Assassination attempt not a ‘coincidence,’ Donald Trump Jr. says

The conditions that allowed a 20-year-old would-be assassin to get a clear shot at assassinating former President Donald J. Trump didn’t happen by coincidence, Donald Trump Jr. said July 26.

“I don’t honestly think that the guys at the Secret Service — many who I know and respect — magically left an entire roof unguarded where a guy with a rifle could get there for 20 minutes within 150 yards,” Trump Jr. said in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson.

“Like, that doesn’t happen. That’s not being a conspiracy theorist,” Trump Jr. said. “Like, you’re a freaking idiot if you think that that just happened by coincidence.”

The junior Trump’s explosive statement raises the public specter of what has been mostly whispered only in private: Were the U.S. Secret Service or others in government somehow complicit in the attempted assassination? Did would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks have help?

J. Michael Waller, senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy and author of the best-selling book “Big Intel: How the CIA Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains,” said the ugliest explanations cannot be ruled out.

“It’s really hard to separate incompetence from willful negligence or even simple negligence or malice,” Waller said on the July 19 episode of “Blaze News Tonight.” “You can’t rule out malice. You can’t rule out somebody wanted this to happen.”

A top-tier U.S. military special operations expert told Blaze News that after examining all of the evidence to date, the hallmarks are there to suggest that Crooks was groomed and trained for an assassination attempt.

“It’s not in the realm of real possibility for the government to be this incompetent,” the special operator said on condition of anonymity. “There is no chance Crooks was not pointed to which building he needed to be on.

“Rank incompetence vs. rank arrogance. I’ve seen a lot of it in my 30 years in government ops. This was neither,” the expert said, suggesting that initial clues are visible in Crooks’ behavior.

Crooks’ 11-minute drone flight two hours before the shooting was likely not for surveillance, the expert said, but for planning his route onto the grounds and up onto the roof. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. House hearing that Crooks flew the drone some 200 yards from the stage where Trump would speak.

This piece by Blaze Media features quotes from CSP Senior Analyst, J. Michael Waller.

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AUTHOR

J. Michael Waller

J. Michael Waller is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy.

His academic and professional areas of concentration are foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion.

He is the former Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, DC.

He has been an instructor with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. He has guest lectured at the FBI Academy, George C. Marshall Center, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, National Intelligence University, and other military schools and combatant commands.

Dr. Waller holds a Ph.D. in international security affairs from the University Professors Program at Boston University. His award-winning doctoral dissertation, written in 1993 and published as Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today (Westview, 1994), foresaw the rise of a KGB officer to seize political control of Russia. He received his military training as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan contras.

He is author or editor of books relating to intelligence, political warfare, public diplomacy, terrorism, subversion, and strategy. See his page on Academia.edu. His latest book is Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains (Regnery, 2024).

He has written for American Greatness, the American Mind, the Daily Beast, Daily Caller, The Federalist, Forbes, Insight, Investor’s Business Daily, Kyiv Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Clear Politics, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Waller is on Twitter/X at @JMichaelWaller.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.