, which forced curfews in at least 200 cities and brought out nearly 100,000 National Guard, State Guard, 82nd Airborne and Army infantry regiments in the largest peacetime military mobilization in American history.

I will be back to regular Real Story programming shortly. I have a lot in the pipeline. For starters, I have come to the attention of the authorities, as they used to say in East Germany. Chris Selley reports about it for the National Post here: Why are police stigmatizing factual reporting about residential school graves? That report follows from my last newsletter, alluded to in the subheadline, There’s something deeply wrong with the RCMP.

I’ve got more on that to come, and on why the hell it is that the Justice Minister and the RCMP are happily allowing the most vile of the “anti-Zionist” crowd in Canada to get away with violating Section 83 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits "knowingly acting on behalf of, at the direction of or in association with" listed terrorist entities.

And why does the mass media almost completely ignore this? Last Thursday in the National Post, in a column I’ll be elaborating upon in the next Real Story newsletter: Trudeau Liberals' indifference to NATO plays right into Russia's hands. It’s all related. Trust me.

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