Single Bullet Theory

Most Americans don’t like strongmen, but they like strength. Trump’s brash self-assurance and boorish wit always telegraphed that he’s not afraid to tell it like it is. Long ignored or dismissed by the political class, the Forgotten Man projects his feelings back onto the speaker: He speaks for me. Such has long been the poor man’s way of reacting to technocratic newspeak and bicoastal moralisms.

Some call it demagoguery, but there’s more to it.

Trump was already the symbol upon whom Forgotten Men and Women could project their displeasure with the political class. They sense elections are spectacles and frauds, whether this one or that was “stolen.” They realize their betters have never thought of them, their views, or their votes as being part of “our democracy” at all. They know the powerful see them as timid herds on a tax and debt farm.

One day, three iconic images flooded our collective consciousness: one of a focused former president with a bullet whizzing by his head; another of the man on the ground shielded, bleeding, and backlit; and a third, a picture of defiance—his fist aloft.

He speaks for me, thought the Forgotten Man again. But this time, others joined in.

Even those who have prayed for Trump’s demise daily since wearing a pussy hat to protest his 2017 inauguration cannot deny that Trump has now become a symbol capable of vaporizing a thousand political shibboleths or neutering fifty former intelligence officials shouting, “Russia!”

We had already witnessed Trump overcome numerous obstacles, including made-up scandals and stories, two dubious impeachments, and a barrage of fabricated legal charges that have made the word lawfare part of the common lexicon. After a hail of gunfire and a single bullet through the ear, Trump’s courage permanently imprinted him as indefatigable, resilient, and quick on his feet—everything his opponent is not.

People, by nature, tend to operate within a coherence framework. Once an obscure theory of knowledge, coherentism posits that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs holistically within one’s cognitive repertoire. Rather than relying solely on correspondence to external facts—which can be hard to come by in the Internet Age—this theory emphasizes internal consistency and mutual support among beliefs, which form a coherent network (or don’t).

The media’s relentless agitprop and information warfare, coupled with recitations from the DNC’s talking-points hymnal, has eroded trust in institutions. COVID was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and idiots are taking “horse dewormer” when they should be taking “safe and effective” mRNA vaccines. Trump said racist white nationalists were “very fine people,” and that if he lost in 2024 there would be “a bloodbath” both of which prove he’s a white supremicist and orchestrator of coups. January 6th was not a Whitmer-style entrapment plot on steroids, or even a protest that spiraled out of control, but was an unarmed “insurrection” by “domestic terrorists.” President Biden’s long-apparent cognitive decline was dismissed as a series of “cheap fakes” less than two weeks before Biden declared, “We beat Medicare.” And, of course, ad nauseam, Trump is all manner of Hitlerian and an “existential threat” to democracy, despite four years without major armed conflicts, invasions, or rigging any elections.

These are the foremost experts on misinformation and disinformation.

Americans are no longer willing to accept narratives that fail to cohere with their web of beliefs. They’re becoming more discerning and better at filtering for cognitive incoherence. Charlatans like Rick Wilson and Joe Scarborough are being exposed, even as the most formerly ardent Never Trumpers are laying down their swords. Many who once leaned left are weary of being lied to over and over, then asked to parrot those lies, or to carry water for a cadre of censors, spindoctors, and disinformation experts. The result? The disillusioned will stay home or offer a protest vote rather than have to take a shame shower on Election Day.

Ordinary people are catching on to the tactic of accusing their opponents of the very crimes they commit to sow confusion and vilify their adversaries. Alinsky’s playbook has been used effectively to gain and maintain power. But such tactics are unsustainable.

Many pundits, proxies, and politicos have accused Tucker Carlson of “stochastic terrorism” after a deranged shooter claimed Carlson’s rhetoric inspired him. Jody Foster never got such strange accusations despite having inspired Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt on Reagan’s life, but she sure gave the FBI a halo in Silence of the Lambs. The point is that the mendacious media hurled the “stochastic terrorism” accusation against true claims—in Carlson’s case that the Democrats were using illegal immigrants to replace American-born voters—even as they were lighting rhetorical fuses about the mortal dangers of another Trump presidency.

Having established themselves as experts on stochastic terrorism, they must have known their approach would lead to an assassination attempt, as it would create an environment where deranged individuals would be statistically more likely to take matters into their own hands. The choral refrain of Trump of being “an existential threat” to “our democracy” has endured for years now—with Mussolini this and Hitler that. Now, of course, out of one side they say we need to dial back the rhetoric, but on the other they blame the would-be assassin’s victim.

The Trump-as-Hitler trope presented one of those time-machine thought experiments similar to those about 1936 Germany where someone asks you if you’d *take the shot.* In this case, though, there’s no need for a time machine. Given the number of people who referred to Trump as an authoritarian fascist or wrote “a shame the guy missed” the day after the attempt, it was only going to be a matter of time before someone thought he could rise from his sorry status as a bullied incel to become the man who saved our democracy.

Given the media’s penchant for stochastic terrorism, did the deep state even need to send in FBI agents to warp the mind of Thomas Matthew Crooks? Or did they only need to count on the Secret Service’s incompetence or willfully under-provide rooftop security for Trump rallies? Like activating a terror cell, all the FBI or CIA would have needed would be to let Rachel Maddow & Co. continue to foment animus and keep projecting MSNBC hysterics on Gotham’s clouds.

Jokers who fancy they’re Dark Knights will eventually rise from their basements.

There is a small chance that some surprise figure on the DNC’s secret bench will soon be revealed, one capable of whipping the left into a euphoria that lasts long enough to bring victory in the fourth quarter. But that surprise person will be—surprise!—undemocratically chosen. A coronation.

For now, Trump’s strength, resilience, and refusal to quit have earned him a place in the hearts of a voting majority. The Democratic Party, with media’s дезинформация campaigns and full complicity, has not turned Trump into Satan or Hitler but instead has eroded trust for all but the most bitter, self-deceiving partisans.

While I am one who thinks the presidency (with its toxic agencies and grotesque budgets) should go the way of the dodo, the electorate is not ready to face the fact that our democracy is a theater of the absurd run by a legal mafia.

Donald Trump cannot change that.

If he’s not killed, jailed, or cheated out of his win, Donald Trump will be elected for a second term. But those are big ifs. Trump’s enemies are upping the ante. The power consolidated in the national security state doesn’t care if you are an R or a D, it has no patience for anyone who wants to “stop the killing” in Ukraine, a sentiment recently echoed by Trump’s VP choice, J.D. Vance. It has no time for anyone on Team Trump who has threatened to mass furlow federal employees Hollywood has painted as heroes for decades. It has no truck with any rabble chanting Balance the Budget or End the Fed.

“It” is the furnace in Moloch’s belly.

Under a Trump presidency, repairing the Republic will take a miracle. It is infested with a class of permanent functionaries that will be nigh impossible to dislodge. The most likely scenario is that the empire will drown in a sea of red ink sometime under Trump’s watch. This will cause accelerating inflation as interest on the debt compounds at an unstoppable rate. To service that debt and pay food stamps and an army of functionaries, the treasury will have to insist that the Fed print like Peronists as the contractors stay at the head of the trough queue.

Although the seeds of America’s demise were sown long ago, Trump will be blamed entirely for the coming disaster. But no matter. What matters is what the rest of us will do in the shitstorm. Will we rise together with dragon energy to reconstitute our lives and communities, and to build new American institutions? Or will we prostrate ourselves before the Church of Politics and beg for our suppers?

I have a theory. Call it “the single bullet theory.” We will tap into what we felt that Summer day when a bloody man got up one more time and told us exactly what we had to do.