If Japan's weekly magazines appear to be devoting an inordinate amount of space to coverage of U.S. politics this election year, it's thanks largely to the flamboyant antics of Donald Trump, who can be counted on for verbal outbursts and surprises.
Take weekly magazine Shukan Gendai (June 11), which is predicting an ominous "X-Day" — a local euphemism for a date when something big is about to happen — on July 18. The magazine raises the possibility that an assassin will go gunning for the presumptive presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
"There's already been a flood of messages with predictions of Trump's assassination," Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer who spent years on assignment in the Middle East, tells the magazine. According to Baer, when an intelligence organization confiscated laptop computers from several Saudi nationals in Lebanon, the computers' drives were found to contain detailed particulars of Trump's scheduled appearances.
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