Wilson took his shot… but missed!

An American Allegory Part 2: Why I’m back on the Trump train, and why he may now get the sequel that Gatsby never got.

In April 2023, the lawfare apparatus of the establishment swung into action against Donald J. Trump, having tried for eight years, and ultimately failed, to cancel him through character assassination.

At this time I wrote a whimsical essay titled The Great Trumpsby – An American Allegory: The remarkable parallel of Donald Trump and Jay Gatsby in which (over-simplistically, I thought at the time) I likened Trump to Gatsby, Tom Buchannan to the US/globalist establishment, and the narrator, Nick Carraway, to us – the hopeful onlookers, who dare to believe our world may yet return to a place both of reason and of simpler, purer idealism.

Gatsby’s embodiment of the American Dream was, I argued, mirrored in Donald Trump – in their enigmatic rise and swift, subsequent fall, but more importantly in the somewhat naïve but compellingly romantic belief, harboured by both men, that they could turn back the clock, and repeat an idealised former time; a sentiment immortalised in the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

In this essay I wrote:

As the machine gears up to crush Trump once and for all we ask ourselves if Donald Trump will get to complete his story arc and write the sequel that poor old Gatsby never got. We ask ourselves, is it even possible, not only to repeat the victory of 2016, but to return the Western world to a place of pragmatism, prosperity, decency? Or has America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, retreated into such vast carelessness as to stake this final roll of the dice instead on the crumbling, cancerous edifice of the Liberal World Order? Is the soul of America still intact?

I did not know at the time that there would be another, yet more analogous chapter to this story, and that my flawed metaphor would eventually be granted a neat little conclusion – but one that ultimately departs from the tragedy of Gatsby.

“It is not important who Wilson represents in our analogy,” I wrote in The Great Trumpsby, “– pick your functional organ of American national life: the intelligence agencies; the media; the Democratic Party ... What matters is – Gatsby threatened Tom’s control of Daisy, Tom used his status to manipulate Wilson, and Wilson put an end to Gatsby.”

For indeed, my analogy was then imperfect, and Wilson to me simply represented the many tentacles of the state, then fixing to imprison the former president and prevent him from running again in 2024.

But Wilson now has a name in my fanciful little saga: Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Last Sunday, as those of us behind the westwardly advancing sun awoke to the news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Andrew Tate posted on X:

“Remember what I told you. You get three lives. First they cancel you. Then they try and put you in jail. If they both fail. They kill you.”

Tate was hardly alone in his prescience, and countless other high profile commentators (and many millions of commoners aside) have been predicting for months now that this bullet was incoming, including Tucker Carlson.

But what a remarkable parallel it is that can now be drawn between the character of Wilson and Thomas Matthew Crooks – the snivelling weakling, the struggling loner, so very easily manipulated and maneuvered by the The Machine which, I again remind you, I analogised in the character of Tom Buchannan in The Great Gatsby.

“I told him the truth,” [Tom] said [speaking of Wilson]. “He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in, he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house—” He broke off defiantly. “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.”

“That fellow had it coming to him,” Tom says, and here, in his above justification to Nick Carraway following Wilson’s murder of Gatsby, we see again mirrored the pronouncements and prodding of the establishment for the past nine years.

Whether Crooks was ‘acting alone’ and simply goaded by the propaganda machine into the action he took on 13 July, or whether he was recruited and resourced by the same intelligence and paramilitary actors that we now know were responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy is irrelevant.

For the record, I entirely believe this to have been orchestrated by the state, and that Crooks was simply the last link in a long chain of conspirators potentially leading all the way back to the White House, and certainly involving the big monied interests who sit behind it and pull the strings of the current presidency.

But even if one takes the view that Crooks was merely a deranged maniac, driven insane by the relentless media attacks on Trump since 2015, the analogy of Wilson stands: A weak and unstable individual, used as a pawn by a powerful elite (either through direct compulsion or cunning innuendo) as the trigger man to accomplish what it could not affect through defamation and legal chicanery.

My analogy of 15 months ago is thus complete, and we now know who Wilson is.

There is of course one crucial difference: While Wilson’s bullet hit its target, Crooks’s projectile missed, by a mere centimetre to be sure, and not without drawing blood. In the novel, Gatsby’s lifeless body floats on an inflatable mattress in his swimming pool amid a cluster of autumn leaves, revolving around “like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.”

The vermilion streaks that punctuate the images which emerged from Butler Pennsylvania last weekend could not tell a more antipodal story – departing from the tragedy of The Great Gatsby and coalescing resolutely around the novel’s other core theme: Hope.

Readers may have noted my general avoidance of the topic of Donald Trump these past few years. I’ve dedicated only one essay to him and made only passing mention elsewhere. This is partially because there is so much coverage of the man that I’ve generally felt there is little I can add, but moreover because I have, since 2020, been somewhat sceptical about his salience as what many millions view as our political salvation. And I am forever saying, put not your trust in princes.

Trump’s achievements in his first term, some of his policies, some of the people he placed in his immediate entourage, and most of all his complicity in the COVID ‘vaccine’ rollout and subsequent ambivalence on the topic have all given me cause to distrust him.

And while I am still not convinced that he alone can save us from the woke globalist onslaught, all of that changed on 13 July 2024, and I am now back on the Trump train.

Put quite simply, and as I remarked to a friend this past week (a fellow who, like many others, does not like Trump and does not want to see him in office, yet still characterised his bloody rise from the floor of the podium, and defiant raised fist as “a BOSS move”)…

Anyone who the CIA is trying to kill, is most likely on my side.

It’s been a dark year and I’ve had my fill of grief, doubt, and pessimism. I’m ready to indulge in a little hope. And nothing inspires hope, defiance, and, in Trump’s own words, “FIGHT” like the above image.

Will Donald Trump now get to complete his story arc and write for himself the sequel that poor old Gatsby never got? Will his reach extend across that foggy gulf which Gatsby could not bridge and finally grasp “the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”?

I wonder what Gatsby’s sequel would have looked like? Or his alternate ending, more accurately put. Would Wilson’s failed assassination attempt have jolted Daisy back to her senses, out of Tom’s clutches and back into the arms of her lover? Would the book’s fragile theme of hope instead trump the grim motif of tragedy?

At the conclusion to The Great Trumpsby I left readers guessing as to whom Daisy represented in my American allegory, suggesting that I’d already revealed the answer within the body of the essay. I no longer see any utility in this coyness and so shall reveal that she, of course, is emblematic of the soul of America.

And the question remains: Is the soul of America still intact?

We shall find out, come November – further tragic turns in the road notwithstanding.

As the crumbling mask of the Liberal World Order continues to slip, laying bare the grotesque creatures who have for so many decades masqueraded as our great and benevolent benefactors, it only remains to once more quote Nick Carraway’s words to his friend Gatsby on the morning that his gunman came for him:

“They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”