Maybe it's real, maybe it's Maybelline, maybe who even gives a fuck anymore

Gonzo Report 146

Buried in the Kremlin archives, a document exists that reads, in part, like a detailed blueprint for the “security event” that unfolded this past Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and mirrors the previous incidents in West Palm Beach and Butler, Pennsylvania.

In March 2026, the Washington Post obtained and reported on an internal document acquired from Russia’s SVR—its foreign intelligence service—outlining a plan they referred to as “the Gamechanger,” which involved staging a fake assassination attempt on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was trailing badly in the polls ahead of Hungary’s April parliamentary election. Orbán’s re-election campaign was buckling under the weight of a weakened economy, and public support for Trump’s favorite European dictator was rapidly cratering.

According to the document, a staged attack would “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign,” not by solving any of Orbán’s actual problems, but by burying them under an avalanche of manufactured anxiety, outrage, and nationalist solidarity. The operatives calculated that such an event should “shift the perception of the campaign out of the rational realm of socioeconomic questions into an emotional one, where the key themes will become state security and the stability and defense of the political system.”

Essentially, the concept boils down to this: scare people badly enough and they comply, rally behind the embattled candidate, and never dare to ask inconvenient questions.

Fortunately for the people of Hungary, this plan never made it off the page, but given how precisely the blueprint mirrors what has now played out three separate times on American soil, it would appear the Kremlin wasn’t proposing some untested theory.

They were simply shopping a proven strategy to a new client.

In July 2024, another Kremlin asset held a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, during which an alleged gunman opened fire on Donald Trump, barely missing a headshot. The bullet instead grazed the top of his right ear, or so we were told. The ensuing chaos can only be described as more of a staged production than either Cats or Hamilton. Trump grabs his ear, goes down, Secret Service swarm him, aides usher photographers into place as a crane lowers an American flag, and once all these set pieces were moved into place, Trump stands and raises his tiny fist into the air, “blood” streaking down the side of his face, and he mouths a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to the stunned and panicked crowd, many of whom were too busy trying to save lives to pay attention to the theatrics onstage.

Three attendees had been shot. Two faced life-threatening injuries, but survived. A third man who was shot in the head, did not, and was pronounced dead at the scene.

As for what happened next, Trump essentially went home, put a bandage the size of a dinner plate on his ear, and then—in the single most out-of-character move of his entire public life—emerged days later, increasingly downplaying the level of detail and the frequency with which he spoke about what happened. Unless you had the good fortune of being new to planet Earth, you knew that for someone who has never in his life passed up an opportunity to play the victim, that something was off about the whole thing.

As time passed, questions piled up, but answers never came.

Here was the ultimate victim card, dealt directly into his tiny, nasty hand: a gunman tried to kill him and nearly succeeded. Any other version of Donald Trump would have ridden the grievance train until it ran off the fucking tracks, past the 2020 stolen election bullshit, past the millions of other perceived slights and media injustices, all the way to his cursed grave. Instead, he just—for once in his miserable life—shut the fuck up about it.

What we suspected about Butler was never a conspiracy theory—it was an actual conspiracy.

He monetized it, naturally. Man Child von Griftsalot never met a tragedy he couldn’t exploit with a merch line. Fundraising began immediately. The unwashed rubes who date their cousins and can’t afford their child support payments fell all over themselves to send him more money. $5 here, $3 there. It all adds up and ends up lining his pockets, not those of the smooth-brained mouth-breathers who wear bald eagle, American flag, mayonnaise-stained t-shirts, otherwise known as the MAGA faithful.

Had someone actually tried to kill him, had he actually bled, he would never have shut the fuck up about it.

You know it, I know it, and he knows it, too.

For all his stupidity—his staggering, flabbergasting stupidity—Trump understood that getting away with it clean was the win. “Clean” meant “clean for him,” not for anyone else. Besides, Trump “honored” the man who was killed, Corey Comperatore, the following week at the RNC in Milwaukee by claiming to have the deceased firefighter’s jacket and helmet displayed onstage (which Trump walked over to and awkwardly kissed) only there was one problem—it wasn’t Comperatore’s jacket, because where an emergency responder’s name appears on the back of the jacket, Comperatore’s surname appeared misspelled as “Compertore.” Speaking of the victims’ families, Trump said they were “serious Trumpsters and still are, but Corey, unfortunately, we have to use the past tense.”

How crass. Classic Trump.

Trump’s televised appearances continued for weeks with that absurd oversized Maxi-Pad on his ear, and his brain-dead supporters—collectively possessing an IQ lower than the average person’s shoe size—dutifully wore bandages on their own ears in solidarity, because nothing says “this was a legit assassination attempt” quite like cult members coordinating matching ear bandage costumes. Meanwhile, Trump was photographed multiple times glad-handing the scumbags who hang out at Mar-a-Lago, conspicuously bandage-free. I guess staying in character 24/7 is hard.

Two years on, we’re no closer to a straight answer on any of this, but just as you don’t need to stick your hand in a fire to know it burns, we know what Butler was—an elaborate staged production in which things got out of hand.

It was, as Trump claims anything true to be, a hoax—another con pulled off by a lifelong con man. His followers bought it—hook, line, and sinker.

It was bullshit.

Fast forward to this past Saturday.

The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was being held at the Washington Hilton, or the “Hinckley Hilton” as it’s nicknamed after John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan outside the same hotel in 1981. The regime’s official narrative holds that a 31-year-old mechanical engineer with a PhD in computer science—Cole Tomas Allen, of Torrance, California—plotted to assassinate not only Trump but as many cabinet members as possible. Why his manifesto specifically named Kash Patel as someone to be spared remains, for the moment, one of the evening’s more interesting unanswered questions.

Details continue to emerge about the security that was, or more accurately, wasn’t, in place that night. Regardless of details, Allen never got within earshot of Trump (see what I did there?) much less close enough to shoot him or anyone else. Secret Service agents reportedly fired at Allen five times and missed every shot. The regime claims Allen shot a Secret Service agent, striking his bulletproof vest, but independent reporting now contradicts that, suggesting the agent was hit by friendly fire from a colleague—which, if true, is the kind of embarrassing operational incompetence that raises its own set of questions.

The staged-event calls came fast, and I made them too. As with Butler, things don’t add up. But unlike Butler, the degree of incongruence isn’t even close — and the most telling difference is how much we were immediately told about Cole Allen. Compare that to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the alleged Butler gunman about whom we still know virtually nothing two years later, and the contrast is stark enough to raise the question of whether or not they learned from Butler’s mistakes—that a total information blackout breeds more suspicion than it prevents and so, they deliberately overcorrected?

Maybe.

Are there people out there who hate Trump enough to die trying to kill him?

Obviously, yes.

However, it strains credulity that someone with a PhD and a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory internship on their résumé would execute a plan this badly, but rage has a way of making fools of brilliant people and a decision to attempt political assassination isn’t a logical one—it’s a desperate external expression of an internal emotional detonation to which even the best and brightest among us aren’t immune.

So, regardless of whether or not this was another bullshit assassination attempt, the ending is the same. The fascist opportunists are going to use this to get what they want. What’s worse than that, and mark my words, they will find a way to use this against us.

Within hours of the incident, right on cue, the congressional lapdogs were stampeding over each other to get in front of cameras and declare the ballroom Trump has spent years fantasizing about an “urgent matter of national security.”

Lindsey Graham—who has never once in his life missed an opportunity to genuflect before his orange messiah—threw a press conference together faster than he can “slip into something a little more comfortable,” if you know what I mean. Flanked by fascist senators Katie Britt (R-AL) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO), the Divine Lady G announced $400 million in proposed federal funding for Trump’s ballroom. The same ballroom, by the way, that last year on the campaign trail, Trump claimed he’d pay for himself. And that is also the same ballroom that two months ago Trump claimed would be paid for by private donations.

Funny how things like this always have a way of happening with Trump.

Every Republican politician, pundit, and podcaster took the same cue and flooded the zone in unison, demanding $400 million of taxpayer money—your money—for Trump’s ballroom, posthaste, zero debate.

To hell with hungry kids in this country. Fuck the sick peons who don’t have health insurance. The millions upon millions of struggling Americans who can barely get by? According to Trump and Republicans, they can all eat shit.

Nothing else matters. Donald Trump needs his ballroom.

Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana said that it was “an embarrassment to the strongest nation on earth that we cannot host gatherings in our nation’s capital...without the threat of violence.”

If these rat-fucking, spineless weasels got even the teeniest, tiniest taste of what it feels like to fear for their lives, they wasted no time making sure it never happens again — demanding $400 million in public funds to erect a gaudy, fortified fortress from which they can safely watch an 80-year-old diapered pedophile eat Big Macs and shit himself, insulated at last from the violence they’ve spent their entire careers refusing to take seriously when it was happening to everyone else.

As always, when the safety of rich white men is threatened, when they are afraid for their lives, no action is too swift, no sum too obscene, no legislative priority too urgent.

Remember this the next time little kids are slaughtered in their classroom and these same subhuman pigs offer nothing more than their useless goddamned thoughts and prayers.