Donald's Duck! - Lessons From India

Donald Trump's instantaneous duck to the floor for cover behind the podium saved him from certain death. 

Image Credit: The Web

It was Trump's solitary and instinctive act that saved him and not any assistance from the US Security Service staff. The SS team, which uses long-range binoculars and sniper rifles, could not spot the shooter standing with a rifle astonishingly close (120 meters) to the stage where the former president was speaking.

Sad Day for America

Saturday, 13 July 2024 is a sad day for America and the whole world. The shooter came within millimeters of assassinating a presidential candidate. It is a despicable assassination attempt on the former President Donald Trump.  

There is a news video clipping that indicated eyewitnesses had raised the alarm about a ‘suspicious’ man with a rifle on a roof. Witnesses have seen the gunman with a rifle, 20 minutes before the shooting, moving from roof to roof during the rally for a perfect place to shoot. A witness warned security Officer about the shooter, lying on his stomach, on the roof minutes before the attack on Trump. 

Image Credit: BBC

The gunman was shot and killed by the Secret Service seconds after he fired the shots. At the exact split-second Trump grabs his ear, after being hit by a bullet, one of the agents took out the gunman, hitting him in the head. 

Does it mean that the shooter was in the Secret Service agent's cross-hairs minutes before he fired at Trump?

Secret Service Failure?

The billionaire businessman Elon Musk tweeted: 

“The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign." 

On July 14, there was an unreliable social media post claiming that the Secret Service top brass did not give a green signal to one of their agents to neutralize the alleged shooter in the Donald Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The post, which could be a conspiracy theory, began: “My name is Jonathan Willis. I’m the officer in the famous photo of the two snipers on the roof at Trump’s rally. I came here to inform the public that I had the assassin in my sights for at least 3 minutes, but the head of the Secret Service refused to give the order to take out the perp.”

In short, Donald Trump's instantaneous ducking for cover behind the podium saved his life, much before any security staff reached near him. It is an abysmal failure of the US Secret Service. 

Lessons From India

This assassination attempt on the presidential candidate Trump brings into sharp focus how foreign agencies hostile to a country can wage extensive and insidious war against the country to sabotage national elections.

In India, millions of dollars in funding purportedly came from the US and European Union (EU) to interfere in the recently-concluded Lok Sabha elections, according to DisInfo Lab, a group tracking information warfare and psychological operations. Read the details in this article based on the extensive DisInfo Lab report:

'Invisible Hands': US and EU Funded Millions to Interfere in Indian Elections - Report

The report blames three primary actors for peddling a "particular narrative" as part of a financially supported plot: 

1. the US-based Henry Luce Foundation (HLF)
2. the George Soros' Open Society Foundation (OSF) 
3. the French Indologist and political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot (CJ).

In spite of the concerted international effort in pushing the anti-national forces within India as well as the opposition INDI Alliance to stop Modi becoming the PM for the third term, BJP scored a decent victory. 

It is worth investigating whether there is a similar plot being hatched by agencies within and outside USA to stop Trump at any cost becoming the president once again.