Democrat Mayor Claims Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump Was Staged

Aberdeen, Washington, appears to be a rather idyllic town on the coast of Washington state, perched on North Bay, just west of Tacoma. The mayor of that town, one Douglas Orr, apparently believes that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump may have been staged and took to X to post a rather unhinged and marginally literate rant (since deleted) to that effect. We'll be seeing more of this kind of nuttiness.

Nuts. pic.twitter.com/EftNbfkMkI
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) July 15, 2024

On Monday, Daily Mail gave more detail.

Aberdeen's mayor Douglas Orr said he is standing by his belief that Trump may have cut his ear as part of the stunt, and is asking that independent doctors review his injury.
Orr wrote a Facebook post riddled with spelling errors where he decried that it's 'sick how polatics [sic] have devolved.'
The Democrat claimed: 'Ears bleed alot [sic]. I hope they check to make sure it wasn’t just a self inflicted scratch. The shooter is dead so we will never know if it was staged.'
Orr added: 'Not buying it quite yet Any way [sic] you look at it, it was a horrific act. Short of Biden dieing [sic], this is about the only thing that could happen that would artificially gain Trump sympathy votes. I hope I’m wrong, but because of his record of deceit, that’s the first thing that came to mind.'

Honestly, this guy is the mayor? Of even a small town? The sheer number of "[sic]" notations in that piece makes it almost laughable.

But there's a serious angle to all this, and this nut and other nuts like him will be more vocal in the coming days - and while Douglas Orr is probably typical of the intellectual quality of their arguments, he at least was embarrassed enough later to delete the post.

Of course, the internet is forever. Not only has this leftist mayor been revealed on the national stage, marginal literacy and all, but he has also presented us with the talking points that nuts like him will be using. Let's have a look at those.

"Ears bleed a lot." Yes, they do. And this wasn't a self-inflicted scratch. There was nothing in Trump's hand that could have torn a hole in his ear, not one like the injury that is visible in some of these photos.

Yes, the shooter is dead. But hundreds, probably thousands of people heard the shots - and some who saw the shooter on the roof and tried to draw attention to him before the shots were fired. My colleague Nick Arama, earlier on Monday, presented an excellent timeline of all these events.

But this is the most egregious statement:

Short of Biden dieing [sic], this is about the only thing that could happen that would artificially gain Trump sympathy votes.

This isn't "artificially" (and there's a big word he actually got right) gaining Trump votes. This event was genuine, and this kind of conspiracy-mongering is irresponsible. It does a grave disservice to the people who were injured in this event - and to Corey Comperatore, who died heroically defending his wife and daughters.

We're already seeing this abominable conspiracy-mongering spreading across the internet.

In the coming days, we'll see many calls to "tone down the rhetoric." A lot of those calls will come from the left, who are the same people who've been calling Donald Trump and his supporters every name in the book since 2016. They probably don't appreciate the irony in all this, the fact that it is their rhetoric, their unhinged shouting about anything Trump, that leads to these kinds of events.

And we'll be seeing more of that kind of conspiracy-mongering around this attempt on the life of Donald Trump. Bank on it. One certainty in life is this: There are always nuts among us. There always have been, and there always will be. Douglas Orr is only one of many.