So When Will Oliver Stone Make a Movie About the Assassination Attempts on Trump?

I haven't thought about Oliver Stone in a long time. His movies were always hit-or-miss with me. The last time I'd heard about him, it was 2005 and he was throwing a hissy fit because his supposed epic "Alexander" had just done horribly in the United States. In an interview in London, he ranted that the movie bombed because Americans are too ignorant to understand history, and that we're all raging homophobes who would never watch a movie in which a protagonist might be gay.

Sure, that must be why "As Good As It Gets" tanked, right? Or "Philadelphia." Or "Brokeback Mountain." Or "Bohemian Rhapsody." Sorry, Oliver. We didn't like your movie, not because Alexander the Great may have been gay, but because the movie flat-out sucked.

But with the two recent assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the former president and leading presidential candidate, my mind brought me back to Oliver Stone's "JFK," which I'd first watched way back yonder. For those who haven't seen it, the movie documents the actual independent investigation conducted into the Kennedy assassination by then-District Attorney of New Orleans Jim Garrison. The investigative results suggest that Kennedy was killed not by lone communist Lee Harvey Oswald but by a shadowy cabal of CIA operatives and Pentagon generals, in collusion with military weapons manufacturers, to prevent Kennedy from ending the Vietnam War in 1963.

Spoiler alert: Jim Garrison wrote "On the Trail of the Assassins," a book detailing his investigation. Garrison's case is interesting and thought provoking, but much of the "evidence" in Stone's movie can be found nowhere in Garrison's book, and is instead the product of Stone's own peyote-induced fever dreams.

Having said that, maybe Stone could do another assassination biopic. The actors and even the plot would be largely the same, i.e., a cohort of entrenched Deep State operatives doing whatever it takes, including assassination, to prevent an antiwar president from altering policies that only benefit the entrenched elites at the expense of the working class.

Here are a few plot points he could use about the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt:

1. The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was able to case the grounds the morning of the rally using a drone.
2. Crooks was spotted early on during the rally and reported to authorities as suspicious. In response, the Secret Service did nothing.
3. Crooks was able to easily gain entry to one of the only three buildings in the entire field. The building itself was completely unsecured by the feds, and Crooks was able to access the roof.
4. As he crawled across the roof into position, he was spotted by several bystanders on the ground, but somehow was missed by every Secret Service agent there. 
5. The FBI obstructed efforts of congressional investigators to examine Crooks' body and allowed it to be cremated before they were able to do so.
6. The 20-year-old Crooks had encrypted messaging accounts using various overseas platforms. As of this writing, our vaunted intelligence community is still unable to break into his accounts. Or, at any rate, that's their story, and they're sticking to it.

And here are a few plot points he could use about the West Palm Beach, Fla., attempt:

1. Trump's golf trip was unscheduled and added on at the last minute. Theoretically, very few people would have known about this schedule change. Yet Routh knew. It's not like he diverted his day by happening to drive by and notice that Trump was there. He appeared to have known about it in advance.
2. Routh knew about the unscheduled, secret trip early enough to procure a rifle and other gear, get to the golf course, set up his sniper nest, and wait for 12 hours.
3. The Secret Service failed to check, much less secure, the golf course perimeter before Trump arrived.
4. No Secret Service agents were posted along the perimeter at its most vulnerable points.
5. Routh procured an SKS-style rifle somewhere along the way. His felony weapons conviction certainly would have prevented him from purchasing one legally. His son said he had no idea his dad was in Florida, so he didn't get it from his son. Furthermore, the FBI stated that this specific weapon was not sold in Florida. So how and where did he get it?
6. Routh earned $3,000 a month, had no money in the bank, and holds no real estate assets. But he was able to buy a plane ticket from Hawaii to Florida, buy a gun, scope, and ammunition. Where did he get the money?
7. Routh was arrested driving a Nissan Xterra. The plates on the Nissan were stolen, but was the Nissan itself his? Where did he store the vehicle and gun? And if the Nissan isn't his, then whose is it?
8. Routh had six cell phones in his possession at the time of his arrest.
9. Jeffrey Veltri, the head of the FBI's Miami office, is a notorious Trump-hater who was previously ordered to take down anti-Trump posts from his social media. And it is none other than Veltri who is heading the investigation into the second assassination attempt on the man he loathes. Oliver Stone made a stink about the Warren Commission being staffed by anti-Kennedy investigators. Surely he can see the same scenario playing out now?
10. The Department of Justice released a letter written by Routh, in which he calls for others to step up and try assassinating Trump in the event that Routh himself fails. This letter holds no public value other than as a blatant incitement for additional attempts against Trump and can be read only as the Deep State green-lighting any and all said attempts.
11. Stone even has his Garrison-like figure in the person of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has zero faith in the federal government to execute a competent and objective investigation, which is still too much faith in my book. Like Garrison, he launched an independent investigation which, predictably, has been stonewalled by the feds every step of the way so far.

Are these not enough suspicious circumstances for Stone to make another assassination biopic? Here's the synopsis: A cabal of Deep State operatives conspire to peddle a false Russian collusion narrative and multi-million-dollar investigation into allegations they know are false but which effectively cripples Trump's first two years in office. The Deep State then impeaches him, twice, on false grounds. Then the Deep State first ignores the Hunter laptop scandal, then publishes a letter penned by 51 Deep State operatives declaring the scandal to be "Russian disinformation," all with the full knowledge that this was a lie.

Then, once it became clear that Trump was going to run again in 2024, the same Deep State unleashes a series of politically-driven lawsuits designed to both cripple his fledgling candidacy and to destroy the man himself as a lesson to others. Then, the Deep State raids his Mar-a-Lago home for documents in his possession that were perfectly legal.

Then, the Deep State, at best, allowed the conditions for the first assassination attempt to take place. After that plan backfired, the Deep State engineered a palace coup against its own incumbent rather than risk him losing to Trump in the election. Then the Deep State created the conditions, again, for a second assassination attempt to take place.

Gee, if I didn't know any better, I would think...

If you owe the IRS a nickel, they will hunt you down and get that nickel. If you have a puddle in your backyard that the EPA arbitrarily designates a "waterway," and you alter that puddle in any way, they'll seize your property. If you were a grandparent let into the Capitol building on January 6th to walk around and take pictures, they'll use face-recognition technology to find you, imprison you for "insurrection," and destroy your life.

The government can track every step we take, every penny we spend, and can punish every one of our decisions it deems problematic. The capabilities of the Deep State and its brutal willingness to use it to consolidate total control are vastly more powerful than they were in November 1963, the focus of Stone's "JFK."

The antagonists' motives have changed, but that's it. Instead of rabid anti-communist bureaucrats conspiring with weapons manufacturers and Cuban rebels, now we have rabid pro-communist bureaucrats conspiring with hormone treatment manufacturers and Islamic terrorists. The result is the same, i.e., a shadow government exerting its own unchecked power for its own ends, with the connivance of a compliant prop of a president. The Constitution and the will of the people be damned.

 But maybe Oliver Stone doesn't oppose the current shadow government as he did the one that allegedly seized power in 1963. Maybe, as a fanatical leftist, Stone loves the idea of uncontestable jackboot authority, just so long as it's his guys in the driver's seat. When 1963 conservatives are The Man, then The Man is bad. When 2024 deconstructionist Marxists are The Man, then The Man is good.

How sad that so many of the '60s kids who once professed themselves champions of freedom, peace, and love are now committed totalitarians of the Stalinist bent. Maybe they soured over time. Or maybe they never believed in freedom to begin with.

I don't expect this movie anytime soon from Oliver Stone. The guy seems to have run out of steam. But it's a nice idea, and the movie would surely do better with audiences than the abysmal "Alexander."