Oliver Stone must be overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu these days. I am one of those unfortunate souls who, smelling the proverbial rat regarding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, went down the rabbit hole of assassination research, reading and amassing a small library on the subject. I dove deep and came up with no solid conclusions, but a severe case of the bends. I did, however, gain a healthy mistrust of our intelligence community, an awareness of the incompetence and/or complicity of the FBI, and the strong suspicion that, though undiscovered, the rat was bigger and stinkier than I had first imagined.

Stone’s movie JFK used Eisenhower’s farewell address as a mode to frame the leviathan-like culprit as the military-industrial complex. Over time, those with eyes to see and ears to hear have given the beast other names, more inclusive names: the administrative state, the bureaucratic state, the deep state. Whatever name, it is a group of non-elected bureaucrats and their affiliated oligarchs, billionaires and elitists who see the unsophisticated masses who do all of the working and creating and living and dying in this country as cattle to be corralled and then consumed.

Donald Trump wasn’t afraid to speak for those unsophisticated masses, and the deep state trembled. They couldn’t start with something so archaic as an assassination, as these days everyone carries a camera in their pocket — we are millions of potential Abraham Zapruders. So the assassination would have to be of his character; when that didn’t work, they went for his political power, and when that didn’t work they went for his wealth and his freedom through illegitimate lawfare, which needless to say, didn’t stop him.

Finally, exhausted and frightened after all their various attempts at figurative assassination had failed, they would have to fall back on the method that has persisted since probably even before March 15, 44 B.C. Actual, old-fashioned murder of their political rival.

And so, on July 13, 2024 at a Trump rally, a 20-year-old media-indoctrinated loner somehow breached the Secret Service’s security zone (our nation’s elite multi-billion dollar unit tasked with one job on that day) and slipped past local and state police units, climbed on top of a building that was unguarded and provided a perfect sniper’s perch in broad daylight with a rifle. Somehow, though the assassin had been noticed as the suspect and was observed with range-finder field glasses up to 30 minutes before the speech, the president was still allowed to go on stage.  In those last fateful minutes as attendees screamed about a man with a gun on the roof and police confronted the shooter ineffectively and counter-sniper teams began to attempt to sight-in on the killer, no one thought to get on the communication channels and get the president off the stage. Somehow, during all those minutes of screaming “gun” at a presidential rally the secret service sat there frozen. Somehow.

Then an amazing thing happened. After the bullet had already left the barrel, the president turned his face toward this deadly threat and the projectile merely kissed his ear as if to tell him, “Get down low, you’re in this by yourself.” The president ducked and was spared.

After he had been allowed to get off several shots, mortally wounding hero Corey Comperatore, the shooter was finally neutralized, saving the need for another Jack Ruby. Now the same FBI that did such a bang-up job “solving” the JFK murder will pour its immense talents for deceit and obfuscation into supplying the unsophisticated masses with answers as to how, somehow, so much went wrong.

Though exposed as the murderers they are, the deep state is not done, and we can only pray that God will grant the former president the wherewithal to continue to face the deadly onslaught, and us the courage to support him. We also pray that this attempted coup d’état is the bookend on the deep state’s stranglehold on our country.

I will close with a quote from the final courtroom scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK: “What is the future of a democracy where a president can be assassinated under conspicuously suspicious circumstances while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles.”

Image generated by AI.