Will Chump shooting mute any open criticism of him as a rapist and a pedo?

[Metaphorical]

19. Giving enough rope

This week should be interesting. Trump with a large bandage plastered on one ear (maybe tied with gauze around his forehead) is not a good look, no matter how this plays out. Trump with a whole ear is not going to play well either.

I'm not too worried about the ad stop for the moment - it would have happened anyway given the conventions, as money is funnelled into those conventions instead as a running ad.

The Republicans have not, lately, staged terribly good conventions. They tend to have a tin ear (sorry couldn't resist) when it comes to reaching out to anyone BUT their base, and even there, the move towards the left is being met by very fierce resistance by the far right (especially the religious right). Epstein is out there, the convictions are out there, Trump's cognitive decline is out there, and Project 2025 is beginning to become disseminated, despite every attempt to stop it. The fact that the shooter was a registered Republican is out there as well (likely one of those things that got missed in the planning, if it wasn't what it appears on the surface). None of this is good news for Trump. The media's obvious bias in the last few weeks is also coming back to haunt them, and the possibility that they could end up losing viewers permanently at a time when viewership is shrinking anyway has to be factoring into the political calculus.

There comes a point in a con when you have too many spinning plates, and when that happens, crockery tends to get broken in a dramatic fashion. The deceptions become more and more obvious, because you don't have the resources to put together elaborate ones anymore, and you lose credibility in bits and chunks. When you look at questions about credibility, nobody believes Trump anymore beyond his MAGA cultists. Everyone is worried about Biden's age, but from every indication I've seen Biden is fine - my take on it is that he's dealing with side effects of the treatment for sleep apnea, something I know a lot about, and yes, he's at the point where he's losing muscle mass, which is typical for people in their 80s.

Here's my guess - RNC convention is going to be a sh*tshow. They don't have an agenda that they can talk about, there is dissension in their ranks, tthey have Donnie Boy siphoning off funds for his own legal defense (illegally, most likely) and their fearless leader is going to be walking around with a bandage on his ear. Nicky Hailey is grudgingly being allowed to speak, and after she was so summarily dismissed by Trump, she may very well not be at all interested in playing nice. I can't see Trump backing a VP candidate that might very well challenge him (especially if president for life is in the cards), which means that the #2 slot is likely going to be even more extreme than Trump, but who is also going to be very subservient.

What that means in practice is that it's not going to move the needle much, one way or another. It's possible that something else may happen in the Republican's favor, but its hard to imagine what at this point.

The DNC Convention may prove a different matter. For all that there may be attempts in the press to paint the Dems as divided, there is no obvious Democratic alternative who isn't already Kamela Harris. There is no Bernie Sanders this time around. The Dems do generally put on a good show, and it gives a chance for them to compare and contrast their record against the Republicans, to show a much more unified front, and to paint a much more hopeful picture of the future. Inflation has moderated, jobs are available, people are generally better off, the stock market is up dramatically. It's getting harder for Netenyahu to prosecute the war in Isreal, and Ukraine is holding their own against the Russsians. This is the opportunity for the Democratic community to make the case to their public, and especially if the RNC convention goes as sideways as I think i will, this should shift the balance of the race.

One final point - what if it had been Biden rather than Trump there yesterday, with a Republican shooter. Would it make much of a difference in the race? Probably not. If it had been an ardent leftist, this might have been different, but i think that Trump the Hero is going to get old VERY quickly, especially because he didn't do anything especially heroic here - indeed, he was basically a victim. That's not playing well with the narrative of Trump the invincible, and it also showcases that there are people even of his own party who are willing to commit suicide because they think the man is vile.