Bullet for the President

Bullet for the President

Directed by Vladimir Soloviev (2024)

Film Review

Russian with English subtitles

For the most part this  all of this documentary consists of commentary by Retired Soviet and Russian intelligence officer Andrey Bezrukov. However Russian-American Dmitri Simes, former president of the US Center for National Interest, appears briefly at the end. *

Bezruikov, who believes the assassination attempt against Trump led Biden to drop out of the presidential race, begins with a number of general observations about US politics:

The US is a country of radical people and their politics are always radical and messy. He cites the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy and the 1982 assassination attempt on Presidential Ronald Reagan.The financial interests that currently control the US want a manageable president who does what “the system” wants them to. When JFK and Nixon didn’t do what they were told, they were removed from office. Trump has also broken “the rules of the game.”

According to Bezrukov, after the US became the sole world power, the US elite seemed to go brain dead. At present, they protect their own personal interests by installing members of their personal clique as president. Meanwhile US industry has lost its competitiveness and ability to create jobs.

In 2016, underrepresented Americans who hated the worsening corruption in Washington and had ceased to engage with the US political system, were inspired to vote for Trump after he promised to 1) focus on US domestic problems rather than interfering in other country’s domestic affairs and 2) to root out the US deep state and restore their country to an open participatory system envisioned by America’s founding fathers.

Bezrukov believes Trump practically fulfilled all his campaign promises during his first term but two: “draining the swamp” (eliminating the corruption) and improving relations with Russia. Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate smear, based on totally fabricated allegations that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election, was a major factor behind the deterioration in US-Russian relations after Trump left office.

In the second half of the film, Bezrukov analyzes the total breakdown in basic security the day (July 13, 2024) Trump was shot:

Police spotted the gunman Thomas Crooks in Trump’s security perimeter 64 minutes prior to the shooting and the Secret Service made no effort to remove him from the scene.The Secret Service failed to secure a rooftop in Trump’s security perimeter.The way the Secret Service tackled Trump immediately increased his risk of being shot by keeping him upright as a visible traget.

Bezrukov feels it’s too soon to differentiate between criminal negligence on the part of the Secret Service and a deliberate assassination conspiracy. However he clearly reject the claim that Crooks was an unstable “loner” operating on his own.

He notes that Trump was guarded by a private military company during his first campaign but the Secret Service took over his security once he was elected president in 2016. Bezrukov notes that 48% of the Secret Service were fired or resigned during the Biden presidency and it takes 3-5 years for new Secret Service officers to reach their full effectiveness.

He ends by sharing his view that, as with the Soviet economy in 1988, the US economy is on the brink of collapse. He also seems to believe (as did a lot of the people who voted for him) that Trump possibly has both the insight and courage to keep that from happening.

*Former president Richard Nixon started the US Center for National Interest in 1994 to improve US-Russian relations. Simes, its first president, stepped down in 2022 and returned to Russia. He’s currently under investigation by the US State Department for violating US sanctions against Russia.

https://en.rtdoc.tv/films/1406-bullet-for-the-president