Has everything changed?

I was going to write my blog about Project 2025, the Republican Party's repulsive 900-page guideline on their plans to deconstruct the American government and rebuild our country into a conservative white man's orgiastic wet dream under an expected Trump presidency.

You know, immigrant detention camps. Christian nationalism. Voter suppression. The end of medicare and social security. Stuff like that.

And then the rifle shots rang out, like they often do in this country. The shots were aimed at Donald Trump himself, giving a campaign speech in a rally in Butler, PA., yesterday.

Those shots changed everything, I think. In what was essentially a 50-50 campaign for the presidency against incumbent Joe Biden, yesterday's horrific events (one person was killed and two others were critically wounded for doing nothing more than attending a carnival barker's sideshow) will virtually hand Trump the keys to the Oval Office. As well as the nuclear codes. And state secrets. Again.

Trump luckily suffered only a grazed ear in the shooting, but the blood trickling down his face will serve him well in campaign posters, maybe as soon as tomorrow when the Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee. He now looks like a war hero, after all. As the former Commander in Chief, does Pvt. Bonespurs qualify for the Purple Heart? The Congressional Medal of Honor? Stay tuned.

But now he will have an element of sympathy behind him, as well as the anger of his retribution and a sense of martyrdom. All of this, and perhaps more, will carry Trump into the presidency and there's nothing the Democrats can do about it. I bet Trump's poll numbers take a 10-point bounce. His voters are energized more than ever by this event.

Already conspiracy theorists are claiming that this was a deep state CIA operation, but early indications are that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, now deceased, was just two years out of high school and was a registered Republican. I wonder how that little tidbit will fit into the overall scheme of things?

I want to say that assassinations only happen in banana republics, but the United States host lost four of its presidents in the last 235 years (dating back to the ratification of the Constitution in 1789). That comes out to one murdered president every 59 years. Throw in attempts to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and then to candidates like George Wallace and Robert Kennedy, well, assassination is something of an American tradition. If we disagree with someone, shoot them.

So does the conversation turn once again to guns? Probably should. Probably won't.

In the meantime, we're probably four months away from another Trump presidency. Four months away from the implementation of Project 2025. Four months away from more Trumpian chaos and insanity. Four months away from the possible end to the American experiment in democracy.

Everything is changing. Except this: Trump is still an adjudicated rapist. He's still guilty of fraud. And he is still a 34-times convicted felon.