The Wilderness of Mirrors

A few thoughts on Saturday's assassination attempt on Donald Trump

As regular readers know, I have a longstanding historical interest in the assassinations of the Sixties. Though I no longer read about these topics like I once did—mostly because I don’t think we’ll ever get to the bottom of the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK—since last Saturday, it’s been impossible not to think of snippets from the millions of words I read about those cases. I recognize the territory: James Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors.”

Someone who would’ve had quite a few opinions about Saturday, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, as drawn by the late, great David Levine. David died before I could draft him for The American Bystander, but his work is being admirably preserved by The New York Review of Books. Support the glorious NYREV by buying a framed print here.

Let us begin with the somewhat ritualistic, but in my case genuinely heartfelt declaration: violence has no place in any democracy. Political murder is the ultimate anti-democratic act, and must be absolutely shunned for our system of government to function. Whatever I think of Donald Trump (he is the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War) I am sincerely glad that he’s all right. His movement must be defeated at the polls.

So: what happened on Saturday? God knows, but here’s where we must start: Donald Trump is not an honest man. He is a deeply corrupt and cynical one, who has surrounded himself with similar people. If Donald Trump parked in a handicapped spot, it would not be enough to see a hanging tag; you’d have to examine it closely to make sure it wasn’t fake.

(And it would be.)

Our political system used to filter people like this out. Even in a society deeply committed to White Male Mediocrity, Trump’s team has a shocking number of past or current felons, including the candidate himself. The pure trashiness of this crew is unprecedented in American history, and to argue over this or that latest bit of sleaziness is to play his game. The catalog of corruption is utterly numbing, and profoundly disorienting to anyone who experienced American politics prior to 2015. Since then we are all living in a wilderness of mirrors, each grimy shard reflecting the worst parts of America back to us, and to the world. That was what the KGB constantly pumped out during the Cold War: America said it was better, more moral than everyone else, but deep down it was hypocritical, decadent, corrupt, run by rich racists who could do whatever they wanted. Handsome grinning monsters, pedophiles, liars, gladhanders who would kill you for a dollar. A system by and for sociopaths.

Sound like anyone?

So what happened on Saturday? Did Donald Trump truly escape an assassination attempt? Or was he up to his same old crooked shit?

• • •

Trump is an extraordinary man, living an extraordinary life, this is true. But he is also extraordinarily dishonest, so when unusual things happen to him—especially beneficial things—we must not take them at face value. A careless orator more interested in golf than governing, a vain man, an ignorant man, tall but corrupt, fundamentally cruel, a transparently self-serving dollop of id loved by 25% of the country and despised by most everyone else, Trump is either the luckiest fellow in the history of American politics, somehow able to flaunt every rule, or he’s getting help. A lot of help.

What kind of help? And from whom?

I’m not saying you should think this, or even that I do—but it’s not crazy to think that Saturday was wrestling-style kayfabe, some kind of psyop. Given Trump’s history, we are obligated to ask the question. An intentionally missed shot, a blood capsule or razor blade to the ear—the details don’t matter—as crazy and ghoulish as that sounds to a normal person like you or I, it would fit exactly within the frequently bonkers behavior of Donald Trump, and his associates, and his Party. To the degree that Trump’s movement can be placed within the historical GOP, it is closest to the Nixonian branch, where extralegal—and often bizarre—efforts to manipulate public opinion were standard practice. How rational was it for a sitting President with a commanding lead to have a group of Bay of Pigs burglars break into the DNC? Nixon, like Trump, was winning—Watergate was nuts, and Saturday might have been as well. From the beginning, Trump and Roger Stone have recognized each other as fellow travelers, and one of Trump’s lasting contributions to America will be his Supreme Court’s normalizing Tricky Dick’s declaration, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Democrats have, to be sure, engaged in dirty tricks, but only to Republicans is ratfcking a virtue. “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” Ruling the country is, to them, not a sacred trust or heavy burden; people like George W. Bush make it look easy because the way they do it, it is. To these Republican Party Animals, politics is a college football game; the convention we just saw was a tailgate. Watergate and everything like it is, in some sense, a prank.

Contrast the sober, serious, one-step-behind Democrats, with their painful make-Mom-proud sincerity and thicket of inviolable norms, their self-immobilizing web of glutinous sanctimony. This asymmetry has had a demonstrable effect, especially since Bush v. Gore, when the Right’s frattish exuberance has been married to a Book of Revelations-level zealotry and desperation. Predictably, the Democrats have reacted by becoming even more responsible, more policy-focused, more adult, and unless this pivot is balanced by once-in-a-generation charisma (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) the results have been disastrous. Democrats might not wish to emulate the Republicans—it may not fit with our sensible shoes, public library tote bags, and crosswords on Sunday morning while listening to “Car Talk”—but we may no longer have a choice. We, too, may have to get into the business of creating our own reality. The most chilling aspect of the recent Supreme Court ruling isn’t just that everyone knows the next Republican President will use it like a club, it’s also that we all knew no Democrat ever would.

It’s not just the Party that’s the problem. Democratic voters fetishize the process (as I did above), and the very idea that there might be vote-fiddling in 2016, or something…hinky…about last Saturday evokes genuine horror. This is admirable, but not helpful. The sacredness of norms is the closest thing to a common creed in our eternally fractured, fractious Party. Since at least Carter’s nomination, Democrats seem to hyperventilate at the very idea of gambling in Casablanca—but it’s Casablanca, man. Mayor Daley’s canvassing Cook County graveyards for JFK is something Democrats are embarrassed by; not so Republicans and Nixon’s scuttling of the peace process in ‘68, Reagan’s “October Surprise,” or Bush v. Gore. Or whatever happened in 2016.

You can understand why the GOP might embrace the ratfck as a substitute for policy—1968, 1980, 2000, 2016, these are the elections that have kept the Republicans in business. Whatever the rest of us might wish, political skullduggery has been so essential to their Party’s survival, Republicans may now believe they cannot survive without it. “Russia, if you’re listening…”

So what happened on Saturday?

We cannot, unfortunately, look to the press with total trust; they are easily, constantly manipulated. If you wish to influence the press, simply give them a story they’ll love. A ferociously corrupt man doing ferociously corrupt things and getting away with it is, by S9 E4, not spicy enough. This is why they endlessly strain to complexify Trump, to give him a thoughtfulness, a backstory, an inner life, a moral dimension, a transformative arc, because that’s a better story. Trump cannot simply be a monster, because monsters are boring.

Though each of us will disagree on details—we are, after all, Democrats—let us agree on this: a political opponent who is “too broadminded to take his own side in an argument”—Robert Frost’s still-apt burn on liberals—is the perfect mark for dirty tricks. It’s not just that Republicans can and do manufacture optics to steal elections; they also know that the Democrats (and the press) will defend those optics, even if—or perhaps especially if—they do not benefit the Democrats.

The Press: “Sure, there were dirty tricks, but they didn’t really matter. Please keep reading us, because we are so very fair.”

The Democrats: “Yes, we lost. But please keep voting for us, because we are so very good.”

This will continue until it stops working. Have we, the sane 75%, had enough?

• • •

Democratic supineness may have to change, because there is something new in American elections since 2016—something unprecedented, and tremendously dangerous: the active involvement of a foreign power. Who, how, and how much, is immaterial; you don’t have to be Jim Angleton to see that Putin, and thus the Russian intelligence apparatus, is fully enmeshed with the Trump campaign. That’s as close to proven as one gets, here in the wilderness of mirrors. And its distorting effects on our politics may be finally so great that the rest of us cannot ignore it.

Donald Trump is the KGB’s vision of the United States made flesh. To dismiss this as a coincidence is absurd. To accept him as an authentic product of an unmanipulated democratic process is to ignore at least 100 years of U.S. history. We’ve had Presidents who were racists, or unintelligent, or greedy, or corrupt, but none of them were obviously, clearly, belligerently all of those things at the same time. The man reportedly wears diapers and smells like poop, and when he is being convicted for giving hush money to a porn star, he falls asleep and farts. Thomas Dewey lost because looked like the groom on a wedding cake; Michael Dukakis looked silly in a tank. There is something new going on with Trump, some new impact on public opinion, and the obvious answer is probably the correct one.

As ambitious as past candidates were, each of them knew what a dangerous game this would be; to openly accept foreign help to win an American election would require a fecklessness and ignorance of history—a sense of personal invulnerability—which no candidate prior to 2016 could imagine. To accept foreign help would be to introduce a totally unpredictable element into the governance of the most powerful country on Earth. In the nuclear age, no one inside the profession of politics would take such a hair-raising risk with the safety of the world. That required an ignorant, irresponsible outsider.

According to the Mitrokhin Archive, a declassified batch of KGB docs spirited to the West by a dissident archivist in the 1990s, it was standard operating procedure for Russian spies to make contact with American Presidential campaigns; the campaigns would tell the Soviets to go piss up a rope, and the FBI would take it from there. For 75 years, it was incomprehensible that any Presidential candidate would welcome Russian help, and any whisper that they had, would mean immediate career implosion and probably being tried as a traitor. Trump solicited it, and when he wasn’t immediately drummed out of the political mainstream, something new was introduced—a kind of distortion, of “living in the wilderness of mirrors” common to authoritarian systems. Governance by psyop, by paranoia, by cynicism, distrust sown by stories created and fed to the masses to weaken and divide them, turning them against each other.

Sound familiar?

It is an utterly shocking reversal of 100 years of Republican policy that they welcomed this assistance, and this abrupt change has never been adequately explained. It is almost equally shocking that the Democrats have allowed this behavior to be normalized. The entire government should’ve stopped. And it’s perhaps most shocking of all that the media, and the voting public, has not declared this completely disqualifying. When you vote for Trump, who the hell are you even voting for? Putin? MBS? Today’s highest bidder?

How strange it is that as conservatives display greater and greater levels of isolationism, the one country that our nativist xenophobes cherish is…Russia? Russia is not European, but Slavic; it is not Protestant or Catholic; until 1989 it wasn’t even capitalist. Until 1989, it was the United States’ mortal enemy, and the country rural reactionaries—the ones who now have homemade Trump flags on their lawns—endlessly exhorted Republican Presidents to “nuke.” Russia was the boogeyman responsible for ten thousand Republican electoral victories, maybe more. “Goddamn them Russians” was the single thread that knit the Republican Party together for 45 years.

All this changed overnight. Why? How? Who did it benefit?

If I had to guess what future historians will say, I think they will suggest that the rise of Western tech oligarchs began to create figures in America with the same kind of power—and thus the same kinds of attitudes—as their counterparts in post-Gorbachev Russia. How different, really, is Facebook or Twitter from Gazprom? All three companies function as utilities, and have enriched their owners to such a degree that those private individuals naturally begin to get a little…extreme. Putin is a warlord. So is Elon Musk. So is Peter Thiel. All of them are bloody bonkers.

Communality of interest between the world’s richest assholes isn’t new; nor is even the presence of private armies, even though that’s always a bad sign. What’s new is the combination of Western digital-communication oligarchs with Russian intelligence-adjacent ones. So you get influence campaigns, carefully crafted by experts in the FSB, pumped out via GRU troll-farms and bots, on social media platforms owned by radicalized Western billionaires. He who controls “vibes” creates the world. This is an kind of imperialism that the Empires of the past could only dream of—it is an Empire built inside the mind.

Saturday was part of that. It could not be otherwise.

• • •

The preceding is all upsetting, but factual. It is simply the political world we have allowed to take root. The question is, did any of this—Trump’s greed and dishonesty, Putin’s intelligence network, the omnipresence and amorality of our social media overlords—overlap with Saturday’s attempt on President Trump’s life? All we really know at present is that for the price of a severe shaving cut, the incident has changed the media narrative in his favor. Last night, I was watching something on YouTube, and the man speaking to camera said, “You know, I hate all politicians, and I wasn’t going to vote. But when they try to take a man’s life…I can’t just sit back and let that happen.”

Who the hell is they? Twenty-year-old registered Republicans? What movie does this guy think he’s writing himself into?

In addition to giving random knuckleheads a sense of participating in History—a damn powerful lever, just ask Gavrilo Princip—Saturday’s shooting did something even more essential: it made Donald Trump into an übermensch. It is vitally important for any authoritarian leader to appear physically strong. Trump, a heavy-titted, visibly weakening 78-year-old famously averse to anything more strenuous than 18 holes of golf, just happened to have the one thing occur that would make him appear macho. This is a man who was terrified of a bird. He’s afraid to fly coach. He’s afraid to shake hands. I think he might be afraid of stairs. Do we really think he’s suddenly unafraid to die?

This incident fundamentally changes the narrative of this election. It gives Trump something he has never had before: the mantle of a war hero. Young Donald dodged the draft; he wasn’t brave, or patriotic—he wanted to go into the movie business. Is it so outlandish to think that he was approached with a pitch? “They’ll love it, Mr. President. You’ll be a hero.”

Even if this is kayfabe exposed in full by this time next week, the iconic image has been seen, the convention completed, the narrative injected into the bloodstream. This is the nature of American politics now: the creation of stories, of legends. This is the stuff of spywork, of psyops, not of governance. Poor Joe Biden; he still thinks it’s about doing the job. Do we really think that someone with information revealing Saturday as a horrific, ghoulish scam would be welcomed at The New York Times? They’d hem and haw over it, checking details until October in a misguided effort to prevent criticism…and then the right-wing insanity machine would simply deny it, and pour more hate onto the press. Moments after the shooting, the angry crowd turned to the journalists among them, and began shouting, “You did this!”

A registered Republican takes a shot at the GOP candidate, and the Republican crowd (and lawmakers) blame the press. The press dutifully pumps out a beautiful action shot that’s basically the MAGA version of the Che Guevara t-shirt. High profile billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg use the event to all-but-endorse Trump. MAGA finally has its Rambo Jesus, facing death with a raised fist.

If it’s real, it’s the most fortuitous thing to happen in the history of American politics, even luckier than the explosion of The Maine. And maybe it was. But who put the horseshoe up Donald Trump’s heinie, and how’s it keep working so perfectly? When a candidate is surrounded by GOP dirty tricksters, American quislings with ties to Russia—and Russian intelligence—it’s wise to see luck like that, and be very skeptical.

• • •

One of the JFK writers I trust the most, the former NSA man-turned-academic John Newman, posited that Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence in the files of every U.S. intelligence agency, specifically as a person with ties to the U.S.S.R., would have triggered one simultaneous thought, as his name rocketed through the Telex on 12:45 P.M. on 11/22: “We had better make sure this doesn’t lead to the Russians, otherwise there’s going to be a nuclear war.” No coordinated coverup was necessary; only self-preservation. It’s an interesting theory.

I am not saying that this is at play with the events of last Saturday, only that until Trump, we didn’t have to worry about it every single day. “President Donald Trump” makes a mockery of the very concept of national security; no one believed that the Russians, or the Saudis, or anybody else “owned” Mitt Romney. You could agree or disagree with John McCain (or John Kerry), but you didn’t have to worry he was planning to sell secrets to a foreign power for a few bucks. This, among so many other reasons, is why you can’t have foreign agents anywhere near Presidential campaigns. Put simply, Donald Trump acts like a spy, and not one working for the United States. I am asserting nothing; what opened the door to this speculation is the candidate himself, what he’s said, how he acted as President, and how his Party has changed its spots suddenly, inexplicably, unanimously, permanently on one issue: Russia.

Democracies are messy, that is their flaw, and their glory. That there is no one in the current GOP leadership who stands up to Putin is very, very strange.

Suddenly, protection fails catastrophically for the first time in nine years; the GOP candidate is shot at, wounded inconsequentially—though how is not exactly clear—and instantly becomes the he-man of authoritarian dreams. The shooter, a Republican boy with no manifesto, no history of violence, and no clear motive, is killed before anyone can question him. The candidate emerges invigorated, reborn, with a picture perfectly encapsulating the image that he—and his followers—have always craved.

Democrats are back-footed again, just as they were beginning to link Trump to the most notorious pedophile of our age. And the press talks about spirituality, unity, and moves on to the convention.

What all this doesn’t answer, not really, is…what happened on Saturday?

The psychic hole must be filled. If we are forced to come up with our own story, might I suggest this one: It doesn’t f*cking matter. Donald Trump must be defeated.

• • •

There is a phrase I have used throughout this essay, and it’s one which grows sadly more apt as this era goes on: “the wilderness of mirrors.” Coined by CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, it refers to a psychic realm where all is manipulation and nothing can be trusted. Living there tends to drive people quite mad—it did exactly this to Angleton, who began to see KGB operatives everywhere, carrying out something he called “the Monster Plot” to bring down the United States.

I am not suggesting that anyone who reads this piece should begin formulating their own version of “the Monster Plot”; quite the opposite in fact. I am not saying Saturday is anything more, or different, than what it at first seemed. I am not doing that. But one of the gravest psychic wounds that Donald Trump has inflicted upon the United States is that now we must seriously, soberly consider such stuff. He did that. His terrible judgment and cravenness and irresponsible disregard for helpful, protective, sensible norms he didn’t understand, like “don’t let a foreign country help you get elected President.”

I don’t know what happens to a democracy where the quickest way to shape public opinion is to become a shitposter on Twitter. I do know that the only way you find your way out of a wilderness of mirrors is by being cool, cautious, observant, and never forgetting what is real. Voting is real. Talking with people about the stakes in November, is real. Living your vision of a diverse, welcoming America where people are valued and safe, that’s real.

Political violence is antithetical to democracy, and I am glad that candidate Trump is okay. I firmly believe he will be trounced in November, no matter who his opponent—Roe v. Wade should see to that. Even if someday, someway, we learn more about Thomas Crooks and discover that, beyond any doubt, the whole thing was some Bond-villain-type shit, the only thing that matters is this: Trump and his whole crew must be defeated.

And if Thomas Crooks was just another nut with a gun and that’s all there is to it, Trump and his whole crew must be defeated.

If the candidate is Biden, Harris, George Clooney, or

Heather Cox Richardson

, Trump and his whole crew must be defeated.

Otherwise, every day will be last Saturday.

Look at your feet, not the mirrors. Keep walking forward, with purpose. Be observant, hands out in front so you don’t bump into things; when you hit glass, turn slightly and feel for the next real thing. Read American history, and take heart that we’ve faced this stuff before. Don’t get distracted by the distortions and reflections and dazzling shards flying around, and you will get out of the wilderness of mirrors.

Just grab the hands of the people you trust, the people you love, and don’t stop moving forward until you’re free. ◊

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Suddenly Mr. Barrel-of-Laughs MICHAEL GERBER opines about politics, and also fireworks. He publishes the humor magazine The American Bystander.