Shooting an elephant

 It just showed to Donald Trump that he was right about the Press being out to get him. It was at the White House Correspondents’ dinner for him, an annual event, that someone tried to assassinate him. Well, I don’t know if the idea was to assassinate him or the rest of the Cabinet, but he was stopped before he could get a clear shot.

I think a lot of people have been sleeping on the job. First of all, the President’s own team is clearly not doing its job, perhaps still cowering under a dining table, even though everyone is saying the assassin has been caught. What if there’s a second shooter somewhere? Wherever they are, surely there would have been someone with enough presence of mind to blame Iran.

Trump’s problem is that he has made a lot of enemies. Like Hispanics, blacks, LGBTQ+ and Democrats. Iran is just someone at the back of the queue.

It’s been ascertained that the assassin, Cole Allen, voted for Kamala Harris in the last Presidential election. Trump has got to be worrying about the assassination attempts. He’s had at least two, counting the one when someone took a potshot at him at a rally, and the one when someone was caught with a rifle when he was playing golf. Then there was rightwing activist Charlie Kirke, who was shot dead last September. It seems the Democrats have got more sand in them, and enough have been won over by the National Rifle Association to have guns.

It’s a little unfair, because there’s no corresponding figure on the left that Republicans and other right-wingers can have a potshot at. This left-right thing is astounding, but perhaps not as much as the time a Republican (Charles J. Giteau) shot a Republican President (James A. Garfield), back in 1880.

That assassination was because the assassin thought the Vice-president, Chester Alan Arthur, would be good for the party. Arthur was a shambles as President, and in 1884, became the first (and so far only) sitting US President to seek renomination and be refused.

For my money, you need to check JD Vance carefully. I mean, if something had happened to Trump, he’d have become President. And more important for Modi, his wife would have become First Lady. She’s of Indian origin, and took JD to see Modi after she took him to her home country after he had become Vice-President, last year. He had praised Indian potential, and even though it had shown its inability to take on China, by its dismal performance against Pakistan in a fight it had itself chosen, he still seemed to think it could be a counterweight against China.

Garfield was attended by a black physician, which would probably not be a mistake that Trump would make. Garfield died a painful death, dying not from the wound, but from the infection succeeding it.

Look, I’m not saying that Vance was behind the attempt. But Modi has tried assassinations before, and Trump seems to have turned against him, so he could kill two birds with one stone, get risk of an enemy of India, and get a national son-in-law as US President.

King Charles III of the UK had it announced almost immediately that he would not postpone his state visit, which he duly embarked on. I would almost suspect Charles was coming on a fact-finding mission, to check out what went wrong. I don’t mean he was personally doing the checking, but that MI6 types were using the visit as cover.

There have been two developments here in Lahore. First, the new Commandant of the Police College has asked for an audit of what has gone before. The internal audit has revealed many irregularities, and he’s asked for an external one as well. Embezzlement is a bad example. Whatever happened to good old police brutality? About half an hour with a DSP or Inspector of the old school, hard of hand and large of paunch (not to mention raspy of voice), and those responsible will confess their crimes in painful detail.

In an unrelated development, the federal Cabinet has given approval for the sale of donkey meat to China, after the importers threatened to withdraw. The PM personally intervened, showing how much he cares about the country, for the decision is going to cause problems in Lahore, his home constituency, where butchers are going to run short of meat.