This week saw former President Trump take to the stage at the Republican National Convention where he was even introduced by former wrestling star Hulk Hogan, which made a change from last weekend which almost saw an appearance by The Undertaker. This followed a week where the media tried to unpick the mess of that happened at the Trump Rally and the likes of CNN and the BBC realised that Trump is very likely likely to be in the White House for the next 4 years. Of course, for many people he also lives rent-free in their head, all the time, with ludicrous hyperbole being bandied around. If I counted the number of counterbalanced opinions I'd heard on the likes of Radio 4, you could do it on one hand, even if your hand had been horribly injured in an industrial accident

In the meantime conspiracy theorists from both sides have suggested a number of theories about what really happened, from the deep state trying to assassinate him, to Mr Trump staging it all himself. Certainly if it were all a TV show then it would be getting fantastic ratings by now going into the season finale in November. Maybe the final episode would have a plot twist where the Chinese start a war in Africa and Joe Biden demands that someone ask Nelson Mandela to do something, and it's also revealed that he's unable to remember any of the launch codes.

It is remarkable that having looked at the conspiracy evidence, you're left with the horrible realisation that one of two things must be true: either the secret service either planned it all, or they were just remarkably incompetent beyond anything that would be conceivably forgivable. Apparently the snipers nest was never investigated, even when they were repeatedly warned about a weird gunman being up there, because the sloped roof posed a health and safety violation for the agents. After the attack you see the agents struggling to get their guns out of their holsters, many of them were overweight and unfit for the role and there's a lot of talk about them simply being diversity hires and being put on the Trump team, rather than risk having them around the actual President. Perhaps that's true, and if so then I feel sorry for them: being over-promoted into a role they're completely incapable of doing and then being put on public display to be ridiculed when they mess up.

One of the more compelling arguments in favour of a conspiracy would be the money trail, huge amounts of money were placed on short selling the Trump Social shares the day before, almost as if someone knew something was going to happen to him, and then there's the timing of it all: if Trump had been successfully bumped off then with just 2 days to go to the Republican Convetion, senior people in the party could have done a deal behind closed doors and put anyone they wanted on the ticket. There's also an interesting case to be made about the lady with sunglasses who sat behind Trump, filmed it all on an iphone and has not come forward since. Many are claiming it's Janeen DiGuiseppi, assistant director of the FBI and the resemblance is pretty uncanny.

Or perhaps the secret service are just another branch of the government and as such are about as useless as you'd expect. If it takes months to renew a passport or to get the city to aprove a building permit, why would you expect a government team tasked with guarding Trump from assailants to be any more compitant?