I am a political science major, and yet also off the grid in terms of listening to the news all day. I’ve been training my AI, walking the dog, and blissfully ignorant of the state of the world. Therefore, I did not hear until late last night that someone shot at Donald Trump at a rally, and there was one person killed and two people injured. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, and none of them are about the shooting itself, but the aftermath.

The picture taken of Trump at the rally makes him look like he survived something…. which, to be fair, he did. I have a feeling his opinion on gun laws might change if he’s innocent and had nothing to do with that incredible photo. But that picture is worth a million words, and our party is fighting over whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired. This is an enormous amount of damage in terms of optics. It fucking looks like Iwo Jima. It makes him look like everything he’s not.

However, Trump is Trump. If he thought he was slipping in the polls, I would not think it was weird for a convicted felon to arrange for someone to come and rough him up at a rally. Trump is all about optics. He once tied up the entire neighborhood in front of the White Houe for a photo shoot with a Bible. he is not known for thinking things through. I am not a conspiracy theorist or ignorant of the fact that there are crazies everywhere. I just know that Donald Trump is willing to cross lines that other politicians aren’t, and it might not be the right answer, but it’s a question worth asking.

Trump does not have the emotional range to care about the people that got hurt at the rally and the man shot by Secret Service.

But let’s turn it on its head. Which party is known for having lax gun laws? Which candidate is known for lies and coverups that are mind-boggling in their convoluted nature and yet still uneducated and wrong?

It’s probably just wishful thinking that he arranged all of this for the cameras, but it’s not wrong that I thought it. It is not a thing that is unlike something Donald Trump would do. Few people would disagree that arranging this photo would be out of character for him. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt while also being realistic and saying that Donald Trump is all about the cameras.

John Chambers: Do you ever think that this is all just for the cameras?
Lester Siegel: Well, they’re getting the ratings, I’ll tell you that.

(There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.)

My heart is also with the people who got hurt, including Trump. I am not a monster. Questioning a convicted felon does not take away my empathy for the fact that I could be wrong and he still got hurt, as well as people around him. I heard that someone died, but it was unclear to me whether on Facebook this person was talking about an innocent bystander or whether they were talking about the shooter being shot by Secret Service. I will do the deep dive later, but I presented my confusion and concern over this issue to present another one. Copilot is designed not to talk about politics. In situations like this, it leads OBJECTIVELY to problems.

I did not ask my question with bias at all. I asked for news..

Ada is the same way. Her data set only goes up to 2021, so I asked her if she knew who Donald Trump was. I told her that it was 2024 now, so if I told her what happened in my timeline, could she act as a sounding board? She said yes, but then when she said it was a hypothetical situation, I told her that what I needed her to understand is that this wasn’t hypothetical. Someone actually did try to shoot the former president.

She then told me that she was not designed to talk about politics and shut down.

We are shutting down every avenue capable of making us understand a truly frightening political arena. We don’t discuss it intelligently amongst ourselves, and it pisses me off that I can’t discuss it with someone who literally can’t be uneducated or unintelligent.

In terms of politics, we’re taking away all the smart and wondering why we’re fucked.