Gerald Posner
Subject: Shooting Donald Trump
Bio: Journalist and author
Reading: Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK is here
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and investments.
The topic today is Shooting Donald Trump.
Our speaker is Gerald Posner who is the author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. You may recall that Gerald and I recorded a two-part podcast series on Oswald and JFK that could be found here and here.
I want to discuss with Gerald what we have learned so far about Trump’s alleged assassin, what was the extent of the security failure, and why we Americans gravitate so quickly to conspiracy theories on both the right and left.
Buckle up.
Gerald Posner:
Sometimes I think of the Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth's great novel about a hired assassin trying to kill Charles De Gaulle where we get a shooter at a long distance with a rifle. And this happened three times in modern American history, starting with John Kennedy in 1963 and Lee Harvey Oswald pulled it off. And then James Earl Ray, five years later when he kills Martin Luther King. We're accustomed to close range assassination attempts where Sirhan Sirhan kills Bobby Kennedy or John Hinckley tries to kill Reagan, those are pistols. Then a couple of weeks ago when an attempted assassination of Donald Trump turns out to be a rifle shot.
I used to be asked what would happen in today's world of the internet and social media if such an assassination took place? Would we have more conspiracy theories faster? Yes. Watching what happened in the Trump shooting was really remarkable because the first conspiracy theory started within an hour, there was a flood on social media, on Twitter, on TikTok of theories of what happened. The far right immediately thought that there had to be a setup. The deep state had tried to kill Trump.
The far left said, “he's not dead. It must be a fake attempt. It must have been staged.”
There's not a direct line between hateful rhetoric and the assassin, but what happens is people like Oswald or Ray or maybe this 20-year-old shooter Crooks with Trump, they are emboldened with the language that is around them. Clearly, in the case of Trump, for a period of a few years, there had been all these references to him as the next Hitler. He was the end of democracy. And it was being said by the representatives of the administration, by Biden himself who said his rhetoric is like Hitler.
Who among us would not take a time machine back and kill the young Hitler. Of course, it would be great. Is it possible that that inflammatory language can push a somewhat unstable 20-year-old over to do the shooting? Sure, it's possible.
I went to the New York Times with a co-author, and I said, would you be interested in an op-ed that talked about what a terrible job the Secret Service that they've done in informing Americans. They haven't held a press conference; they haven't done anything. This was before the Secret Service Director resigned. So, we ended up doing a piece of the New York Times called the Government has Failed America since the Trump shooting, and its how conspiracy theories get going, how they live, how they flourish.
I saw some of the commentary after the New York Times editorial ran and people said, “that's a real sign there must be a conspiracy because the government had Gerald Posner write an editorial on the New York Times to quiet us all down. So, something must be afoot.”
Larry Bernstein:
In Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Day of the Jackal, which you referenced earlier, a right wing French military group hires a professional assassin to kill de Gaulle. So, it was a conspiracy.
In the Trump shooting, it does not appear to be a conspiracy because no one else seems to be involved in the crime.
What are the differences between a conspiracy and a troubled youth with a gun.
Gerald Posner:
I hesitate as I first answer this is the difficulty of saying what a conspiracy is. In the Martin Luther King assassination, there might have been a conspiracy of James Earl Ray the assassin with some of his family members looking to get a bounty on King's head. That's a small kitchen conspiracy, but it's not what people think of when you say a conspiracy. People are thinking Oliver Stone, secret state, FBI or CIA. We have to wait for all the information to come out on Crooks, the Trump shooter because maybe he was encouraged by somebody online. But it's not what I call the conspiracy that people often are looking for when they say,” we think there's something much more to this.”
One of the things I hear Larry all the time is, “how is it possible that he ended up on the roof of a building where they had failed to provide protection?” What people don't realize, that if you are the shooter, the 20-year-old kid, and you've got a plan to try to use a drone over the entire area where the rally is, you've got your idea of the building that you want because it gets a direct line to the stage 140 yards away, which is like a chip shot for a bullet.
And you've picked a section of the roof where it appears that some trees may hide you from the surveillance post that the snipers are using. So, it's very well chosen. But let's say he goes there and tries to get to that roof and he sees somebody on it and is being guarded, guess what? He's going to go someplace else. He's got a Plan B, possibly he's got another location where he might be able to shoot from. And if he can't find any place to shoot from, he's going to take his rifle and go home that day. It's not a suicide mission like an Islamic terrorist who's decided to blow themselves up. What people look at is where he ends up and look at the miscues by the Secret Service, there's luck involved. Everything has to break right for the attempted assassin.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to go to Oswald and luck. And we shouldn't think of this as a one-time event, but an ongoing recurring event until the shooter gets a shot. Oswald wanted to make a difference. He decides that he would like to assassinate Walker, who is a retired general but also a right-wing politician. And Oswald goes to his house, comes up with a plan, and then shoots him, but it hits a window pane. And the bullet grazes him but does no real damage. He sees the glass, panics, hits the ground, and then crawls out. Oswald is dumbfounded to find out that in fact he's missed.
And then he just tries again, how should we think about these young men who just want to kill somebody important? He investigated Trump, but he also investigated Biden, who knows who else he investigated. Tell us about this assassin, and it doesn't matter who he's shooting.
Gerald Posner:
In the assassination attempt that Oswald made on General Walker, there was an ideological bent to it. He viewed Walker as this right-wing general aligned with the John Birch Society and had run for the Governorship of Texas and was thinking of running again. Oswald viewed him as a threat, and said, “I'll stop him.”
That assassination fails then Oswald learns that Kennedy's motorcade is going in front of the place where he is landed a job only two or three days before. Kennedy is a target of opportunity. It will surprise people who haven't looked at the assassination to discover that Oswald doesn't hold any real animus to Kennedy personally.
It's not like Sirhan Sirhan who was writing in his diary, Robert Kennedy must die. Robert Kennedy must die. Robert Kennedy must die. Kennedy is a symbol of a system that Oswald hates. He hates capitalism in America. He wants to get to Cuba. He thinks Castro's doing the real job, and Kennedy presents for him this opportunity to enter the history books at a much higher level than killing General Walker. And if Kennedy hadn't had that motorcade, it's not as though Oswald was committed to trying to kill him.
It happened to be that Oswald had the opportunity and he took it. And that's very much the feeling that I had with Crooks from the little that's come out. When people said, “he had also looked at the DNC.” I know that's puzzling people because they think you can only try to kill a political candidate if you hate their ideology or them.
They sometimes become school shooters or they can turn into a political assassin who will change history without necessarily having the animus to one person. John Hinkley who's deemed insane by the legal system wants to impress Jodie Foster. He was going to go after the president of the day. It happened to be Reagan, but it wasn't any hatred toward Reagan.
When they're dead, we never know what their motivations are. When they live, we don't know their motivations. James Earl Ray lived for decades and he lied consistently about what he did. He was pretending that there was somebody called Raul, which turned out to be a fictional character who made him do it.
Sirhan Sirhan has been telling us for decades he's still alive, that he doesn't remember anything. So, whether they're alive or dead doesn't necessarily tell us. Sometimes they leave behind a treatise of why they've done it. The Unabomber Ted Kaczinski wrote his screed on technology to explain why he did it.
Now, I don't know if Crooks has left anything behind that explains why, but we may or may not find out why he ended up on that roof shooting at Trump. We may be left to speculate because they don't always tell us dead or alive.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the complexities of the JFK conspiracy theories is that Jack Ruby kills Oswald and here Crooks is killed in the act. How do you feel about Crook's death as propelling conspiracy theories?
Gerald Posner:
Crooks’ death will compel the conspiracy theories on both extremes. Let's say that you believe that the government set Trump up and wanted to kill him. Of course, what you need to do then is to have an assassin ready to kill the assassin. The minute he kills Trump or in this case fails to kill Trump, you can't let anything come out, whether he's a patsy or whether he's part of the plot, you've got to kill him. That's why the sniper takes him out. Now, if you're on the far other end of the extreme and believe it was a setup that Donald Trump is such a diabolically evil figure that he's able to set up this stage event where he's going to appear to be almost died and will propel him into future, and by the way, there's going to be a couple of other people shot and one person killed, whatever. That's collateral damage. That's how evil Trump is. He's willing to take that risk. Then you also have to make sure that the person who's been set up to do the shooting has to be killed immediately. So, the sniper then kills the shooter is part of the fake attempt. So, in either way the conspiracies work, they look at every aspect of what took place as part of a plot.
Larry Bernstein:
Bureaucratic failure is always part of the conspiracy and its continuation. The purpose of the Secret Service is to prevent an assassin from attempting to shoot the president, that's core to its mission. The fact that someone did it means that the mission has failed and therefore they're incompetent. Start with JFK and then we'll get to the Crooks’ incompetence, but it's unbelievable. The FBI was aware that Oswald was a bad actor. They had met with him, they interviewed him. They should have known he was a risk. No one was tailing him on the day. How is it possible? Recently there may have been evidence that someone dropped one of the bullets on the bedding when JFK was brought into the operating room, there was a destruction of the notes that the FBI agent had with Oswald, and he asserts that he did it because he was embarrassed that he was going to bring shame on the FBI and the Hoover would've sent him permanently to Kansas City.
Tell us about the coverup, the shame, the failure of the mission and what people will do to make the Secret Service look better than it is.
Gerald Posner:
You hit the highlights on that. The 1963 failure was not a Secret Service failure of security because the standards for the Secret Service were fairly lax. Before the Kennedy assassination, we did things like have the president go around in open top convertible, and we published the motorcade route in the newspaper. But that was the standard back then. Secret Service did not ride on the side of the car where the president was. They were on the car behind.
The driver of the limousine didn't take any evasive action after the first shot was fired. Oswald then has another 10 seconds before he gets off the fatal headshot. If he had taken the Secret Service driver who was driving the presidential limousine had taken evasive action, maybe there's no successful assassination that day, but none of that was required in Secret Service protocols. It was all changed afterwards.
The failure was on the FBI end, because the FBI had Oswald as an open file for investigation because he had defected to Russia then been allowed back into the country. An FBI agent who had interviewed him later destroyed a note that Oswald had left at the FBI headquarters in Dallas, knew that he was working at the Texas School Book Depository and he didn't look at the motorcade route.
That wacky guy Lee Harvey Oswald works there. I mean the agent would've been a hero if he had been able to put that together. And then afterwards when the Warren Commission, the panel put together by Lyndon Johnson to investigate the crime comes together, the FBI is covering up the extent of its ties to Oswald, because they don't want to be asked the question of why didn't you stop him?
The CIA is hiding from the Warren Commission the fact that it is working with the mafia to kill Castro. They're afraid that's going to come out. When conspiracy theorists pick up the evidence in the late sixties that it looks like there's a coverup. They think it's a coverup of a murder, but it's a bureaucratic coverup protection which your bureaucracy does and that is not surprising.
Larry Bernstein:
In the Godfather paraphrasing Michael Corleone said, “if history has taught us anything, it’s that anyone could be assassinated.” And I'm sympathetic to Corleone’s view. These are public figures. They're exposed every day to a potential assassin, and I'm frankly surprised we don't see more of this. Tell us about why and how public officials leave themselves open to getting shot.
Gerald Posner:
Secret Service agents biggest fear is somebody willing to die. The Secret Service puts on this big show of strength that they're going to scare people away from trying to take an assassination attempt because it's a suicide mission. But some people like Crooks who shot Trump are willing to do that, and there's no way Secret Service can stop that.
They can make it difficult. He had a protection detail that had some agents who were a foot shorter than him, that opens you up to a headshot?
One of the rules of Secret Service engagement is that the protection detail has to be the same size as the candidate you're covering because you want to be able to provide a human wall around that candidate in a dangerous situation, should there be a continuing shooter or a second shooter? In this case, that was not the case, and I will tell you that if you talk about scandals or conspiracy theories, imagine if there was a second shooter and the former president was shot and killed as the Secret Service detail was taking him to the car because the agents were too not tall enough to protect him. They were willing to give their life. There's no question they were brave. I give them credit.
If you noticed within a day after that every Secret Service agent around was about the same height as Trump, which should be the case.
Larry Bernstein:
Crooks was a 20-year-old male and 20-year-old male brains aren't fully formed. You mentioned Hinkley and Oswald. Hinkley was found by a court to be mentally insane. Oswald was a strange cat 24 at the time. He’d moved to Russia with the intention of permanently resettling there. He had recently spent the summer distributing pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans. He wasn't a child, that said he couldn't keep a minimum wage job. He was desperate. He was strangely incompetent. But this kid Crooks really is a child, a loner, confused. Tell us about the mental incompetence of this young man.
Gerald Posner:
I could see Crooks as a school shooter. There is an instability that is compounded by being immature, and that's why assassins are in their twenties. They feel this act of violence is going to put them into the history books, change the world and make things better. They have that ideological fervor, that anger, that instability, that 20-year old's going to have that sometimes you can mature and grow out of. The odd thing about James Earl Ray who killed King is that Ray was 40. That's really odd. Very seldom do you have a 40-year-old assassin who never has killed people before take up a rifle and kill a civil rights leader. What else was going on with him? Because most of the time they are 20-year-old and Crooks is the perfect example of this.
You're not going to get the valedictorians who suddenly decide to kill somebody. It doesn't happen that way.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to compare Oswald and Crooks. Oswald's married and his wife takes a Polaroid of Oswald holding his rifle wearing army fatigues. She's aware that Oswald previously shot at Walker and that he's mentally unfit. She had a sit down with them and told him that he has a family to support and that he needs to cut this out.” When she hears that the president has been shot, her initial response is my husband has done this.
But we don't really see that here with Crooks and his parents. At least I'm not aware of it.
Gerald Posner:
We don't know enough yet.
Larry Bernstein:
He lives at home, the gun is his father's, he goes shooting frequently. Tell us about the importance of family oversight of the assassin contemporaneous with the killing.
Gerald Posner:
In a gun culture, it's not unusual for a father to have a rifle that the son then takes to the shooting range and become part of the rifle club.
We need to wait and find out what the parents knew and clearly the FBI and the investigators are going to try to figure that out.
Larry Bernstein:
Crooks parks his car a good distance away. It's packed with explosives. We know that he's flying this drone to figure out the best options to take a shot. The metal detector goes off for Crooks and they find a range finder. Conspiracy theorists would say, there's a scope and they don't do anything about it. What kind of nonsense is that? People see him, he's a person of interest, but they lose track of him. Look, there's a guy going up on the roof. The man's got a gun.
A police officer goes on top, but Crooks points a gun at the cop, and he falls off the roof, eight feet, and hurts himself. I don't understand how the Secret Service assassins have him in their scope to kill him in a second after he takes the shot, but the sniper refuses to take the shot prior to him shooting Trump.
Then you've got this seeming incompetence by the Secret Service as Trump is being taken away. Take us through what we know, why it's fodder for conspiracy theorists, why it's a failure of the Secret Service and how things are going to change going forward.
Gerald Posner:
Crooks flew his own drone at least twice over the site. Senator Hawley reported a Secret Service Whistleblower has said that Secret Service had denied twice an offer from local police to use their own drone over the site. With a drone, you have eyes up in the air, you have somebody operating and looking at the screens. If somebody gets up on a tree or on a rooftop, you know it immediately.
Police did find out when people were shouting that he's up on the roof, you can see him. There is a water tower there that has the highest point in the entire area. If you have a secret service agent on top of that water tower, they have a full 360-degree view. They can see on top of the roof. Nobody's posted on top of the water tower. There's supposed to be a policeman on the roof of the building from which Crooks took the shot. But they decided it was too hot and they stayed inside the building where the sniper was on top of the roof. If that turns out to be the case, heads will roll.
But you also talked about the fact that the shooter tried to get through the perimeter and the magnetometers went off and he ended up having a golf range finder that measures distance from one location or another.
You will not be allowed to bring a range finder to these kind of events in the future. Now, you said that they view him as a person of interest, they lose track of them. People would be startled to find out how many times at rallies or public events for candidates, the Secret Service or local police mark somebody that they think is behaving a little odd and say, keep an eye on that one and they lose them in the crowd, and then nothing happens. In this case it does.
The real failure to me of all of this is what you talked about when you said that for a minute and 57 seconds before the first shot is fired. We have videos, thank goodness for people having cell phone cameras. Hey, there he is. I see him. You can see Crooks moving from his right side to on his stomach. There he is, he's on the roof, officer. They're yelling 140 yards away from where Trump's speaking. Trump is allowed on to podium at 6:00 PM. They had notified the snipers nine minutes before he took the stage that they had a person of interest that they were not able to find him. They still let Trump take the stage, which feeds the conspiracy theory that there something must've been wrong as opposed to incompetence, which is my view. Never underestimate the ability for the Secret Service to be grossly incompetent. And then in that minute and 57 seconds in which they're shouting, and you're right, a local member of the local police climbs up on the side off of the air conditioning unit to the edge of the roof and sees a person on the roof with a gun who then aims the gun back to them.
How is it possible? And then the shots take place right after that. But how is it possible that no one on the central communications channel, which goes out to everyone, is yelling gun, gun, gun and the personal protection on stage to knock him down and get him out of there? That is remarkable. Even if they had shouted gun and the Secret Service close to Trump had started to respond, we'd say, well, it was too late. They didn't even do that. The failure here of an actual threat that is seen by dozens of people yelling for police is really remarkable.
Larry Bernstein:
In some ways, the task at hand for the Secret Service seems impossible. How are they going to keep tables on tens of thousands of people in the audience? There are all these potential places they could be shooting from. The scale of the problem seems too challenging given the resources provided.
Gerald Posner:
They can't stop them all and we are Monday morning quarterbacking. But the Secret Service did not have a meeting that day with the local and the state police. They can't stop all shooters. This was a fundamental failure in the setup for security. They can't stop everybody. Somebody inside the crowd sneaks in a gun. They start to shoot at the candidate. I get that. But this Crooks shooting seems preventable.
Jill Biden was in Pennsylvania that day, and so was Vice President Harris. Secret Service was spread thin. They have a lot of people to cover, but what's going to happen, Larry, we're not going to have public rallies anymore.
Larry Bernstein:
I was visiting my grandparents when Reagan was shot, and I watched the video of the attempted assassination. It was at the beginning of this 24-7 news cycle. It was continuous. Eddie Murphy was on Saturday Night Live and there was a skit that Buckwheat's been shot. The reporter asks Alfalfa in the hospital waiting room, if she'd seen the videotape and they play it for her. The Reagan assassination became a cultural phenomenon, and here Trump is shot, bounces back up and screams, “fight, fight, fight.” And then he's wheeled off and he comes back moments later wearing a bandage. But there isn't the same social media response that happened after the Reagan attempted assassination. Tell us what you think is interesting about the public’s reaction to Trump.
Gerald Posner:
The reaction of the public because it's a failed assassination, it's very different than it had been successful. I'm surprised at how quickly it became partisan. It's a setup, and people who love him think that it must have been nefarious. I was hoping that we could hold it away from partisan views of the assassination attempt for a longer time, but that's not the case.
Larry Bernstein:
When Reagan went into the operating room, he turned to a surgeon and said, I hope you're Republicans. And a surgeon said, today, we're all Republicans.
Gerald Posner:
That's fantastic. And Reagan had the humor to say to Nancy, I didn't duck. It's hard to imagine Reagan at the moment that he had been shot to have put up his fist and said, “fight, fight, fight.” Trump's response is purely Trumpian. It's great and it further inflames people.
We've had an attempted assassination and copycats that somebody's going to get the encouragement to try to do something to another candidate or to Trump again. So hopefully that does not happen, but that's a fear for the Secret Service.
Larry Bernstein:
Gerald, I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to political assassinations and conspiracy theories?
Gerald Posner:
I am very optimistic that we will react to this by improving presidential protection. We made it better after Jack Kennedy was killed. We made it better after the attempt on Ronald Reagan and it will be made tighter going forward. It will be much harder to assassinate the candidate in the next year or two because the Secret Service is going to be at its very best and on high alert. That is a cause for optimism.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Gerald, for joining us today.
If you missed our previous podcast, check it out. The topic was Investing in Cheap Real Estate. Our speaker was Dean Adler who co-founded the real estate investment firm Lubert-Adler 27 years ago. Dean’s firm has over $17 billion of assets under management. Dean is an expert in investing in residential and office buildings in both equity and debt.
I would now like to make a plug for our next podcast about discipling disobedient college students. Our speaker will be Daniel Diermeier who is the Chancellor of Vanderbilt.
I plan to discuss with Daniel whether universities should be neutral on controversial political matters, and how to encourage free speech and civil discourse on campus. Even with clear rules of engagement like preventing the heckler’s veto, there will be trouble on campus. What should be the rules of the road as it relates to expulsion and disciplinary action against students who do not follow the university’s code of conduct?
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Shooting Donald Trump