I Shot Trump!

“That whole Trump assassination business was just a hoax, with a phoney shooter and fake target. I should know – I shot Trump!” so declares former Marine and current fugitive from justice Dean Arbutt from his Brazilian refuge. “That’s right – I shot Trump months ago and even then he turned out to be fake!” In the aftermath of the alleged attempted assassination of convicted felon, sex pest (as found by a jury) and former president Donald Trump at a rally of right-wing extremists in Pennsylvania, many commentators have claimed that the incident was staged, but Arbutt’s allegations are undoubtedly the most extraordinary. According to the veteran, his assassination attempt took place in the grounds of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, in Florida. “Frankly, I was disgusted by the creep’s attitude to the military – calling fallen American soldiers ‘losers’ – not to mention his economic illiteracy, bankrupt social policies, hate-mongering and general corruption. I couldn’t bear the thought of my beloved country suffering a second term under him – so I decided to off the fat bastard,” he told the Weekly World Shopper, (available at all good supermarket checkouts in Kansas and Missouri), in an online interview. “Well, I had him in my sights when he was on the golf course – I was using my military skills to camouflage myself as a bunker – and pulled the trigger on him while he was teeing off on the fourth hole. I got him in the head – but instead of going down like a sack of shit, instead he just sort of deflated, with a hissing noise. I realised then that he was actually an inflatable decoy!”

Arbutt claims that the ‘Trump’ shot in the ear in Pennsylvania was also and inflatable decoy, although in that case the whole thing had been carefully staged by the Trump camp. “That’s why the Secret Service guys swarmed him and pulled him down so quickly – they were trying to stop anyone from seeing him deflate. It also explains why, when he went down, witnesses said that they heard a loud farting sound and assumed that he’d voided his bowels in fright – it was just the sound of air escaping from the puncture caused by the bullet.” he insists. “When they had him on the ground they quickly patched the ‘wound’ and re-inflated him with compressed air, explaining why he sprang back up so quickly with his arm apparently upraised.” Arbutt thinks the reason for the deception is obvious. “Just look at the timing – it dominates the news cycle just as a pro-Trump judge throws out the documents case against him, (in which prosecutors had him bang to rights), in a bizarre ruling and evidence of his close involvement with Jeffrey Epstein is coming to light,” he says. “Not to mention the fact that it happened right before the Republican National Convention, turning him into some kid of risen again Messiah before his appearance there!”

Other top conspiracy theorists, while agreeing with Arbutt’s claims that the assassination attempt was staged, disagree with his contention that the ‘Trump’ shot there was an inflatable decoy. “That it was a set-up is obvious. I mean, Lee Harvey Oswald, a poor shot with a crappy rifle, somehow managed to pull off a near impossible shot from the book depository in Dallas in 1963 and blew JFK’s head off, yet a guy with an AR15 gets a clear shot at Trump from closer range and only hits his ear and a bystander? FFS, who are they trying to kid?” asks conspiracist and foaming-at-the-mouth liberal Jake Headress on his podcast, Out of Left Field. “But I’m convinced that it was the real Trump there, although everybody else at the rally, including the supposed victim, were crisis actors. Moreover, the supposed assassin was dead before he reached that roof. They just dumped his body there with a rifle before the rally started. The so-called ‘eyewitnesses’ who claimed to have seen him climbing up there? Again, crisis actors. Obvious ones at that – just look at that weirdo with the red beard and wild hair they interviewed: nobody looks like that for real. He was some casting director’s idea of what a hick Trump supporter might look and sound like. Besides, I’m sure I saw him in a porno movie once – that beard is distinctive.”

Headress believes that at least part of the event was pre-recorded. “They shot the whole fake assassination attempt in advance in a studio, with the whole Pennsylvania venue replicated there. They probably employed some top Hollywood director to shoot it – like they got Stanley Kubrick to shoot that fake moon landing – and ensure they got those neatly composed shots of a supposedly wounded Trump raising his fist defiantly, in front of the American flag. Yeah, maybe they got Michael Bay to do it,” he muses. “Anyway, at the appropriate moment, they cut this pre-filmed footage on the live broadcasts – some blank shots being fired at the venue was probably the cue. It was also, doubtless, the cue for all those crisis actors making up the audience to react appropriately so that when the feed switched back to the live event, so it looked seamless.” Unsurprisingly, the theories advanced by Headress and Arbutt have been condemned Trump supporters, the right-wing media and pro-Trump posters on social media, describing them as ‘sick’, ‘bad taste’ and ‘offensive’. “Pity they weren’t so sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of all those kids who were killed at Sandy Hook, eh?” opines Arbutt. “I remember Alex Jones and all his Trump loving troll followers banging on about how all those kids and their parents were crisis actors and that the whole Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax – they just can’t take it we liberals are even better than them at spinning this stuff!”

But if the Trump shot in Pennsylvania and the one ‘assassinated’ by Arbutt in Florida were actually inflatable decoys, where is the real Trump? “Personally, I think he’s dead – been dead for years, possibly since he lost the 2020 election, in fact,” confides Arbutt. “The tub of lard probably suffered a fatal heart attack while being urinated on by Russian prostitutes or during some unspeakable shenanigans on Epstein’s island and they’ve had his body in a freezer ever since.” – Keeping up the pretence that Trump is still alive, Arbutt believes, is essential to the US’s far right, in order to exploit his cult of personality. “That’s why I high-tailed it to Brazil – not because I’d attempted to assassinate a former president, but because I knew that by exposing their deceit, I was now a target,” he explains. “Obviously, they couldn’t bring any real charges against me, lest they give their secret away themselves, which is why they’ve issued those phoney bestiality charges against me.” Amidst the fall out from the fake assassination attempt, Arbutt has some advice for President Biden. “Personally, I think it high time that he took advantage of the Trumpist Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts, by declaring that Trump constitutes a threat to American democracy and ordering his arrest and execution. That would call their bluff – if there’s still a real Trump, he’d be out of the way, if there isn’t, then they’ll be exposed when an inflatable one is publicly executed by firing squad,” he enthuses. “Problem solved – and it would all be legal. According, ironically, by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees.”