The desperate left-wing spinning of the assassination attempt started minutes after the bullets flew, one actually hitting former President Trump. 

It was Trump's rhetoric, they said, as if the bullet was aimed not AT Trump but BY Trump or one of his supporters. 

That was sick, but on-brand for the mainstream media. 

ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s seething hate is all apparent in her haggard face.

Here she is blaming Trump for the assassination attempt on his life using the “bloodbath” hoax.

pic.twitter.com/HfItBcZcCT

— John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte (@NolteNC) July 14, 2024

Now The New York Times has an added twist to the spin: Trump is playing the victim, and this is now just another arrow in his quiver. He will use the fact that he was NEARLY KILLED to falsely portray that he is somehow the victim of a multi-year attempt to smear him, bankrupt him, put him in jail, and label him an existential threat to America. 

The shooter wanted Trump DEAD. That's all the motive anyone needs to know. And if nearly having your brains splattered isn't "persecution", I don't know what is. https://t.co/Rs2VWTUYbk

— Mark Mendlovitz (@MendlovitzMark) July 15, 2024

As we know, nothing could be further from the truth. It is Trump who is entirely at fault, not the people like the Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, who called for putting a "bullet" in Donald Trump--on national TV. 

Violent rhetoric indeed. 

🚨Flashback to Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson in 2023:

"They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump." pic.twitter.com/FqMFty7SlO

— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) July 14, 2024

Nineteen minutes into Trump's presidency--Trump had just begun his inaugural address and had literally done nothing yet as president besides be sworn in, the Washington Post printed this headline:

Nope, Trump has no reason to believe he has been targeted for nearly a decade by the Establishment. 

A compilation of Democrats directly calling for violence against Trump 👇

Tonight we saw the result of this incitement.

pic.twitter.com/oIhL3MQ0Vk

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) July 14, 2024

The Establishment has been spending years claiming that Trump is the diabolical leader of a fascist movement who must be, as Congressman Dan Goldman said, "eliminated." But, The New York Times tells us, any sense that this is unfair is merely grievance politics. Totally untrue. 

For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters, the assassination attempt on Saturday was the climax and confirmation of a story that Mr. Trump has been telling for years.

It is the story of a fearless leader surrounded by shadowy forces and intrigue, of grand conspiracies to thwart the will of the people who elected him. A narrative in which Mr. Trump, even before a gunman tried to take his life, was already a martyr.

“They’re not coming after me,” he declared at the first rally of his 2024 campaign, last year in Waco, Texas. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”

In the hours after the shooting — before the gunman’s name, much less a motive, was known — many Republican politicians and Trump supporters blamed Democrats and the news media. They pointed to portrayals of Mr. Trump as an authoritarian and anti-democratic force in politics, which they argued created a climate that made an attempt on his life inevitable.

Nobody knows the motive of an assassin who shot Donald Trump, we are told. 

I know the motive: TO KILL DONALD TRUMP. It doesn't take a genius, nor is it a stretch to assume that it has something to do with a campaign to call Trump "worse than Hitler," an "existential threat" who is itching to kill opponents, and the leader of a domestic terrorist movement. 

Just sayin'. 

Surely Trump has no reason to feel victimized as he bleeds from a wound to his head. How ridiculous. 

Since he began campaigning in earnest in March of last year, days before his indictment in New York in the first of several criminal cases he has since faced, Mr. Trump has depicted his impeachments, investigations, prosecutions and social media bans as a coordinated scheme.

Mr. Trump had no hard evidence for the claims, but many suspects: Democrats, Trump-resistant Republicans, media and tech companies, partisan-minded prosecutors and government bureaucrats were all working together, he would suggest, to stop him from returning to office.

Mr. Trump has "no hard evidence." 

This comes from a newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage promoting a proven hoax paid for by Hillary Clinton: the Steele Dossier. 

Give me a break. Everybody with a brain knows there has been a coordinated campaign to get Donald Trump. It's not a mystery when prosecutors who put him in the dock literally RAN FOR OFFICE on a promise to put Donald Trump into the legal crosshairs. 

That seems like hard evidence to me. But even if it is only circumstantial evidence, it is beyond compelling. Quit gaslighting. 

The irony is that only dedicated Trump haters will buy into this spin. It looks weak, even pathetic, to most people. Especially after people realized they had been gaslighted by the media about Biden's health. The excuses and attacks on Trump will only work with people already disposed to hate Trump. 

Trump could still lose this election--anything is possible--but it will be an event that would cause that, not some manufactured Narrative cooked up by the Democrats or the media. In the near term--and likely ONLY the near term--the media has no power to control the public perception of Trump. 

A picture is worth a thousand words and in rare cases, like this one, pictures simply define how people think. This is one of those. 

Its power will diminish over time for those not dedicated to Trump, but if you are trying to make the case that Trump has concocted a ridiculous theory that people are out to get him, a photo showing a president wounded by an actual bullet is a pretty good refutation of the premise. 

The liberals in the mainstream media and the punditocracy may try to regain the initiative on the Narrative™--and they have the reach and time to do it--but as we can see by MSNBC silencing Morning Joe for the moment, they know how dangerous that is. They are going to try to be sly. 

I am pretty sure sly won't work.