Trump Assassination Attempt Forecast in 2023 Book: "Our Country, Then and Now"

“Shadow Men” Implicated

By Richard C. Cook

July 14, 2024

Former President Donald Trump escaped death by an inch or less at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the evening of Sunday, July 13, 2024. Trump was winged in the right upper ear by gunfire from the roof of a nearby building. The shooter was shot and killed by Secret Service snipers but not before Trump and two bystanders were wounded and another killed.

Trump, with blood on his face, was whisked away by his Secret Service detail after raising his fist and shouting defiance. He is due to receive the Republican Party nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week. Trump’s wound appeared to be superficial, and his campaign affirmed that he will attend.

The mainstream media spoke tentatively about the seriousness of the incident and did not label it as an assassination attempt until it was designated as such by the FBI. The Secret Service issued a perfunctory acknowledgement of what took place while saying nothing about how a shooter armed with a rifle got so close to the event stage. Two eye-witnesses appeared on camera stating they had alerted nearby police about the shooter’s presence.

Pro-Trump commentators quickly pointed to the vituperative speech that has been directed against the former president in recent weeks by his Democratic Party adversaries, including President Joe Biden’s call to place Trump in a “bulls-eye.” As time passes, ever more emphasis is bound to be placed on the interminable efforts by Democrats to get rid of Trump, including the two impeachment attempts while he held office and the massive “lawfare” assault of recent months.

So far, Trump has been hit with a questionable conviction for so-called felonies in New York City, though the cases against him there and elsewhere look increasingly shaky due to recent Supreme Court rulings affirming limited immunity for actions taken while in office.

But the larger issue remains that the assault against Trump began long ago, even before he took office in January 2017 after defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

We are all now familiar with the fake “Russiagate” narrative Clinton’s campaign cooked up during the election campaign, but the ultimate responsibility for that particular pack of lies has never been sufficiently disclosed.

In my book Our Country, Then and Now, released by Clarity Press in October 23, I call attention to a remarkable article published by Indian journalist/scholar Madhav Nalapat. On January 22, 2017, Nalapat published an article in the Sunday Guardian-India entitled, “Shadow Men Work to Remove President Trump.”

Among Nalapat’s disclosures was the existence of a 1,000-day plan for Trump’s removal. Note that Nalapat wrote only two days after Trump’s 2017 inauguration. He states that the plan centered on Trump’s removal via impeachment on what would be essentially bogus charges. Amazingly, Trump was actually impeached by the House of Representatives 1,057 days into his term of office, almost precisely on schedule!

Following is the entire section on the Shadow Men from my book Our Country, Then and Now. Read it and draw your own conclusions about who are the people acting behind the scenes in what is now an eight-year conspiracy to get rid of Trump, evidently culminating in yesterday’s gunfire in Butler, Pennsylvania.

From "Our Country, Then and Now" (Clarity Press 2023).

Shadow Men

What we shall call the “Shadow Men” are those who sit atop the Deep State pulling strings on behalf of the ultimate heavies—the financial controllers and those who rule them….

On January 22, 2017, a curious article appeared in the Sunday Guardian-India entitled, “Shadow Men Work to Remove President Trump.” The author was a highly-placed Indian academic and journalist, Madhav Nalapat.

Nalapat states that his sources were knowledgeable individuals “based in Chicago, Washington, New York, and London.” Nalapat writes, only two days after Trump’s inauguration:

“If the plans activated since November 8, 2016 [election day], by the Shadow Men succeed, the 45^th President of the United States will not last in office beyond a thousand days from his swearing-in on January 20, 2017. The term Shadow Men refers to officials and policymakers operating in a stealthily coordinated manner to ensure the furtherance of specific agendas unrelated to the public interest….They represent the hitherto ubiquitous and dominant Wall Street-Atlanticist alliance that has devised and implemented policy in Washington for several decades. These Shadow Men form an informal club of intelligence operatives, businesspersons, officials, and politicians whose relevance to policymaking and whose monetary wealth depend on the continuation of policies helpful to the interests they support, even though these may be harmful to the country they belong to.”

Of course, the existence of a cabal like the “informal club” described by Nalapat has long been suspected by observers of the American scene. A certain amount of flesh was put on the bones of suspicion by Professor Carroll Quigley in The Anglo-American Establishment. Nalapat continues:

“Individuals with direct knowledge of the ‘1,000-day plan’…warn that January 20, 2017, marked not just Donald J. Trump’s first day in office as the 45^th US President, but the acceleration of an ongoing campaign that has been designed to ensure that President Trump ‘does not continue in the world’s most powerful job for more than a thousand days.’”

Nalapat describes the planned mechanism for getting rid of Trump:

“According to individuals revealing details of the 1,000-day ouster plan, ‘the preferred route is a steady increase in public pressure, which would lead to the 45^th President’s impeachment by the US Congress on the basis of presumed misdemeanors. These would be played up by media persons, who regularly get briefed by officials active in the shadow network….It was explained that the Shadow Men are apprehensive that the strong-willed billionaire may refuse to get house-trained in the manner that Hillary Clinton so transparently was. In their view, the role of an elected head of state is in many aspects ceremonial, and on matters of national security and strategy, he or she should, in essence, follow the agenda set for him by the interests represented and protected by the Shadow Men.’”

President Donald Trump was impeached by the US House of Representatives on December 13, 2019. This was 1,057 days after Trump’s inauguration, almost exactly on the Shadow Men’s timetable that Nalapat reveals. Like so much else that was going on at the time, the impeachment also revolved around Ukraine and Russia, with Trump supposedly soliciting Ukrainian President Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden.

Trump fought back by going on Twitter. Trump called the impeachment inquiry “a coup.” He said it was intended “to take away the power of [the] people, their vote, [and] their freedoms" and that the Democrats were “wasting everyone's time and energy on bullshit.” He said: “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here—a lynching! But we will WIN!”

In House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff’s opening argument at Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, he chastised Trump for abusing the US relationship with Ukraine by citing a statement from a witness at the House impeachment inquiry: “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” Thus the impeachment attempt had a close relationship to the fear-mongering of “Russiagate.”

But the impeachment failed. Trump was acquitted in the Senate on February 5, 2020, and continued in office.

Nalapat continues:

“Although media reports claim that US intelligence agencies are hostile to the just sworn-in President, ‘in actual fact most within the middle layers (of these agencies) are supportive of his (Trump’s) views,” with only the politically-connected higher levels signing on to the 1,000-day agenda now in the process of being implemented. The sources say that the new head of state of the world’s most powerful country “has an astonishing amount of goodwill within the operational level of the investigative and intelligence agencies.’”

From Nalapat’s final paragraph:

“Given the pervasive influence of businesses dependent on China and the Middle East in Washington, a key objective of the Shadow Men is to ensure that the Enemy Number One slot remains with Moscow and its allies such as Iran and not migrate to Beijing or to Saudi Arabia. Another is to ensure that the interests of Wall Street and the Atlantic Alliance continue to be given primacy in US policy. The worry of the Shadow Men is that a US President ‘who has yet to be house trained by the bureaucracy the way Barack Obama was in his very first week as President of the United States, and who has over three decades developed strong and consistent views on geopolitics and on economics over decades’ of careful cogitation [i.e., Trump] may succeed in shifting US policy away from the Wall Street-Atlanticist embrace that has been the norm since the 1980s. ‘Trillions of dollars are at stake, so there is nothing to get surprised about that tens of millions have been spent these past months on ensuring that the agenda of the Wall Street-Atlanticist alliance continues to be official US policy,’ a source said, adding that ‘President Trump represents the most potent threat to such interests in two generations.’”

On the bright side, they didn’t do to Trump what an earlier generation of Shadow Men did to John F. Kennedy. At least not yet.

This concludes the excerpt from "Our Country, Then and Now."

In conclusion, I would like to state the obvious: The Shadow Men have not given up on trying to get rid of Donald Trump. But on July 13, 2024, he once again appears to have escaped their clutches.

I, for one, am immensely grateful. I say this not as a Trump partisan but simply for the sake of human decency and for the sake of the woeful state of the beleaguered American republic.

Richard C. Cook is a co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute.  Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle, documenting his story in his book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an advisor to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023.

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also see the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.