Melania Trump is broken After months of silence about the assassination attempt on her husband, she quickly reversed course when she released a video amplifying unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting. To promote her upcoming memoir.
In my opinion, this video resembles a deepfake video with a Kris Jenner filter overlayed on it and was posted on X on Tuesday morning. Melania stands in front of a black background as ominous music plays in the background. She tells the camera, “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible and painful experience.” “The silence around him is heavy now. I can’t help but wonder: Why didn’t law enforcement arrest the shooter before the speech?”
“There’s definitely more to the story,” she added. “And we have to get to the truth.” Then the cover of her eponymous book flashed across the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book from her website. It’s unclear what connection the memoir, which is due out in early October, has to her husband’s shooting, according to the publisher. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.
With this rare video appearance, Melania now becomes one of the many There are those around Trump who have suggested that a conspiracy-based evil force facilitated the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has reported, Trump’s two sons, Trump’s running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have blamed Democrats for the shooting without evidence. (As Mark has reported, the shooter, a registered Republican, still has a motive unknown.) Trump himself played a role in the incident. The narrative, he said in a late August interview with television psychologist Dr. Phil, “is, to a certain extent, the fault of Biden and Harris. And I’m the opponent. Look, they weaponized the government against me, they used the entire Department of Justice to come after me. They didn’t really care about my health and safety.”
“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in the interview. “They’re going to say that. (a) Standard dialogue, if you keep talking, you’ll find that the assassin or potential assassin can move… maybe that bullet is because of their investigation method.”
Experts have warned that such baseless claims could spark retaliatory violence from Trump-loving extremists.
This persistent slander adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources say is the most significant risk heading into the election: the potential for bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, the message that he is the victim of a broad conspiracy by his political opponents. Trump’s central narrative has now been further bolstered by an assassination attempt that left three attendees shot, one of whom died.
As Melania alludes to in the video, questions remain about the fatal security failures that allowed the shooter to climb onto the roof without law enforcement intervention. But those questions are the subject of an ongoing federal investigation, and neither Melania nor anyone else in the MAGA world will be leading or resolving them.
