Could you blame Trump if he’s now LOST the will to win? Hours after a second assassination attempt, his friends speak to MAUREEN CALLAHAN and raise grave concerns

Donald Trump is the target of an assassination attempt for the second time in two months. And the world is shrugging.

That goes for law enforcement, too. After the Secret Service discovered a scoped AK assault rifle poking through a chain-link fence at Trump’s Palm Beach golf course — the former president on the fifth hole, the would-be assassin poised to fire just 500 yards away on the sixth — Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw ducked responsibility.

“He’s not the sitting president,” Bradshaw said at a news conference Sunday. “If he was, the entire golf course would be surrounded.”

Let’s get this straight: it’s Trumps wrong? Even President Biden, in the wake of this latest effort, says the Secret Service “needs more help.”

By sheer luck, the former president survived that bullet in July. He was the target of two ricin poisoning attempts, one in 2018 and the other in 2020. Iran has offered an $80 million bounty on Trump since the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike.

What else needs to happen to give Trump the right protection?

Imagine if Kamala Harris had survived not one, but two such attempts in the same time frame. It would be the headline everywhere—not for days, but for the entire election cycle.

Networks would employ left-leaning historians to hammer home America’s persistent racism and sexism. Experts would speculate on the systemic failings of the Secret Service and whether there was a conspiracy at play.

MSNBC, the New York Times and NPR would spread one message: to atone for our sins and reject such political violence, we must vote for Kamala Harris.

As it stands, the first effort against Trump, repeated on a loop in the run-up to the Republican National Convention, has been largely forgotten. This is the wildest presidential election cycle in modern history.

The iconic images of Trump, blood streaming down his face, pumping his fist in the air and screaming, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” were quickly consigned to the trash bin as Biden was dramatically routed, as Harris’s long-term liability mounted rapidly, and as the colluding media refused to demand that Harris answer tough questions or submit to more than two scintillating, superficial interviews.

How could Trump and his campaign not turn that first effort into a major revival?

Why didn’t Trump focus on the sober, serious, somewhat vulnerable character we saw in the days after? At the RNC?

Here’s why: A friend of Trump’s who talks to him every week told me that his campaign assumed they would have a long-term halo effect and that they would still run against Sleepy Joe.

“His team got comfortable, maybe even lazy, because of how well he did against Biden,” this person told me a few weeks ago. “They didn’t hit the swing states hard enough.”

Moreover, Trump’s top advisers are primarily concerned about their own positions, fearing that a colleague will stab them while they are not there.

“They all fly with him on his jet because they’re all afraid of being left out, because they’re afraid of decisions being made without them,” the same source told me when we spoke again late last week. “The truth is, no one is in charge. He doesn’t take good advice because there isn’t any. In 2016, he had Ivanka and Kellyanne Conway on his jet. Now he has Laura Loomer.”

Ah, yes. This was where we left off on Friday — the cliffhanger featuring a Kardashian-lite 31-year-old, a photo of Trump with his arm around her waist, another of Loomer pressing her breasts against his chest, gazing at him adoringly, just the latest distraction in an already chaotic campaign.

Trump’s decision to take Loomer, an avowed 9/11 truth-seeker, to not one but two of last week’s memorial services, in order to stay in touch with someone who has said that a Harris president would mean “the White House will smell like curry” and “speeches will be routed through a call center,” is not only bad politics, it is despicable.

Especially when you consider that his running mate, J.D. Vance, is married to a woman of Indian descent. It all lends credence to the constant criticism from the left — that Trump is, if not outright racist, then certainly tolerant of such views.

Why is this woman still around? Presidential candidates have thrown closer advisers to the wolves for far less. Loomer is a deep, self-inflicted wound to the campaign, but Trump seems to be the last to acknowledge that.

On Friday, he doubled down on his claims and refused to deny her statements.

“I have no control over Laura,” he said. Really? Does anyone believe Trump couldn’t curtail this if he wanted to?

“Laura can say what she wants,” Trump continued. “She’s a free spirit.”

On Saturday, Trump was able to offer only a few mild condemnations.

“I disagree with what she said,” Trump said.

You can hope so!

All of this raises an existential question, one I asked after last Tuesday’s debate: Does Donald Trump even want to win?

When he started ranting that Haitian immigrants were “eating Ohioans’ pets” and Harris looked mischievously at him, Trump lost that debate.

He sounded, frankly, deranged. Even Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and Springfield’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, have criticized Trump’s claims and blamed his rhetoric for multiple bomb threats.

Uniter vs. divider? Right now, the former looks like Harris, a very beatable candidate by the way.

“Any political leader who steps onto the national stage and into the national spotlight has to understand the gravity of the words they have for cities like ours,” Rue told Politico. “Springfield, Ohio is caught in a political vortex and it’s gotten a little out of hand.”

Rue said he was “very frustrated by the former president’s comments” and declined to answer a question about whether Trump had received his vote.

Springfield is in a county that Trump won in 2020 with more than 60 percent of the vote.

In the face of Harris, he has decompensated into Biden 2.0: old, out of touch, aggrieved and a passive player in his own presidential campaign.

Why is he tweeting juvenile things like, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT?” Why did he decline a second presidential debate instead of accepting and reversing the downward trend? Does he no longer have it in him to hit Harris on data, the economy, the border, crime, and foreign policy?

Why is he golfing now that his campaign is losing steam? That, I hear, is a question from people close to him.

A shocking poll from Iowa on Monday shows Harris closing in on Trump, trailing him by 4 percentage points, down from an 18-point lead in the spring.

Worse, women in Iowa are now firmly in Kamala’s camp, 53 percent to 36 percent. Abortion is undoubtedly a factor, but so is Trump’s treatment of women.

Aside from the specter of the E. Jean Carrol case and “grab ’em by the p***y,” Melania is nowhere to be seen, while Loomer was at Trump’s side last week, bragging that she had flown with him to the presidential debate.

Meanwhile, Don Jr. is flaunting his rumored affair with a Palm Beach socialite while engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle, further reinforcing the idea that Trump men don’t treat their wives and girlfriends with respect.

Meanwhile, Harris will be interviewed for the third time this Thursday by none other than Oprah Winfrey, who played a major role in Obama’s election.

It’s all so messy. Trump’s campaign is in total disarray. No one is in charge — least of all this erratic candidate, who seems hell-bent on giving undecideds every reason to vote against him.

Perhaps it is true that Trump, having narrowly survived two assassination attempts, would rather not win. That is certainly understandable, especially since the first attempt did not make him any less vulnerable.

If Harris had been the target of a near-successful assassination, she would have been protected by a Roman Praetorian Guard, now and forever. How can Trump not wonder if this is all worth it?