Republicans would love to believe that the assassination attempts on Donald Trump were part of some grand conspiracy. FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino dashed those hopes on Sunday.
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Ever since a single gunman tried to assassinate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania last July (and again after a second individual was apprehended with a gun at one of his golf courses a few weeks later), Republicans have indulged in a fantasy that a nebulous cabal referred to only as “they” were trying to kill the then-presidential candidate.
“They did this!”
“They want Trump to die.”
“They are never going to stop.”
Of course, none of them ever specified who “they” were, but it was always implied that it was any or all of the following: the Biden administration, Democrats, the deep state, George Soros, the media, or any other boogeyman the right-wing hype machine fabricated.
And, even though there was never a shred of evidence linking anybody else to the assassination attempts, and common sense dictated that both were the actions of lone weirdos, a conspiracy-minded audience embraced the idea that “they” were after their idol, especially because this played right into Trump’s victimhood narrative.
On Sunday, however, FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, appeared to pour cold water on the theory (for lack of a better word) that “they” were involved.
Asked by Maria Bartiromo of Fox News, a network on which the idea of “them” being somehow involved was frequently invoked, why there isn’t more information on the assassination attempts and whether there would be any surprises when additional details are revealed, Patel and Bongino offered a reality check.
Patel assured Bartiromo that the two of them personally looked at all the evidence and “any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike,” but indicated that their review had come up empty in terms of revealing any juicy conspiracies involving “them.”
Bongino was even more direct.
“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth. And whether you like it or not is up to you,” he said before stating that there was no “big explosive ‘there’ there.”
The FBI duo was obviously aware that this would be a major disappointment in MAGA world, which had apparently hoped that, somehow, the Bidens or Soros or MSNBC were involved, and they tried to let down the Fox audience easily.
“In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there,” Bongino said almost apologetically. “And I know people — I get it. I understand. It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.”
Fortunately for Trump supporters, this announcement comes right on the heels of former FBI Director James Comey, who played a big role in getting his fellow Republican elected in 2016, sharing and then deleting a picture of some shells that is being interpreted by MAGA world as another call to assassinate the president.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
