Legends of Forbidden Memory Hole
You will never make your biggest problems disappear.
On July 13th, 2024, President Donald J. Trump’s head was less an inch away from exploding on live television. You wouldn’t get that impression watching the video. The bullets that came hailing down onto the stage made sounds that were more of a ‘Ricardo Lopez’ result than Scanners. Nonetheless, for those of us watching in real time and who have a vested interest in the country, it was a turbulent, earth-shattering moment.
Over the past three weeks, right-wing personalities on X have been up in arms, concerned that the media is attempting to blackout news, information, and photography related to the assassination attempt on President Trump by the now-deceased 20-year-old terrorist Thomas Matthew Crooks. Silly idea. Right?
Time Magazine yanked the cover of their August 5th, 2024 issue featuring President Trump’s now iconic fist pump, shouting “Fight!”, to instead publish a remarkably forgettable ‘queen/girl-boss/yasss slayyyy Kamala Harris werk it’ cover. The reasoning? According to The Federalist, Time feared that the Trump cover would indirectly work as a propaganda device for his campaign.
Time Magazine ran through four covers for their August 5th, 2024 issue, rejecting the history-making photograph above as their primary cover to instead trot out the Fiverr tier design below. We love an ethnically ambiguous bad bitch.
Yours truly nabbed an early copy featuring the Attack on Trump cover, sure to go out-of-print soon. Best read with a Sea Blue Red Bull.This downgrade from Time Magazine encapsulates so much of why America has fallen short in producing meaningful art and iconography in recent years. The decision to dump what is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and vibrant images of the 21st century out of a misplaced sense of political responsibility is shameful. Moreover, it is not remotely reckless or irresponsible to publish modern history at its most potent. In fact, in such a rootless time, it should be encouraged.
On July 28, right-wing pundits discovered that Google was suppressing search engine suggestions related to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. That doesn’t seem very helpful. You’re giving the person researching a whole extra second or two of confusion, wondering if the event ever took place.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray refused to admit that Donald Trump was struck by the bullet during a testimony in front of Congress. "I think, with respect to former President Trump,” Wray said, “there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, hit his ear.”
Huh. It sure looked like the bullet was on the correct trajectory to strike him. Could it be that we’re all just overreacting and it was some dirt from the ground that hit him? Maybe he sneezed too hard and blew out his eardrum.
The FBI were later forced to confirm that the bullet did indeed hit Trump.
On July 29, 2024, Facebook came under fire when it was exposed that they were “accidentally” censoring the image of Trump raising his fist in the air. To steal the new word of the Democrat party, it’s “weird” how this keeps happening.
There is validity to the concern from these pundits and Trump supporters that Google, Facebook, and certain news outlets are doing their best to make this story quietly float into the past. Whether that concern is warranted, I am unsure. It doesn’t seem to be working, even if the hype has died down.
By and large, the people away from their keyboards are still acutely aware of this event. It has left a ripple in ways that I have not previously seen. Since the shooting occurred, I've noticed MAGA hats in the wild - both in Boston and New York City, two of the bluest cities in the country. Do you understand how rare that is? Not even in the late-2015 grace period, before the media embraced their “Trump is racist, Trump is Hitler” scare-tactic campaign, were there MAGA hats being worn publicly in Democrat-run cities.
I've heard people in extremely art-centric corporate offices openly discuss voting for Trump during their lunch breaks, despite being surrounded by harems of prickly Gen Z and Millennial women. That is not something that I could have imagined in 2017. Something changed.
One could take a look at Tim Heidecker’s Instagram and see him getting talked down to by his fans in the comment section for an anti-Trump post. Heidecker’s audience tends to be a more liberal crowd of 25-to-45 year olds. He regularly gets hate from the Million Dollar Extreme fan base over his passively enthusiastic attitude towards their sketch comedy program Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace being pulled from the Adult Swim slate in 2016 after a single successful season. But that is not who is demeaning him. These comments are being written by normal people. Not just normal people, but normal girls.
The average New Yorker is feeling his wallet get thinner. Beef jerky currently costs $11. Steak? $30. Pizza? $37. He is noticing groups of migrants huddled about on street corners, even in the more affluent parts of Manhattan. The world’s richest city is devolving into the third world. It’s not just Middle America that’s been forgotten, it’s America.
The frontrunner of the 2024 election, who aspires to hit ‘rewind’ on all of those problems and make things “great again”, just took a bullet from a dweeby, radicalized Bidenite. Clusters of liberals on social media lamented the bullet missing Trump’s head. Conservative-lite personalities, free speech YouTubers, and comedians still wishing it were 1999 cried, “Both sides! Both sides!” when these people were fired from their jobs due to a LibsOfTikTok lead ‘cancel’ campaign. Where is this all going?
Well, for right now, conservatism and Trumpism, specifically, is the most accepted and tolerated it has been in eight years. Most people with healthy brains, who don’t sit and rot in terminally online environments, see an attempted murder take place and do not sympathize or side with the culprit or those who endorse the culprit’s form of terrorism: they side with the victim. They side with Donald Trump. Whether or not that will shine through at the ballot box is another story.
After one of the most turbulent months in American history—beginning with an immensely troubling debate performance from the sitting president Joseph R. Biden, to the assassination attempt on Trump, Biden’s bowing out of the 2024 presidential race, and now Yass Queen Kamala taking Biden’s spot at the top of the Democrat ticket… things have come to a lull. We’re in a cooldown period.
Naturally what followed were heightened suspicions. After all, only the paranoid survive. But beyond those suspicions of the ‘next big thing’ creeping up, there was also this immediate craving to face another impact. Conservative provocateur Laura Loomer claimed to have intel that Joe Biden was in hospice and not expected to survive the night, after he had disappeared for a handful of days. This was incorrect. And now, with the gaps in the polls shrinking between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, we’ve been led to believe that a TikTok video with over 1M views and an article in Politico dubbing her a “meme queen” has posed a challenge to the crater that this failed assassination on Trump has left. It’s silly.
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