Gamechangers

Portrait of a bullet by Doug Mills, The New York Times, via Reddit.

Interesting report in Washington Post (this was a gift link from Bluesky that worked for me) on the presidential election campaign in Hungary, where the fascistoid incumbent Viktor Orbán appears to be in serious trouble:

Officers from the [Russian] intelligence service, or SVR, suggested that drastic action might be necessary — a strategy they called “the Gamechanger.” In an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, the operatives proposed a way to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” — “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban.”

You know what it made me think of. 

I've never had any patience with the conspiracy theory of the assassination attempt on Trump of July 13 2024, because of all the uncontrollable variables: in the first place there really was a shooter, killed on the spot, of course, so his motives can never be investigated; the four seconds he was given before the local security team put him out of commission, he got off eight shots that hit either three or four people, killing Corey Comperatore and critically injuring two other audience members and probably grazing Trump's right ear (the hardcore conspiracy theory holds that he or somebody with him was prepared with fake blood to smear on his ear after he dropped to the ground). I don't see how the conspirators could have been certain that the shooter, who was clearly prepared to die on the spot, could be counted on to miss Trump, or that he could have come as close as he apparently did, if he didn't intend to kill him. The astonishing photo by NYT's Doug Mills showing a bullet flying toward Trump's right ear could conceivably have been doctored, but that would have expanded the necessary number of conspirators beyond plausibility to include the forensic analysts who decided it was authentic and Mills himself. 

Stochastic

 

Pentheus torn by Maenads, in a fresco in the Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, via Wikipedia.

I wonder if Trump's bizarre initial response to the killing of Rob and Michele Reiner could be considered an incitement to stochastic violence, when he made up the story that their deaths were "reportedly"

due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump

—the theory that the killer was a Trump fan maddened by Reiner's criticism of Trump, like he's accepting it as a tribute to himself, the way the angry god Dionysus accepts it and indeed instigates it when his crazed followers the Maenads tear King Pentheus to pieces in the tragedy by Euripides. You feel Trump would love it if a wild Maga crowd did something like that to one of his many enemies.

Now that we're getting an idea of what actually happened to the Reiners it certainly seems tragic in the Aristotelian sense—inspiring pity and terror—but with no roles for Trumps. That human drama is not what the press will focus on, naturally; they'll be doing the courtroom drama, with close analysis of the lawyers' strategy on either side. I don't want to write about it myself, at least not yet. 

Nor about the shooting deaths at Brown University, unless it's addressing the dysfunction of the FBI under its incompetent Trumpy leadership, which may have let the shooter escape even as Patel was issuing premature announcements of success, which will have to wait until we know a lot more than we do now. As we heard last night that the law enforcement agencies had solved the crime and the murderer, a former physics student from Portugal, had shot himself dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, the question arose whether Trump would issue a ban on all Portuguese nationals or maybe all STEM grad students.