Ok so here are the strange elements:

1. The decision not to secure the roof goes against all common sense and normal procedure. The roof was close enough to be an ideal sniper position, and you don’t need to be a sniper, a combat veteran or a ballistics expert to know that.

2. The explanation that it was a sloping roof is absurd. The slope was very slight anyway, and posed no danger to fit security teams whose job, anyway, is to risk danger themselves in order to protect a target.

3. Crowd witnesses spotted the shooter and notified security. How was that not responded to?

4. Reports and footage seem to indicate the shooter was in the sights of the SS or law enforcement for some time. How come that didn’t result in action against the shooter until after he was firing?

5. Lack of action when you have a shooter in sight means either a pre-existing order not to engage, an instruction not to engage, or a trained security team deciding not to notify anyone higher up the chain AND not to engage an identified threat. Do any of those reactions make sense?

6. Prior calls from Democrats to remove Trump’s SS protection suggest a desire for such an event to occur and Trump to be without protection when it does occur.

7. The reactions of the team when on the podium with Trump and getting him to his vehicle don’t look like the reactions of a highly trained team. The Melissa McCarthy looking agent looks confused, frightened and incompetent in multiple ways. Several of the female agents seem to be acting as if they don’t know what they are doing. Again, you don’t have to be a security expert to spot things like struggling to holster a pistol or fiddling with sunglasses or cowering behind the target you are supposed to be protecting.

8. If access to the roof was via a large ladder, that made the actions of the shooter all the more obvious. Again, why wasn’t that spotted and reacted to?

9. The claim that a building is secured just by going into it, without looking at the roof, is another obviously absurd explanation.

10. Reports now indicate that the security team were aware of the shooter on the roof for 30 minutes. That’s a damning length of time with no action taken.

All of these errors represent decision points that are pretty basic. You can only make ALL of these errors from gross incompetence. But some of these errors must have been decisions made prior to the event, or decisions made higher up the chain of command during the event.

In other words, it’s bad planning as well as bad reactions in the moment. It’s higher up, as well as on the ground, decision making that goes against what you would think all security service training and normal procedure demands.

You don’t need to hire the shooter if you DECIDE to provide a very poor level of protection. If you cut corners or don’t do basic things because the people in charge don’t like the person being protected. That’s setting that person up to be killed, even if it’s not an actual conspiracy to kill him.

I’m as far from being a security expert as it’s possible to get. I’ve only fired live ammo once in my life. I have no military training. I’m unfit. I’m not even very good at shooting people in video games. But I can say this. I know a bloody nearby roof needs to be secured, and if I was looking at a strange guy on a roof with a gun for thirty minutes I might consider him a threat that needs dealing with BEFORE he starts shooting people.

Because I’m not retarded. You have to be retarded to leave that roof unchecked and not respond to people telling you there’s a guy on that roof. Or there has to be another explanation like you haven’t been given the personnel you need to do it. Which would be ANOTHER decision higher up the chain designed to set up a successful assassination. There are of course reports that Trump’s team requested more security, and were declined.

My view is that even if they didn’t have any involvement with the shooter, the people in charge didn’t want to expend normal effort or follow normal procedures to protect Donald Trump, because they hate Donald Trump. Even without a conspiracy to kill, there’s a bias there, a petty malice, that made them slapdash, lazy, and recklessly unprofessional. Not necessarily in the team immediately around Trump, but in the command decisions and operations decisions made higher up.

That isn’t just a matter of incompetence. It’s a matter of malice. Like a cop on a beat hearing screams from a house and deciding not to investigate because he’s had previous interactions there and doesn’t like the occupants. Sure, him going for a coffee and a doughnut instead is incompetent. But it’s also a decision. A decision that takes malice.

There is no way this level of separate and glaring errors, errors obvious even to anyone of us with zero training, should occur without decision makers being held accountable for it and losing their jobs. If it was anyone other than Donald Trump, if it was a senior Democrat, there would already have been senior resignations or sackings.

Am I wrong?