The Trump Manifesto, Newsom’s Bad Trump Cosplay & The Gerrymandering Lie

Good morning from a rainy Houston, Texas. It is Beth Guide, and welcome back to Talking Purple — where I try to make sense of common again, because lately, common sense feels like a lost language.

Today’s episode is a big one. Pull up a chair, grab the coffee, because we are unpacking the latest assassination attempt on President Trump, the manifesto that should be lighting up every parent’s radar, the late-night comedians who have completely lost the plot, Gavin Newsom’s failed Trump cosplay, the SD4 special election here in our backyard, and a deep dive into what gerrymandering actually is — not what the keyboard activists on your local school board Facebook page think it is.

Buckle up.

The Trump Assassination Attempt — And the Crowd Cheering for It

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. There was another assassination attempt on President Trump, this time at the Correspondents’ Dinner. The shooter did not make it into the room, thank God. And immediately, the staged-event crowd started up again. Let me say this loud enough for the people in the back: nobody is packing up a gun, throwing away the rest of their life, and walking themselves into a federal prison cell for a staged event. That is not how this works. Use your head.

What is flying under the radar — and shouldn’t be — is that the alleged shooter is a teacher. A teacher. That means he has been in front of our kids, influencing students, day in and day out. That is a massive problem and we should be talking about it a whole lot more than we are.

Then there is the manifesto. Three words: rapist, pedophile, traitor. And here is where I want to stop and have a real conversation, because if you actually believe the President of the United States is the second coming of Hitler, that he is molesting children, that he is selling out the country — I cannot fully blame somebody for thinking they need to take matters into their own hands. That is the logical end of believing those narratives. The problem is not the guy with the gun. The problem is the machine that convinced him those things were true.

Let’s go through the three accusations like grown-ups.

Traitor. This comes from the Russia collusion story. That story has been debunked six times over. The minute they came back with hookers in a hotel room, common sense should have told everybody this was a put-up job. Smart people are still repeating it. Get out of the echo chamber and actually read both sides.

Pedophile. This one rides on Epstein. Here is my common-sense test: if Trump was meaningfully implicated in the Epstein files, the Democrats would have released them the second they had the White House. They went down every legal road they could find — convicted felon, civil cases, the whole nine — because they did not have the goods. If they had Epstein-file dynamite on him, he would have been Prince Andrew’d long before he was a candidate, never mind a President. And by the way, the Democrats should be very careful what they wish for on Epstein, because I suspect there are more of theirs in there than ours. Just look at how fast Eric Swalwell’s situation got weaponized the moment he was inconvenient.

Rapist. I had to look this one up myself. The alleged incident was supposedly between 1996 and 2002. From 1996 to 2022 — twenty-six years — Trump was on Home Alone, on Bones, on every TV show in America. Not a peep. Then a civil trial, a judge who said the charges were “similar,” and George Stephanopoulos running it down the field on national television. ABC was forced to pay out a heap of money for that little stunt. That is libel money, folks. That is not vindication of the claim — that is a judgment that ABC said something untrue.

But these accusations get plugged into the social media algorithm and repeated until they become “the truth.” That is how you end up with an educated teacher pulling a trigger.