I'm Spanking My Crappy Inner Buddhist For Wishing Tommy Had Aimed Better

Would you shoot Hitler if you could? What if Biden is the one who will bring ruin? What if a Trump victory means some American lives will be saved?

From X

I have to wonder what Donald Trump’s mental state will be like from now on: The man survived an assassination attempt and for the want of two inches, might be dead.

Trump was one tortured individual before this happened, and in need of constant distraction from annoying cycling ‘bad thoughts’, at least so say those close to him.

Whether you’ve done Buddhist or emotional intelligence work on yourself or not, you must know what the ‘bad thoughts’ are. They’re those unresolved demons that regularly cycle in our head, torturing us:

I really hate my father! I really hate my father! He’s such a monster! I really hate him! He’s such a monster…!

Now people want to kill Donald Trump. I wonder if his thought cycles turn this way now: What if there is a hell awaiting the unrepentant sinner?

I like pondering Trump’s inner life more than my own because I’m struggling with my own bad thought.

Shit! If only Thomas Matthew Crooks had shot two inches closer to the left!

My inner Crappy Buddhist needs a time-out.

Would you kill Hitler?

If we decry the historically more-prone-to-violence right, then how can we justify wishing someone, dammit, would please just take out someone else we fear? Didn’t Crooks practice enough?

I’ve said over the years, sometimes holding my metaphorical nose, that I wouldn’t wish assassination even on Donald Trump. We don’t have the right to kill others based on what they might do. (How Minority Report!) I was a baby during JFK’s murder, and I don’t remember Martin Luther King’s, but I do remember Bobby Kennedy’s, which was traumatic for a five-year-old grappling with a stranger who shoots a father for no comprehensible reason. I’ve lived through two attempts on Gerald Ford’s life and one near-miss on Ronald Reagan’s.

It’s not okay to wish for it. It really isn’t. On a higher spiritual level, we must aspire to rise above our tribalist, animalistic impulses. Allowing negative, hostile thoughts juice our own cycling thoughts and keep us depressed and dangerously angry. If we can put aside the hysterical rhetoric for a moment, Donald Trump may be many things, but he ain’t Hitler.

He shares many personality traits with Hitler, as I wrote last year, but so do many others who aren’t Nazis or wannabe mass murderers. Being an otherwise useless, incompetent little narcissist is a trait many share, most of whom never stumble upon the narrow little window of opportunity in which one is enabled to maleficent ‘greatness’. At least for awhile, by the cultural zeitgeist and power-mongers smarter than they, and for whom they serve as a useful idiot because the moronic masses like him, they really like him!

If you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler? I pondered that in an as-yet unpublished novel I’ve written about a modern woman transplanted back to the summer of 1968 who hopes to change history and prevent 9/11, when her twin brother died. She considers all the problems inherent in considering how many lives you alter, how many will live and who now won’t, because maybe the Nazis unwittingly killed some mass murderers or, who knows, the next Hitler. Maybe the Jewish protagonist is alive, her hippie friend with whom she engages this question suggests, because some poor bastard who died at Auschwitz might have lived to kill her, or maybe his son would have.

Finally I said, “So you don't think it would be a good idea to go back in time and alter history, so that World War II never starts?”

He slowly turned his head and opened his eyes. Which were needle-thin slits. “If you had special information that could save sixty million lives right now, would you give it to whoever could stop the deaths?”

Of course she would, she replies. I played out my own arguments while writing the conversation, because I myself wasn’t completely sure of the righteous consequences of saving sixty million WWII deaths. Who in the future might not be born? Maybe even myself, even if somehow saving sixty million lives now saved some truly bad actors.

It would be much easier to justify travelling back in time to kill Trump if history proved his second term was a massive disaster resulting in the deaths or abject misery of millions of people. But not so much today, especially with the knowledge that liberal hysterics about what his first term would be like didn’t result in the end of democracy or free elections.

A recent article in The Free Press about the assassination attempt, and how attempts and successful hit jobs changed the world, notes that, “So central was Hitler’s worldview and decision-making to the war and to the Holocaust that his death at any juncture between 1933 and 1944 would surely have changed the course of history.”

How different might America be today if Bobby Kennedy Sr. had gotten elected President rather than Nixon? My old boyfriend and I used to ponder this and other deep questions on his apartment front stoop on warm summer nights. How different might America be today without Watergate?

Thomas Crooks did in fact alter history—it’s now all but assured Trump will win, unless the Democrats can convince Sylvester Stallone to replace Biden.

(Except he’s a Republican.)

For better or for worse, here comes the Trumpocalypse. Again.

It’s easier to look back on history with the certainty of an accidental time traveller and say, “Save sixty million people? Piece o’ cake!” than it is to look at the world today and be oh-so-certain bumping off Hitler or Trump will solve all your country’s problems.

Maybe Biden, or some other candidate who will ultimately replace him, would be the one who started the nuclear war. Or devastated the country somehow. Maybe with another tidal wave of unfiltered, unmonitored immigrants. Goddess knows Biden’s done untold damage to the U.S. with his open-door policy. Even I will breathe a sigh of relief when Trump shuts the doors and deports illegals. Let’s see how much the crime rate goes down, shall we? How many American lives will be saved once the criminals are sent home? Or prevented from entering during Biden, Part Deux?

Maybe you or someone you love will live because of a Trump victory.

Or maybe Crooks has sealed our fate, and Trump will destroy democracy as the hysterics claim. Never mind that dictatorships aren’t built in a day, or even eight years as one Turk who lived through a democracy-to-dictatorship scenario recounts.

Who died and made you God? Or the Ultimate Arbiter of Fates?

I don’t like my Crappy Buddhist’s inner impulse. Assassinations prevent us from seeing the road not taken.

Spoiler alert: Skip down to “Safe spoiler space” if you haven’t yet read Stephen King’s novel 11/23/63.

Last chance!

Last chance!

Last chance!

Scroll down now!

Stephen King pondered the difference in an assassin’s bullet in his novel 11/23/63, where a time traveller plans to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and does.

He expects a much better world if John F. Kennedy escapes the bullet. He returns to 2011 to discover his world now devastated by a nuclear war, the Civil Rights Bill having never passed, Jonestown incidents happening more frequently and with higher death tolls, and never-ending wars. It’s a nightmare. A mess. He realizes he has to go back in time and fix it—let Kennedy be assassinated.

Spoiler end

Spoiler end

Spoiler end

Spoiler end

Safe spoiler space!

It’s understandable to want to see Trump dead. He’s a detestable human being, if you’re not part of the cult. I feel less guilty wishing, as I did when he was President, that he killed himself with a Big Mac heart attack. It’s amazing to me he’s still alive.

I have Trump Fatigue Syndrome from all the hysterics about how he’s going to destroy everything good in the universe. I know the MAGAs are doing the same to themselves, hyperventilating over a second Biden term. They may look ridiculous to us, but Trump hysterics look equally as ridiculous to them, and I look back at the first Trump term and think, “Well, we did get through it. He didn’t destroy democracy. We had another free election despite the liberal media’s naysayers. The Republic still stood. And, we have less free speech now after four years of woke Democratic reign than when Trump left. So, like, is Trump really the only threat?”

Trump can do a LOT of damage, especially if he finishes turning the Supreme Court into a fundamentalist Christian wet dream. Project 2025 is troubling, but there are a helluva lot of courts its policies would have to clear first, and Congressional mid-terms that could throw ice water on that little wank fantasy. Of course, it’ll be interesting to see the God-based fundamentalists face off against their arch-nemeses, the woke social justice fundamentalists, who are no less authoritarian anymore, who worship DEI rather than Jesus.

I don’t think it’s our job to shoot people we think are dangerous. Trump is dangerous. So is a foggy old man surrounded by more cogent people I don’t trust any more than the MAGAs. Thomas Crooks’s established profile was as a potential school shooter; liberals would be far more condemnatory of his sharpshooting if he’d gone after Joe Biden.

Just as they shout on X far more quietly when a mass shooter is ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’ than when he leaves an online manifesto expressing emotional orgasms over far-right leaders and causes.

If it’s wrong to exult when mass shooters bump off people they don’t like—gay nightclub attendees, music lovers at a festival, blacks, Jews, Indians, or Muslims—it’s not okay when they shoot people we don’t like. Assassinating a political candidate who hasn’t yet killed lots of people, that we don’t know will ever do that, is a lot different from, theoretically, bumping off someone you know will do something truly earth-shattering.

I found myself lying in bed last Sunday morning pondering the ending of a movie I really feel compelled to watch again: David Cronenberg’s excellent 1983 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, about a man who comes out of a years-long coma to find that when he touches people he sees their future.

Absolutely don’t watch the video clip here if you haven’t seen the movie; it’s got one of the greatest plot twists ever. But it harkens to the question the protagonist faces: Dare I murder a currently innocent man?

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