RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: We could have been spared the riots in Southport … if the British police had followed the example of the United States.

Where is Oliver Stone when you need him? The Hollywood director who made a career out of the assassination of John F. Kennedy would have a hard time understanding the recent alleged attack on Donald Trump.

Not that there was a lack of information. Quite the opposite. Within minutes of the intercepted shooter’s arrest, we knew practically everything about him, from his political views to the length of his stride.

Compare the Florida sheriff’s verbal diarrhea with the initial stubborn refusal of British authorities to reveal a single syllable about the identity and background of the man accused of the stabbings in Southport in July.

In a country that thrives on conspiracy theories, Florida law enforcement nipped any violent, hasty response from pro-Trump headbangers in the bud.

Had the police and CPS in Southport acted with the same transparency, we might have been spared the speculation-fuelled unrest that led to egregious attacks on migrant hotels and mosques this summer.

The speed with which the authorities of Palm Beach and neighboring Martin County call press conferences and share their knowledge with the American people can avoid potential problems on the pass road.

Trump himself also praised the secret service agents who, unlike their notoriously incompetent colleagues, decided to shoot first and ask questions later during the first assassination attempt two months ago in Butler, Pennsylvania.

This allayed any fears that the far-right “Proud Boys” might grab their guns and buffalo headgear and carry out a second January 6-style invasion of the Capitol in Washington.

And yet there is much that a filmmaker like Oliver Stone would like to explore. There are still more questions than answers.

For example, how did Ryan Wesley Routh get so close to Trump before he was discovered? Yes, the golf course is the size of London’s Hyde Park and it would be impossible to cover the entire area.

Routh smiled and laughed as he arrived at the courthouse on Monday

But the spot where Routh had set up his hideout was near a main road and is one of the few vantage points frequently used by paparazzi to snap a photo of the former president on the fifth green.

This was his grassy hill.

And how did he know Trump would be playing golf that morning? A stroke of luck? He was only a few hundred yards away from the former president, the ballistic equivalent of a four-foot putt.

More importantly, how did Secret Service agents fail to arrest him and how did he escape when the area was being monitored by heat-seeking drones?

Luckily, we are told, a passerby filmed him escaping in a Nissan SUV. How convenient. Was this the modern Zapruder film about the JFK assassination?

Routh was eventually arrested 50 miles north on Interstate-95, the American equivalent of our M1 freeway, but without smart lanes and two-way traffic control. When police stopped him, he offered no resistance. Photos of him posing calmly in the back of a patrol car were posted online shortly afterward.

Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder — think of Jackie Gleason’s Buford T. Justice in The Man Who Knew Bad Things — who by the grace of God was on the scene shortly after he left the church, told Fox News: “He was as calm as if he was going to a Sunday picnic. If he had disobeyed, you would ask me under what circumstances he died.”

Less mysterious is how Routh, who apparently traveled to Florida by plane from his home in Hawaii, got a gun. Buying an automatic weapon in Florida is as easy as buying a Big Mac.

The average Florida community has more firepower than the British Army. Gun permits are more common than driver’s licenses.

Oddly enough, one of the streets bordering the Trump International Golf Course in Palm Beach is called Gun Club Road. You can’t make this up.

Adding fuel to the fire of Kennedy-style conspiracy theories is the fact that Routh had tried to recruit Afghans to fight in Ukraine and had recently been photographed in Kiev – at a time when Kennedy shooter Lee Harvey Oswald had reported connections to Russia and Cuba.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. But even if we accept that Routh was a crazy loner, we shouldn’t ignore the bigger picture.

Political violence is always on the surface in the US, even if it goes up and down in cycles. In the 1960s, both JFK and his brother Robert, whose son RFK Jr. has since joined Trump, were assassinated. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt.

Today’s atmosphere is just as feverish, fueled by the kind of inflammatory rhetoric – from both sides – that led to the assassination of Trump in Butler.

Oddly enough, however, we know less about this would-be assassin than we do about Routh, which has only fueled the rumor mill. Just imagine, as our American cousins ​​​​say.

During his recent car-crash debate with Kamala Harris, Trump claimed he “took a bullet in the head” because Joe Biden and his vice president, now the Democratic nominee, had slandered him. This aside was lost in the flood of outrage over Trump’s claims about Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. (Isn’t Springfield home to The Simpsons?)

As I wrote at the time of the Biden-Trump TV debate, I have never seen the US so polarized. If Trump had been killed in Butler, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to speculate that America could descend into civil war.

Biden has used the criminal justice system as a weapon against Trump, whom Democrats now call a “convicted felon” after the former president was indicted in an absurd, politically motivated manner by a partisan New York district attorney for allegedly paying bribes to publicity-seeking porn star Stormy Daniels. This is a key line of attack currently being used by Harris.

Equally outrageous was the military-style raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, two years ago. The raid was looking for classified documents that were allegedly taken from him when he was ousted from the White House.

Democrats and the left-wing mainstream media have been stoking hatred against Trump for years, claiming that his re-election would destroy democracy in America. Yet Harris’s unopposed nomination is a real threat to the country’s traditional electoral democracy.

Neither side has a clean record when it comes to stoking division. Trump held back when his more deranged supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to stop Congress from approving the election results. Some of his wilder statements on the campaign trail were inflammatory, to say the least.

Even if we agree that the attacks in Butler and now in Palm Beach were the work of mentally disturbed individuals, is it any wonder that some people try to eliminate their political opponents with bullets rather than at the ballot box?

Those of us who were alive then all remember where we were when JFK was shot. But how many of us will remember where we were when Donald Trump wasn’t shot?

Given the cynicism that currently prevails in American – and indeed British – politics, it is hardly surprising that when many of us heard of a second alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump, we wondered whether it was a staged action to elicit sympathy as Trump’s poll numbers against Harris plummeted.

And what is the true story? Who knows? That’s best left to Oliver Stone.