Trump shooting will be the same

When JFK was shot in Dallas in November 1963, I was home from school sick. It was up in the Chicago area, and I was watching “Bozo the Clown” on WGN. Suddenly, one of the news anchors broke in with the news — shots fired at the president.

At the time, the TV was an old black-and-white, and being so young, 8, I couldn’t really understand why my mom was crying when word came not long after that the president was actually dead.

I asked her why she was crying.

“I thought you didn’t like him,” I said.

That’s how naïve my brain was, not fully understanding, I guess, the finality of death.

If I remember right, my mom explained to me that it’s natural to cry when someone dies, even if you don’t agree with their politics. Besides, she said, it’s a tragedy for our country. A president has just been assassinated.

Years later, after she died from ALS in 1995, I read through some of her old diaries and found an odd coincidence — the day before Kennedy’s Nov. 22 assassination, my mom had just finished reading a book about Lincoln’s assassination. What are the odds?

Now, we have the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump by a 20-year-old who fits the typical shooter profile these days — a kid who was mercilessly bullied in school.

Biggest question is, how did the Secret Service not see fit to cover the few elevated buildings around where Trump was standing?

Did we learn nothing from the JFK assassination — lone gunman in an elevated position with a rifle constitutes a threat?

Apparently not.

Sadly, an innocent bystander is dead. A guy who just went to a Trump rally to hear the former president speak, but because of a dysfunctional Secret Service/Homeland Security, is now at the mortuary.

The director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, according to Biden, was the best choice for the job when he chose her in 2022.

Seriously?

She was with the SS for more than 25 years before retiring and becoming head of Pepsi-Co security, a job she held between 2019 and ’22.

According to multiple news outlets, in recent weeks, Trump had asked her for more resources, more security, but was denied assets, which would probably have been okay if the assets under her direction were smart enough to secure the roof of a building approximately 145 yards from where Trump spoke Saturday afternoon.

With a clear line of sight to where Trump spoke, she and her assistant directors didn’t think it prudent to secure the top of the building from where the shooter fired the shots?

The stupidity behind that is really impossible to fathom, and it will undoubtedly lead to conspiracy theories, as is and was the case in Dallas 61 years ago come this November.

On the YouTube video accompanying this opinion piece, which you can look up online, people are standing near the building, yelling, look, there’s a guy with a gun on top of the building. Meanwhile, Cheatle’s armed agents, which included agents with Homeland Security, don’t see him?

If Kimberly Cheatle really was the best candidate from which Biden had to choose his Secret Service director, this country really is in trouble.

Meanwhile, both parties, both candidates, need to tamper down the hostile rhetoric, as do their supporters.

Just last week, Biden reportedly said during an interview with Politico, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Yep, time for both parties to quit with the divisive rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the question remains: how is the Secret Service and Homeland Security so dysfunctional?

In fact, turns out, the building from which the shooter fired his shots was being used as a staging area for law enforcement. In fact, when he was on top of the building, law enforcement was inside it. Can’t make up this stuff. In fact, a cop had climbed the building, saw the gunman, but when a rifle was pointed at him, he did what a coward does — he retreated, leaving the shooter alone to kill someone and wound others.

Trump also needs to tone down his rhetoric, like this quote he made from the campaign trail last December: “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.” (Source: AP.)

Both Cheatle and her boss, Homeland Security Director Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas, need to resign over this tragic shooting. America deserves better.

We’re not a Banana Republic, but we’re getting there.

In the end, this attempted assassination will end up like the Kennedy assassination. Sixty years from now,Americans will still be wondering, how did this happen, and was there something else at work, about which we know nothing, because none of it makes any sense.