On Saturday evening, the nation lived through a horrific event, when a 20-year-old man with an AR-15-style rifle came within an inch or two of assassinating former President Donald Trump. Fortunately, the would-be assassin did not succeed, although the bullet did graze Trump’s right ear. Unfortunately, the would-be assassin did kill one spectator and seriously wound two others before he was taken out by a sniper. Also unfortunately, the iconic photo of Donald Trump, face bloodied, raising his fist in defiance as his Secret Service detail tried to whisk him away to safety could be a potent image that helps him win the White House again. On the other hand, Trump being Trump, he might overplay his hand and squander the sympathy he’s gotten so far, but at this point no one knows. What I do know is that this election is going to be even more chaotic than I had thought.
Also, what I didn’t expect was that, so soon after almost being the victim of a “monster shot” by an assassin, Trump would put in a phone call to long time antivax leader turned independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and resurrect an old narrative about a “monster shot,” this time meaning vaccines. True, he didn’t use the term “monster shot,” as he did in 2012, but he did resurrect the very same antivax narrative about vaccines that he’s been repeating going back to 2007, when he remarked on multiple shots and “one giant injection,” and 2012, when he referred to a “monster shot” that causes autism.
The New York Post, of all newspapers, reported today Trump and RFK Jr. talk vaccines, dish on Biden’s call after assassination attempt: leaked video. Supposedly, the two also met in Milwaukee on Monday, where Republicans are currently holding their national convention, to try to persuade RFK Jr. to drop out of the race, presumably because Trump has made the calculation that independent Presidential candidate RFK Jr. probably takes more votes from him than he does from President Biden, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Be that as it may, here’s the video that was leaked and later deleted:
The video is less than a minute and a half, but it shows Donald Trump repeating a narrative that he’s been repeating for at least 17 years now:
I agree with you, man. Something’s wrong with that whole system, and it’s the doctors you find.
Remember I said I want to do small doses. Small doses. When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines,and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby.
It looks like you’re giving, you should be giving a horse this, and do you ever see the size of it. It’s so massive and then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times.
And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right?
But you and I talked about that a long time ago. Anyway, I would love you to do something and I think it would be so good for you, and so big for you.
Let’s compare the above to some excerpts from Trump said about the “monster shot” in 2012 in an interview on Fox and Friends.
“I’ve gotten to be pretty familiar with the subject,” Trump said. “You know, I have a theory — and it’s a theory that some people believe in — and that’s the vaccinations. We never had anything like this. This is now an epidemic. It’s way, way up over the past 10 years. It’s way up over the past two years. And, you know, when you take a little baby that weighs like 12 pounds into a doctor’s office and they pump them with many, many simultaneous vaccinations — I’m all for vaccinations, but I think when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different then lots of different things have happened. I really — I’ve known cases.”
Because of course he has. When co-host Gretchen Carlson pushed back a bit, saying that the science doesn’t agree with that, Trump characteristically replied:
“It’s also very controversial to even say,” Trump acknowledged. “But I couldn’t care less. I’ve seen people where they have a perfectly healthy child, and they go for the vaccinations and a month later the child is no longer healthy.”
“It happened to somebody that worked for me recently,” he added. “I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of the sudden they go in and they get this monster shot. You ever see the size of it? It’s like they’re pumping in — you know, it’s terrible, the amount. And they pump this in to this little body and then all of the sudden the child is different a month later. I strongly believe that’s it.”
Sound familiar? Now let’s go back to 2007, which was the very first time that I noticed Donald Trump regurgitating old antivax misinformation about vaccines and autism:
“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” Trump said. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”
He made the comments following a press conference at his Mar-A-Lago estate announcing a fundraising and lobbying push by Autism Speaks to get the brain disorder covered under private insurance policies.
Here’s more of what Trump had to say about autism and vaccinations:
“When a little baby that weighs 20 pounds and 30 pounds gets pumped with 10 and 20 shots at one time, with one injection that’s a giant injection, I personally think that has something to do with it. Now there’s a group that agrees with that and there’s a group that doesn’t agree with that.”
Referring to his and his wife Melania’s 22-month-old son Baron, Trump continued: “What we’ve done with Baron, we’ve taken him on a very slow process. He gets one shot at a time then we wait a few months and give him another shot, the old-fashioned way. But today they pump the children with so much at a very young age. We do it on a very, very conservative level.”
Yes, regular readers will recognize that this is the antivax trope that we commonly label for shorthand, “Too many too soon.” It was a slogan arguably spread beyond outside of antivax circles by Jenny McCarthy around the same time that Donald Trump was pontificating about “massive injections” and how they were spreading out Barron Trump’s vaccines, only giving him one vaccine at a time. I will also emphasize that what Trump said to RFK Jr. during that telephone call is, substantively, no different than what he said in 2007 about “massive injections” or in 2012 about a “monster shot,” sprinkled with the claim that babies are getting too many vaccines too soon. It’s the same antivax narrative, that babies are getting “too many” vaccines “too soon” and thereby somehow harming the babies, mixed with the usual Trumpian hyperbole of “massive injections” and “monster shots.”
Before I move on, let me just note that real childhood vaccines are rarely dissolved in more than 1 cc of solution, and the syringes used are tiny with very small needles, usually 25G, very much in contrast to the “monster shot” described by Trump. Moreover, it’s long been known that “too many too soon” is nonsense from a scientific standpoint. There is a large body of evidence that shows that the current vaccine schedule does not cause the harms claimed by antivaxxers. Moreover, as real vaccine experts—as opposed to fake vaccine experts that people like Donald Trump and RFK Jr. listen to—like Dr. Paul Offit point out that today’s vaccine schedule, despite having a larger number of vaccines, actually exposes children to relatively few antigens compared to regular life:
Now, if you add up all the immunological components that are currently contained in vaccines, it adds up to about 160. So think about that — 160 immunological components, which consist of viral proteins, bacterial proteins, or bacterial polysaccharide — as compared to the trillions of bacteria, each bacterium of which contains 2,000 to 6,000 immunological components. So, I think literally what you are exposed to in vaccines is a drop in the ocean compared to what you’re exposed to in daily life. Frankly, I think a cut on your knee is a greater challenge to your immune system than are vaccines. I think the common cold, which can reproduce itself thousands of times in your body, is a greater challenge to your immune system than vaccines.
And:
If you look at the immunological challenge. Today we get 14 vaccines by two years of age, 14 different vaccines. 100 years ago, we got one vaccine. Do you remember what that vaccine was? Smallpox vaccine, right. Well, today, we get 14 and you could argue that 14 is more than one, but I am going to argue that one is actually more than fourteen because if you look at the number of immunological components, and by immunological components, I mean bacterial protein or viral protein or bacterial polysaccharide which is just the complex sugar that is used to make bacterial vaccines. [my emphasis] If you count each one of those as an immunological component, the smallpox vaccine which is a pox virus, the largest of the mammalian viruses, actually the only one that can be seen by a light microscopy, had 200 separate immunological components. If you added up all 14 vaccines today there’s about a hundred and fifty. So there is actually less in vaccines today. It is not so much the number of shots as what is in those shots that matters. And so the reason that there are fewer immunological components in vaccines [my emphasis] today is because we have had advances, in things like protein purification, protein chemistry and recombinant DNA technology that have allowed us to do that.
One would not expect someone like Donald Trump or RFK Jr. to be the least bit concerned about such science. RFK Jr. has almost certainly been exposed to arguments like the one Dr. Offit has made, and he still rejects them and finds ways to try to deny the science.
I must admit to some amusement, though, that RFK Jr.’s son RFK III leaked the video to social media because he was unhappy that Trump was apparently not antivax enough for him and his father, leading RFK Jr. to have to apologize immediately. Here’s what Bobby Kennedy III posted, now deleted:
The real question here that should be of real concern is what Donald Trump might be willing to offer RFK Jr. to drop out of the presidential race. You might recall that, after Trump was elected the first time in 2016, he invited RFK Jr. over to his transition headquarters for a meeting to discuss chairing a “vaccine safety” commission?
Here’s how I look at it. No doubt Trump was buttering up RFK Jr. in order to try to persuade him to drop out. Thus far, RFK Jr. says that he isn’t:
Unfortunately, just because RFK Jr. is currently staying in the race doesn’t mean that Trump won’t approach him again in the future, and who knows what incentive he might dangle to tempt RFK Jr. out of the race? I can easily envision Trump offering RFK Jr. a prized position in his administration, such as a high ranking position in the Department of Health and Human Services or, even worse, FDA Commissioner or CDC Director. True, if the Democrats hold the Senate, there’s no way RFK Jr. would ever be confirmed, but if Republicans take back the Senate, does anyone think they’d deny Trump a position for RFK Jr.? It doesn’t matter that RFK Jr. is utterly unqualified for either position, either.
Finally, it occurs to me that we got very, very lucky last time with respect to federal vaccine policy under the first Trump administration. For whatever reason, Trump did not appoint a bunch of antivaxxers to high-ranking federal leadership positions in public health, medicine, and science. Moreover, when COVID-19 hit, Trump demonstrated the transactional nature of his antivax views by going full speed ahead with Operation Warp Speed to develop a COVID vaccine in record time, for the simple reason that he thought that the successful development of a vaccine under his watch would guarantee his reelection.
If Donald Trump is elected again, this time around we as a nation might not be so lucky. Just imagine the havoc that could be wreaked on public health by appointing even a few of the antivax, anti-public health, and antiscience cranks in his orbit to positions of actual power. I have, and it scares the crap out of me, leaving aside all the other bad things that would come from a second Trump administration, in which he is surrounded with enablers who know what they’re doing.
37 replies on “Donald Trump and the return of the antivax “monster shot””
We certainly would not be lucky, whether you look at it from an economic standpoint, a standpoint of civil rights, women’s rights, or more. But your point is also correct: he and the rear-end-lickers he keeps near would have no compulsions at all in destroying as much of DHH, FDA, and CDC as they could — ideally they’d completely eliminate them. As you point out, the only reason he went with Operation Warp Speed is because he was hoping for a 2nd term: if he gets one now he would not have an access to another term, so he would not have no reason to be concerned about any damage he and his lackeys would do.
Project 2025, p. 489, calls for abolishing Health and Human Services and replacing it with a “Department of Life.” Handmaid’s Tale.
Orac be careful: writing about “shots” and DJT : his fans might accuse you of encouraging violence ( or regicide) /s
Idw56old: “.. if he gets one now he would not have an access to a second term… ”
I wouldn’t be so sure about that: he has a way of transcending rules/ laws/ traditions. His VP choice transcends even his own abysmal stances but is also intelligent and perhaps also capable of implementing them.
Oh, I was very aware of how any use of the word “shot” in the context of of a post about Donald Trump and vaccines could be misinterpreted, which is why I made sure to call it the “antivax monster shot,” instead of just the “monster shot.”
I didn’t see Trump doing anything terribly anti-vax during his first term, waiting instead until his second term to destroy child and public health. That phone call yesterday makes it even more likely should Trump win in November. Besides putting RFKjr as head of a “vaccine safety” commission, I suspect some anti-vax quack like Ladapo or Atlas or Marik would be US Surgeon General and as such provide bogus testimony on vaccines as Kennedy/Siri/Bigtree/etc work to overturn the NVICP so they can sue vaccine makers for many billions.
Kennedy won’t give 2 cents when kids start catching (and getting hospitalized and dying) from vaccine-preventable diseases, just like he didn’t care about all the measles cases and deaths in 2019 in Samoa.
Surgeon General is a largely ceremonial and powerless position, other than its bully pulpit and power of public persuasion. The only “hard” power the Surgeon General has is to be head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (USPHS).
No, imagine putting someone like Joseph Ladapo or Jay Bhattacharya in charge of the CDC or FDA. That’s what scares me way more than one of them as Surgeon General.
One vaccine at a time? I’m willing to bet that if my mother could have had me vaccinated in one shot, against measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the whooping cough that almost killed me, she’d be saying, “Give it to her now.” Giant needles – spoken by someone who was never in a doctor’s office with a child – he has people for that.
On a semi-related note: Antivaxers on Facebook are trying to drum up interest in an sea cruise for the unvaccinated, in which 2000 or more like-minded and un-immunized folks would participate.
To make it even more of a rollicking affair, they could invite guest speakers like Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree and Sherri Tenpenny (is this starting to sound familiar?).
The concept has been mocked as “a giant floating petri dish”, but it sure sounds like fun.
Rotavirus/Norovirus: “Hold my beer, we’re going on a cruise”
Perhaps they could even take along a few sick people, just to make sure everyone gets a chance at developing “natural immunity”.
Perhaps they can ask some cyclists from the Tour de France, who had to stop, because they were tested positive for Covid.
That sounds like an even-more-focused version of the ConspiraSea cruise that happened a couple of times before COVID, though I think the last time it fell apart because the organizer was arrested for something related to the whole “sovereign citizen” thing.
I read a very long, multi-part series (I think originally linked from here) about the whole cruise where there were the more harmless types (auras and near death experiences and cryptids) in addition to the dangerous health conspiracies and the “going to get you in trouble with the law” conspiracies.
Weirdly there are often things like this on regular cruise ships, like a steampunk cruise on a Norwegian cruise to Alaska, or a “vintage” cruise on a crossing of the Queen Mary II (not technically a cruise ship but a liner).
An unvaccinated reunion cruise be the least likely site for a Covid outbreak that’s for sure, but definitely watch out for STDs as the unvaxed sperm is being passed around
How is that “for sure,” exactly?
Igor claims he knows 3 unvaccinated people who haven’t caught it. That’s all the support he needs for his claim.
Be assured that lawyers are standing by to take advantage of your brand of ignorance.
Even with the disclaimers unvaccinated cruise ship passengers would have to sign, potential liability for cruise operators would be enormous.
https://www.hannonlegalgroup.com/blog/cruise-covid-19-negligence
If I remember correctly in the beginning there were some big outbreaks on cruise-ships.
They are pretty good petridishes for infectous diseases. Not only covid, but I think for instance rota-virusses as well.
Also good for spreading norovirus.
Imagine (if you will) being stuck aboard ship with a crowd of babbling, barfing, diarrheic Covid-infected antivaxers wearing “I have an immune system” and “Critical Thinker” t-shirts.
Happily, I didn’t know much about Vance ( except about his book and relationship to Thiel**) so I looked up his position on vaccines and healthcare. On the positive side, he supports some parts of Obamacare, negotiating drug prices by Medicare ( Forbes, recently) and has been photographed getting his kids vaccinated BUT he (OBVIOUSLY) is very strongly anti-abortion and against medical care for transgender kids PLUS he wrote an op-ed for The Columbus Dispatch ( August 2021) opposing mandated Covid vaccination for Ohio University students because the vaccines weren’t tested enough, etc.
Because he worked in venture capitalism, I imagine he has interesting ideas about drug and other product development. Oy..
** I always wondered who would name a company Palantir or Mitril
Well, he is a Peter Thiel acolyte, and you might recall that Thiel acolytes considered for FDA Commissioner during the first Trump administration had some…interesting…ideas for how to run the FDA. For example, Jim “O’Neill wanted to drastically weaken FDA regulation, all in the name of a “free market” in medicine.
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2016/12/09/fixing-the-fda-by-appointing-a-commissioner-who-doesnt-believe-in-the-fdas-mission/
Also, remember Balaji Srinivasan? Although not as chummy with Thiel as O’Neill, he thinks that we can replace all those pesky phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials for drugs with online reviews like Yelp or Uber. Or just remember that Thiel thinks that any government regulation of anything (including drugs) hinders “innovation.”
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2017/01/16/next-up-on-the-trump-fda-crazy-train-a-man-who-thinks-that-a-yelp-like-system-will-do-better-than-the-fda-at-maintaining-drug-safety/
Trump ultimately settled for Scott Gottlieb, a deregulation-friendly politically conservative but fairly conventional choice, someone who might have been picked for FDA Commissioner by any “normal” Republican administration since Reagan. We dodged the bullet then. This time I don’t think we’ll be so lucky. I fear that, if Trump is elected again, this time around he will appoint free market deregulation ideologues like O’Neill, Srinivasan, or someone even more bonkers, to head the FDA and CDC.
Vance got an A+ from Ohio anti-vaccine groups when he was running for Senate.
Trump’s views on childhood vaccines are barely more than a footnote to the threat of public health disaster his return to the White House would present.
First, there is ZERO chance RFKj would be given an important position in a second Trump admin. All the prep his peeps are doing os directed at staffing every position in the Federal government with loyalists who will do exactly what Mango Mussolini wants. Another messianic narcissist like RFKJ is way too much of a wildcard to fit the bill.
Orac offers a convincing case that Trump has consistently voiced the “too many too soon –> autism” notion for decades. But that consistency is what separates him from movement anti-vaxers: they always find a way to demonize the shots, move the goal-posts, etc. Trump’s take seems to be genuinely conditional, as evidenced by Barron getting vaxed, i.e. the jabs are actually a good thing if you space them out on an alternative schedule.
The narrowness of this concept fits with where we’ve seen Trump go with vaccines: no policy emphasis on childhood vaccines, reasonable adoption of Warp Speed, rarely aired except when he’s trying to sell antivaxers on supporting him. E.G. that not-actually-a-meeting photo-op with Andy Wakefield being a quid pro quo for a sizable campaign donation from a couple of Andy’s wealthy boosters.
The threat Trumpism represents to public health is much wider and more fundamental. We can frame it with metonyms like ‘Peter Theil’, ‘dismantling the deep state’, ‘alternative facts’ ‘Project 2025’, and especially ‘like Trump’s first term on steroids, without the frictions he encountered from more establishment subordinates’.
And that first term was, of course, an absolutely horrific public health disaster: iirc Orac has pointed to credible estimates of like 200,000 excess COVID deaths due to the administration’s bungling of the pandemic response. That’s just mind-boggling. I suggest an analysis of why this went so badly points to the primary reasons we have to worry about Trump’s possible re-election…
I do have the bones of such an analysis in mind, but I don’t have the bandwidth right now to write out even a brief explication of it. I’ll try to get back to it later today or tomorrow.
This post was just about vaccines; I’m painfully aware of the potential overall public health consequences of another Trump term. As I said in this post, for whatever reason he didn’t push for antivax policy (or even “vaccine skeptical” policy) in his first term, and in terms of public health his picks were all mostly the sorts of picks similar to what any GOP administration for the last four decades would make (with the possible exception of Tom Price to head HHS, who was AAPS-level bad). This time around, it’ll be all Thiel acolytes who want to destroy the administrative state, including the FDA and CDC, you know, the kind of apparatchiks who want to return the FDA to its pre-Kefauver mandate, in which it was only required to have drug manufacturers demonstrate safety, but not efficacy, of their products when they applied for licensure. Actually, he’d probably want the sort of ideologues who wouldn’t want the FDA to go beyond its mandate when it was founded in 1906.
The funny thing is, these supposed “free market” types (who are really monopolists masquerading as free market advocates) don’t seem to understand that drug and device companies actually like a strong and consistent FDA. It provides stability and helps their reputations.
Even more than that it provides certainty. The companies know what data is required and they can choose the winners from the lovers. The companies in fact would like some tighter regulations so that products that do not have good efficacy for activity, like supplements, do not get approved.
It turns out that a laissez-faire approach to regulation is of far more benefit to crooks than it is to legitimate businesses.
The funny (odd, irrational) thing is that capitalists in general (not just the pharmas) are of two minds regarding reasonable government regulation. They like it, but only ‘like’, on one hand, and hate it on the other. Stability is to their advantage in the long run, c.f. mutual funds and Warren Buffet, but the system is structured to emphasize the short run: in a dog-eat-dog competition the executives who fail to maximize profit every quarter are likely to be deposed in favor of more aggressive suits.
This is bolstered by an accompanying mythology: the celebration of the successful gamblers, the attribution of ‘magical wisdom’ to their choices, their egotistical delusions that they are infallible. You know, ‘speed limits on the freeway are for the shlubs, but they just fence me in. I can drive 100+mph under perfect control!’ Some express surprise that tech billionaires like Steve Kirsch and Peter ‘Seastreader’ Theil can be so delusional. ‘They have to be be smarter than that to have that much financial success.’ On the contrary, that extreme loons rise to the top in a free-for-all over a pile of lesser loony failures is a structural feature of late capitalism.
In the last 100 years the US has had four laissez faire GOP regimes – Coolidge, Reagan, Bush Jr. and Trump – each engendering a bubble that burst into financial crisis. Cut the rules; cut taxes (thus defunding the economic police even where rules remain formally in place)… instability inevitably results.
You’re probably ahead of me in recognizing how this cycle gets more dangerous over time due to our increasing dependence on technology: how applying ‘anything goes until the invisible hand slaps it back’ in medicine can be more devastating now than in the past. Another example being the deregulated electrical grid in Texas, (which parallels the COVID mess in some ways.)
All that said Trump is not just another Coolidge/Reagan/Shrub/Randian-libertarian-fantasist. He adds a new disturbing dimension to the mix, an amplification of fantasy to the point where it becomes a different thing.
Lest this comment become a tome, again I’ll not dive into that now. But, to quote John Matrix from Commando: I’ll be back!
@ sadmar:
So what’s wrong with a tome?
—Anyway, I think you’re right about loons rising to the top. There are certainly lots of them. Wasn’t Thiell the one who wanted to “download”? himself so he wouldn’t truly die or some other nonsense? I understand that Elon advises other tech bros to have many kids so someday they’ll all take over the world.
—Stability? That’s for sane people! Some of these creatures want chaos so they can invest in crypto and profit wildly when investors flock there in fear.
—The 2 idiots I follow closely tell their enthralled fans to move to Texas because it’s so well run, free and business/ tax friendly. But it’s been hit by disasters – storms, heat, power grid, fires- and they continue to sing its praises.The recent hurricane hit both their places.
— “Shrub” heh heh
— -btw- why are they all bad for women’s rights?
— My investments are carefully diversified; ( real, stocks, bonds, cash) growth funds are great long term but a roller coaster ride. Now will we have to worry about banks if the Orange wins?
For comedy: see Naomi Wolf Substack who’s really behind the Trump attack
Also, for sadmar: Apparently RFK Jr. tried to hit Trump up for a job, in exchange for him dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump, as reported by the WaPo today:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/22/rfk-jr-floated-job-trump-white-house-he-weighed-endorsing-trump/
Trump has been making noises about childhood vaccine mandates recently. Threatening in another term to cut funding to schools. I agree he’s a much broader threat, but he’s a threat there too.
The main thing this tells me about Trump is the confirmation that he never participated in the daily care of his children. If he ever once took one of his kids to the pediatrician for a vaccination appointment, he wouldn’t have such an incorrect image to spew to any interlocutor.
Also, “autism wasn’t a factor when he was growing up?” You mean a sheltered rich kid in the 1950s didn’t know about a condition that was first medically characterized in the 1940s and probably didn’t have any classmates diagnosed with it? Imagine my shock! Even aside from the significant advances in knowledge leading to more common diagnosis of autism since its first characterization, “the world turns out to be more complex than I thought it was as a child” is not evidence of anything except the general ignorance and innocence of children giving way to increasing awareness as they grow up also applying to you.
That was my first thought, too. Anyone who actually saw a child vaccinated would not be imagining a monster shot of any kind. It just doesn’t happen.
RFK for head of FDA let’s go!
He absolutely no relevant experience
Harvey Weinstein to run the National Organization for Women!
In his substack, Paul Offit wrote that he actually had a personal conversation with RFK Jr. over twenty years back. Offit explained the errors in RFK Jr.’s thinking, etc. Offit said the conversation went well and appeared to be productive. No matter. About two weeks later, Offit noted that RFK Jr. was back to spreading his anti-vax nonsense. RFK Jr. isn’t just dense. His behavior is on the level of sociopathy.
As Upton Sinclair said, a man would not accept his mistake if his income depends on it.
That’s the characteristic that makes him attractive to jlb.
[…] help but wonder if there’s a quid pro quo here, given that it wasn’t too long ago that Trump called RFK Jr. to seek his support. (More on that later.) It was the day after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in […]