Assassination Attempt on Trump: The Facts, Theories, Future of Democracy, and My Love Letter to America

0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altucher. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:20This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

1:36So during COVID, every single day I was doing a podcast because I felt there was so much misinformation in the mainstream media, in all the news sources. Everybody was saying conspiracy theories. Nobody was getting the math right on how infections like COVID spread. And I just wanted to kind of every day make the information more correct. like just explain what was really going on and trying to translate why so much of the mainstream news was wrong. Not just about COVID, but how the effects on the economy from the shutdowns, the effects on the economy from the printing of trillions of dollars.

2:15And many of the things that were spoken about then have come to pass. And on COVID, it was all just more of an attempt to understand what was actually not really known by the public, what was conspiracy theories, what was misinformation, and tried to really understand from a rational point of view what was going on. And rationality is not really part of the mainstream media anymore. And we're seeing this again with the Trump assassination attempt. On every side, by the way, this is not intended to be a political podcast, although I will talk about some of the politics involved. So I want to kind of just go through what happened go through some of the conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories about this kind of stuff in general some of the history behind this and you know perhaps we'll get into some of the more recent i mean this is basically this is a news failed week we have just two or three days after the assassination attempt is the nomination of jd vance to be the vice presidential candidate for the republican party it's a very historic event and i will comment on that as well.

3:25But let's start with this assassination attempt. First off, there's not a lot of precedent of an assassination attempt of a presidential candidate. Forget about the fact for a second that he's a former president, just a presidential candidate. So the last time there was an assassination attempt on a somewhat major presidential candidate was in 1972, was George Wallace. So George Wallace famously was a third party candidate in 1960. He basically was a racist governor from Alabama who was representing an extreme part of the Democratic Party that at that time was far right, particularly in terms of like racism and civil rights.

4:11It was a shame that that part of the Democratic Party even existed. But that was the kind of the Southern Democrats. There was Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, other people. But so in May of 1972, as he was running for the Democratic nomination for president, George Wallace was shot by a guy named Arthur Bremmer and he was left paralyzed from this. And obviously, you know, George Wallace was no longer a candidate after that. By the way, that guy, Arthur Bremmer, is now released from prison. He was sentenced to 53 years. He was released after 35 years. I think he's a janitor now. So I don't know if the people he worked with are familiar with his past, but there it is.

4:53And then before that, probably the closest analogy to the assassination attempt on Trump would be actually that of Theodore Roosevelt going all the way 112 years earlier back to 1912. And why is this analogous to the Trump assassination attempt? It's because Theodore Roosevelt was not only a candidate, but like Donald Trump, he was a former president of the United States. He was president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. And what's interesting is in 1901, he became president not by being elected, but because he was William McKinley's vice president and William McKinley shortly after taking office in March of 1901, William McKinley was assassinated.

5:36Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States. He got reelected in 1904. And in 1908, he decided he could have run for president again. At the time, there were no term limits, although that doesn't quite apply to Theodore Roosevelt. And he could have run again in 1908, but he decided not to. And instead he wanted his buddy, William Howard Taft to become president. William Howard Taft did become president. Then Theodore Roosevelt was disappointed that Taft didn't just blindly follow Roosevelt's policies. And so Theodore Roosevelt decided to run for another term in 1912. And again, they didn't put term limits on presidents until after Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's cousin, because Franklin Roosevelt was elected for four terms and then died in office.

6:24That's how Harry Truman became president. But after that, the people of the United States decided a constitutional amendment was necessary. No president is allowed to serve more than two full terms. So Theodore Roosevelt decided to run again in 1912, but he didn't want to run on the Republican Party, which was William Howard Taft. And that was the party that he was part of. So he ran on something called the Progressive Party or what he called the Bull Moose Party. And when he was campaigning in October of 1912, right before the election, a man named John Schrenk shot him in the chest. Roosevelt had some notes in his pocket in a metal glasses case, and that slowed down the bullet and it didn't quite reach his lungs.

7:09In fact, Roosevelt even said later that because he wasn't coughing up blood, He knew his lungs were not hit. The doctors even decided that because it did not really cause him that much harm, they left the bullet in his body for the rest of his life. A counterexample to that was James Garfield, who was president when shortly after he became president, he was shot. The bullet itself did not kill him. The doctors were so bad as they tried to get the bullet out that he became infected and he was sick for months until finally he died. So James Garfield, there was essentially a case of medical malpractice.

7:46In Theodore Roosevelt's case in 1912, they let the bullet stay there. He was injured. And by the way, he didn't win the election. Woodrow Wilson won the election. So I don't know if it really increases popularity that much, but he was also a third party candidate. So he was splitting up the Republican Party. So even if it gave a boost to his campaign, it was a third party situation where maybe if it was a two party situation, he would have won. but the Republican party was divided by Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, won the election. But that's the closest analogy.

8:20Perhaps another, you know, Gerald Ford was shot at twice while he was president, but it wasn't close to the election. It was in 1975. The election was in 1976 and Jimmy Carter narrowly won that election. And Ronald Reagan was shot two months after he became president in March of 1981. One, famously, Ronald Reagan, as he was being wheeled into the hospital for surgery to remove the bullet, Reagan, who was hurt but was conscious, said to the doctor right before they gave him an anesthetic, Reagan said to the doctor, I hope you're a Republican. And then they operated on him and it was good and he survived.

8:58So now Trump did not get that injured. He was lucky though. He was apparently turning his head. And so instead of the bullet hitting him in the head, it kind of hit his ear and there was blood, but he wasn't hurt. He even was seen saying to the Secret Service, there's blood on my face. Like he wasn't aware that he was even hit. So he is seen though, putting his hand by his ear, maybe he felt something on his ear and the Secret Service pushed him down. And then he's seen saying, wait, wait, wait, because he knew he was okay. And the secret service was alerted very quickly that a sniper had killed the assassin we'll get to that in a second and trump said you know is said the words fight fight fight and held up his hand in a fist pump we'll get to that issue because there's some narrative around you know what he was saying afterwards but basically the assassin this guy named thomas matthew crooks he's a 20 year old.

10:02He was bullied apparently in high school. Apparently he got on a fairly close building. He got on the roof. He had a rifle and people had noticed him. So there's a lot of conspiracy theories going on. One of the conspiracy theories says that the secret service ignored this because Democrats or Iran or whoever wanted him dead. Another conspiracy theory says this is like kind of a, what's called a false flag where it's planned by Trump because he wanted the sympathy that this would generate. That's another conspiracy theory. And another theory is that the Secret Service was just incompetent. And I'm inclined to believe a third theory.

10:48First off, people notice this guy, Thomas Crooks, as he was on the scene. I don't know why they noticed him, but several Secret Service agents kind of radioed that there was a suspicious looking guy. They tried to find him later. They couldn't. Some local police saw him on the roof and the local police were trying to climb to the roof to see what this guy was doing. As soon as the police sort of, he had his fingertips on the roof and he was climbing up, the local policeman, he saw this guy aiming the gun right at him. And so he dropped eight feet to the ground. And that's exactly when Thomas Crooks immediately aimed the rifle back to Trump and started firing.

11:31So police tried to get on the roof. And the question was, why wasn't this roof covered by the Secret Service? Why wasn't this guy stopped before? How did he get on the roof? Well, first off, let's deal with the most extreme one. There was a tweet by somebody who specifically said he worked for the Secret Service. He saw the guy on the roof. He wanted to take the guy out and his boss told him no. And then this secret service agent was fired right after the assassination attempt. So this was a tweet that got millions of views and it got reposted everywhere. It turns out nobody by the name that this guy went by even worked for the secret service.

12:09It was just a fake tweet that, or it started on Reddit and then became a tweet. So that conspiracy theory is out. But then there's this idea. A lot of people were saying, look, I used to work for the Secret Service and here's what they do for a president. They would have scoped out that roof weeks or months in advance and made sure there were agents covering it and so on. Well, the issue with that is that Donald Trump was not president of the United States. He has two things that do get Secret Service protection. He's a former president and he's a major candidate for president. But a couple issues there.

12:43First off, a former president barely gets Secret Service protection, barely. There's hundreds of agents guarding Biden. That is not the case with the former president. It's usually done on a case by case basis, maybe anywhere between two and a dozen agents, maybe more in some extreme cases, like when W stopped being president, there was a lot of political tension in the air and he was covered by up to 75 agents. But usually former presidents go on to live, I don't wanna say regular lives, but they are not bogged down by secret service agents all over them. So maybe, you know, I've seen former presidents in action.

13:23They don't really have a lot of secret service around them. And Donald Trump did not have enough secret service to warrant scoping out every location he was gonna be in months in advance. That's for a president, not a former president. And for a candidate, it's on a case-by-case basis. I mean, notably, RFK Jr. doesn't even have Secret Service protection right now, despite the fact that his father was assassinated while being a candidate for president, and his uncle was an assassinated president. And RFK Jr. is a major candidate. But yet, you know, Biden has not authorized, at this point, at least he probably will now, but he has not authorized Secret Service protection for him.

14:04Similarly, in the last major cycle, which had a lot of candidates, 2016, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, even though they were winning primaries, they did not get any Secret Service protection. And it took a while for Donald Trump to get Secret Service protection. So it's sort of on a case-by-case basis who gets Secret Service protection. And it's not as formal as the Secret Service protection for a president. So that conspiracy theory that the Secret Service somehow kind of deliberately was not being thorough with Trump, that conspiracy theory is out of the way.

14:59Thanks.

15:07Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

15:50And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

16:27Was this a false flag? Did Trump plan this? So some people are saying this guy, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican, and so that Trump himself planned this, or the Trump campaign planned this, so that people could be sympathetic to Trump, and that would make him win. Well, first off, Trump was within millimeters of getting killed. So it's kind of obvious that he didn't plan to just turn his head that moment so that he would not get killed. Like that would be ridiculous. The other thing with these kind of false flag types of theories, again, like 9-11 is a famous false flag theory that, oh, the government planned this as an excuse for them to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

17:13The problem with this sort of thing is there's a way you can sort of determine if a conspiracy theory is ridiculous or not, and it's called conspiracy numbers. So what is the number of people that would have to keep a secret in order for a conspiracy to remain a secret? Like I said, no one figures it out. So 9-11 is like an obvious case where basically almost thousands of people who work for the government would have to know in advance that this is happening and would have to keep it a secret because it was so meticulously planned. Thousands of people would have to know and keep this a secret until after they die in order for people to never find out that this was a false flag operation.

17:56And that's ridiculous. There's some number where it becomes ridiculous for it to be a conspiracy. And the same thing is here. Like too many people would have to be in on it for this to work. And the same thing goes for a lot of the Kennedy conspiracy theories. I've been to the location where John F. Kennedy was shot. There are people there almost 24 hours a day talking conspiracy theories. Who knows? I spoke to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself about his theories about his father being shot and his uncle being shot. he is pretty sure it's the CIA and the FBI who killed his father and his uncle. I kind of doubt it, but it's 60 years ago.

18:38There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of what happened. Like, why didn't they investigate Jack Ruby a little bit more when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald? But I'm not going to, you know, Robert F. Kennedy, the whole issue himself. So I don't want to get into his conspiracy ideas. but I do want to say there's a theory that's borderline what I believe. Kimberly Cheadle is who's the head of the secret service buddies with Jill Biden before Jill Biden. She had worked for the government at different points, but I believe at the time that she was appointed to be head of the secret service, she was head of PepsiCo's security and Jill Biden really wanted her to be the head of the secret service.

19:16So Jill Biden apparently was very helpful for her getting appointed to be head of the secret service. And so there's this theory maybe that they just didn't like Trump, so the security for Trump was not as sufficient as it should have been and that a lot of security that day was diverted by an event Joe Biden was attending. It's not that I believe this, again, as a deliberate thing. Nobody said, let's not put as much security around Trump because we hope he dies. I don't think that happened, but I do think they didn't really care as much with Trump because of such bias against him. And we see that the bias is occurring.

19:52Joe Biden clearly doesn't like RFK Jr. because RFK is going to pull votes from the Democratic Party. And RFK Jr. is definitely a significant candidate, plus had two significant members of his family killed while either president or running for president. So he did deserve Secret Service protection. He has not gotten it. So clearly there is some bias in how Biden, or at least his administration, does these things. I'm not criticizing that. Every single administration that's ever existed has had bias of some sort. That's what they do. So I do think maybe the security probably wasn't sufficient, not deliberately, like not let's hope he gets shot at.

20:36But I'll get to that in a second because whatever. But there's a lot of rhetoric about that. but I do think the secret service was a little bit lax on how they were protecting things because clearly people saw a suspicious person and we know the secret service was alerted and then tried to find this person, but they couldn't find him. At that point, they should have been a lot more aware of what was going on. Local police somehow was not communicating with the secret service about their own suspicions or maybe they were and it wasn't followed up on, So I do think people didn't care as much as they should have.

21:14And I don't know why. I don't think it was deliberate. I don't think it was like, man, who cares? Like, let's hopefully this guy dies. I don't think it was that. I just think they just weren't good at their jobs and didn't take this as seriously as they perhaps should have. And now there were consequences. I do assume there's going to be an investigation. The head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheadle, says she's not going to resign. I do think she ends up resigning. I do think it's her fault for not assigning more protection in a case where every single day on Twitter, you see people saying, look, on both sides, but you do see Democrats saying, I wish Trump were dead.

21:53You know, Madonna has said it. I'm not saying she's a major Democratic Party figure, but it's not an uncommon thing for even celebrities to say, oh, or even right now, you know, people are out there saying, oh, too bad this guy missed. It's really disgusting and horrible what I'm seeing on this side. Just like, by the way, things Republicans say about Democrats, about Biden has been disgusting. So I always tell people I miss 2012. It was Mitt Romney versus Obama. As far as I could tell, they actually liked each other. I don't remember anything really super negative one said about the other. And the debates were very respectful.

22:37And clearly both Obama and Romney were intelligent, high IQ people who argued about the issues. Obama won. Romney, for whatever reason, wasn't likable enough by the public and incumbents usually win. Well, that's usually the theory is that incumbents win and Obama won the 2012 election. Ever since then, the country has gotten more and more divided. I'll tell you in 2016, early 2016, when Trump was just firing up, I was on a plane from LA to New York and I was sitting next to a guy who's been on this podcast because of that plane ride where I was sitting next to this former DIA agent The Defense Intelligence Agency is similar to the CIA.

23:22There's a lot of three-letter secret agencies that you're probably not even aware of in the government. But anyway, it's a former DIA agent. And he was basically saying from what they were seeing, the country was getting more and more divided and that someone like a Bernie Sanders or a Donald Trump, someone on an extreme edge of their party, would become president one day. He didn't think it was gonna be in the 2016 election. It happened to be in the 2016 election where Trump got elected. And maybe Bernie Sanders would have been the candidate if things hadn't been kind of engineered a little bit.

23:53We know they were engineered in 2020 because Bernie Sanders was winning the primaries. And then suddenly, right before the Super Tuesday primary, all the Democratic candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden simultaneously. I'd never seen that happen before in any election. And Bernie Sanders started finally losing primaries and was no longer the predicted Democratic candidate. and Biden went on to win the presidency. So we do know these things get manipulated. And this guy I was riding on the plane with was pretty close in predicting the journeys of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. So since 2016, the country's gotten more and more divided.

24:31We've seen more and more, 50 million people can't believe why the other 50 million people voted the way they did on both sides. And I have friends on both sides who'd say to me, why would anyone vote for Biden? Why would anyone vote for Trump? Well, clearly 50 million people did for both sides. And, you know, everybody has their reasons. But I once asked somebody, a good friend of mine, who was complaining about Trump. This was when Trump was president. Tell me three policies he did that you do not like. And my friend, who was a producer for TV news, I won't mention which channel, but it's not the channel you expect probably.

25:08My friend could not figure out even one policy. He said, let me call my sister. And I said, no, no, no, you're a producer of TV news. You should be able to tell me three. If you could tell me three bad policies of Trump, I will vote for the first time in my life and I will vote against Trump. But he couldn't name even one. So I didn't vote at all, but I was surprised that he always was complaining about Trump. Same thing, people always complaining about Biden have a hard time telling me three policies that Biden has done bad. Or again, on the other side, People have a hard time telling me three policies that Biden's done good.

25:44Okay, Afghanistan, the way he left Afghanistan was probably bad. But I don't even really know too many. Oh, student loan debt forgiveness, I think was a bad policy for economic reasons. If you benefited from it by having your student loan debt forgiven, then that was great for you. I have no problem with you having your debt forgiven. But as an economic policy, it's never good for the government to reward basically behavior that is not going to improve the country. If everyone got into debt and couldn't pay the debt back because they majored in East Asian studies or whatever, and then they couldn't get a job that was good enough to pay back their debt, to incentivize that behavior economically is not going to make the country competitive in the long run.

26:32So essentially, and this is a political opinion, to be a good president, you should incentivize financially the behaviors you want to continue and you should tax the behaviors you don't want to continue. So if you think smoking is bad for everyone, you tax cigarettes very high. If you want to incentivize people to go to college, you forgive student loan debt. But I think we should incentivize for jobs that basically advance the country or help people make a living. So incentivize engineers where the US potentially could be falling behind to China and India or incentivize people to go to electrician school or other schools that people used to go to, but now there was such a big marketing effort.