Can’t kill pussy. I wasn’t surprised when I heard the news. Another crazy person trying to kill the former president? Must be Sunday. The paranoia’s in the air, now, and on some level we probably all felt it coming. But I was surprised by how quickly we pivoted from this second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and “the price of violent rhetoric,” back to cat memes.

Sure, following the attempted assassination there was plenty of block-and-tackle from Kamala’s unofficial PR team, which we colloquially refer to as “the press.” TIME, for example, insisted it wasn’t clear the would-be shooter — a registered Democrat with a Biden / Harris bumper sticker on the back of his truck, and a highly-public life on social media where he shared his eerily robotic anti-Trump opinions (including such actual famous DNC bangers as “democracy is on the ballot”) — was a registered Democrat with a Biden / Harris bumper sticker on the back of his truck. Might this man, who just tried to kill Trump, be voting for Trump? Maybe! And yes, after a (very) brief spell of respectable Sunday coverage from MSNBC, network operatives argued the real culprit here was Trump’s own rhetoric, a perspective echoed by CNN, as well as the New York Times, which produced a story on Trump’s history of violent rhetoric that quickly dominated the major news networks. Here, the Times skirted the media’s years-long, earnest insistence, parroted from DNC leadership, that Trump is attempting to dissolve democracy and seize the country in a Hitleresque dictatorship — an act of treason punishable in this country by death — and implicitly argued he kinda / sorta had it coming given a violent culture he himself produced. By Tuesday morning, the perspective that Trump was mostly himself responsible for assassination attempts on Trump’s life had coalesced into the dominant media narrative. But on some level anchors seemed to understand that this perspective tends to strike the average person as totally insane, and so they once again retreated, as if hypnotized, as if mesmerized, to the subject of Haitians eating cats.

As early as Monday morning, less than 24 hours after the attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential candidate, almost every major media outlet (CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post) concurrently covered, with front page prominence directly beside news of the shooter, a week-old disinformation story: Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were not, they insisted, eating cats. CBS directly followed their morning news segment on the second attempted Trump assassination with continued coverage of the memes, implying, by my ear, some kind of link between the two. Over the following 24 hours, through Tuesday morning, the link was made explicit — on both MSNBC, and, to a lesser but still consistent degree, CNN. Did I miss a memo?