Yesterday afternoon, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, put out an extraordinary statement that at the same time said very little: “President Trump is safe following gunshots in his vicinity. No further details at this time.” Reporters were quick to share the news—but then the New York Post reported that the gunshots, which occurred around Trump’s club in West Palm Beach, while he was golfing, had nothing to do with Trump. Reporters shared this, too—but then CNN reported that Trump was the intended victim of the shots. By the evening, the FBI had described the shooting as an apparent “attempted assassination”—a rifle and scope were recovered from the scene, as were a camera and a pair of backpacks—though questions remained as to whether the would-be assassin had actually fired the gun. Amid the confusion, Trump told Sean Hannity, of Fox, that he’d been disappointed to miss a putting chance as he was hurried away from the green.
This, of course, was the second attempt on Trump’s life in two months or so, inviting an only-in-2024 comparison as to how they played out in the media. (Or maybe not: Gerald Ford survived back-to-back assassination attempts in September 1975.) When a gunman first shot at Trump, in July, during a rally in Pennsylvania, there was a lot of chaos and some confusion—but it happened live on camera and in front of numerous journalists, some of whom took instantly iconic images of the aftermath, showing a wound to Trump’s ear and smears of blood across his face. It was immediately obvious that Trump had been hit by something, and reaction to the shooting unfolded quickly, too, with various Trump acolytes—including the Ohio senator J.D. Vance and the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—slamming Democrats and the media for inciting the attack by characterizing Trump as a threat to democracy. This time, there were no TV cameras or journalists present. And Vance, now Trump’s running mate, was more circumspect. “Still much we don’t know,” he tweeted, “but I’ll be hugging my kids extra tight tonight and saying a prayer of gratitude.”
Greene wasn’t, though: as yesterday’s news filtered through, she blamed a nebulous “they” for being behind it, later making clear that she was talking about Democrats. Other right-wingers made similar points. And, despite the comparative murkiness surrounding the incident, in certain respects news around it moved faster than news of the first assassination attempt. Despite all the rapid, evidence-free claims of Democratic and media complicity in that attack, the ideology and motive of the gunman, who was killed at the scene, remain unclear as of this writing; by contrast, the alleged culprit in yesterday’s events—who has been identified in various media reports as Ryan Wesley Routh, and is now in custody after fleeing the scene but being caught in a traffic stop—appears to have left behind a more detailed paper trail, and reporters have already begun to parse it. At least two journalists, from the New York Times and Semafor, have reflected on interviewing Routh last year, in the context of a convoluted scheme of his to draft foreigners to fight on behalf of Ukraine.
As this might suggest, Routh’s politics appear, from what is known of them so far, to be esoteric; more care will have to go into excavating his mindset and motives, a story that seems guaranteed to run. So, too, will the story of how Routh was able to get within a few hundred yards of Trump—a fact that is already reinvigorating a debate about Secret Service protections that has rumbled constantly in the background of the news cycle ever since the Pennsylvania shooting. And the second attack wasn’t even needed to reinvigorate the other big media conversation that emerged from the first: namely, the high temperature of political rhetoric in America, and its role in inciting real-world acts of violence. Indeed, yesterday’s events dropped into a news cycle that was already consumed by the question.
One prominent story last week was that of Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” who was spotted traveling around with Trump, when she wasn’t busy tweeting that Kamala Harris would make the White House “smell like curry” if elected. (Harris is of Indian descent; at a news conference on Friday, Trump claimed not to be aware of Loomer’s remarks while describing her as “a free spirit” who has spoken “very positively” of his campaign.) Another big story last week: the racist lie that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, have been eating people’s pets, which originated as online hearsay, then was boosted by Vance, on social media, and Trump, who bellowed, during the presidential debate on ABC, “THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS…THEY’RE EATING THE CATS…THEY’RE EATING THE PETS!” Since then, businesses, schools, and colleges in Springfield have been forced to close after facing threats, while two hospitals were locked down. Haitian migrants have reported feeling unsafe. Officials have reported fielding calls about the Proud Boys marching in town.
Following the debate on Tuesday night, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins grilled Vance on the pet-eating lie, and he doubled down. “The media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats,” Vance said, referring to the Biden and Harris administration’s immigration policies. “If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re gonna keep on doing it.” Yesterday, prior to the events at Trump’s club, Vance went back on CNN and made essentially the same point, this time using phrasing that blew up online. Challenged again on the pets lie—this time by Dana Bash, showing admirable persistence—he said that “if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Various commentators agreed that Vance had just said the quiet part out loud, and that “creating stories” might join “alternative facts” and “truth isn’t truth” in the pantheon of inadvertent admissions of dishonesty on the part of Trump and his surrogates. Pressed by Bash, Vance clarified that he was talking about creating “media focus” on the pet-eating story, which he says he still stands by, based on claims made by his constituents; later, he described the idea that he’d been caught rationalizing lying as a “dishonest smear.” (Again, there is no evidence the pet-eating story is true.) But Vance’s remark—and his remark on Tuesday, in which he came just as close to saying explicitly that the pet-eating story was contrived—was plenty telling of his campaign’s “cynical, xenophobic strategy” (as The Bulwark put it yesterday) around immigration in general. And the campaign’s specific focus on Springfield apparently isn’t done yet: a source familiar with Trump’s plans told NBC yesterday that he intends to visit the city soon. That was, at least, until the attack.
If Trump’s in-person movements might now be in flux again, his commitment to raising the rhetorical temperature should not be in doubt. (In the hours before yesterday’s attack, he posted online: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” and “THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES IS A TRUE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”) In the aftermath of the first attempt on Trump’s life, various critics expressed concern that major outlets would be cowed into downplaying Trump’s violent rhetoric for fear that they themselves would be accused of raising the temperature should they aggressively tackle it. As I wrote at the time, those critics pointed to credulous coverage suggesting that the shooting had softened Trump (sometimes in almost mystical terms) as well as a handful of decisions to take critical coverage off the air or out of print. They also pointed to an interview in which Lester Holt accused President Biden, then still Trump’s opponent, of failing to “turn down the heat” in the shooting’s wake. “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?” Biden countered. “Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody?”
Some coverage of this nature has persisted. On the whole, though, such fears have not come to pass; sure, there has been ample recent criticism (including in this newsletter) about coverage of Trump that hasn’t been sufficiently sharp, but this has mostly concerned years-old flaws in the media’s handling of Trump’s language, not any post-shooting pivot. Indeed, if the shooting was spoken of, at the time, as a watershed event that would fundamentally restructure the campaign, it’s remarkable, looking back, at how little that has happened; history might come to see see the first and second attempts on Trump’s life as back-to-back events, but the political earthquakes in between times—not least Biden dropping out in favor of Harris—have fractured any contemporary sense of continuity between the two moments. This isn’t to downplay either attack as a story—both are huge. But now as then—or, in light of the disgraceful recent rhetoric about Springfield, perhaps more so—neither is an excuse to dodge clear-eyed scrutiny of Trump’s own rhetorical posture. He himself has acknowledged that that hasn’t changed since the first shooting. “When I got hit, everybody thought I would change: Trump is going to be a nice man now,” he told a crowd in late July. “And I really agreed with that—for about eight hours or so.”
Before yesterday’s incident, Bash showed how to perform clear-eyed scrutiny while interviewing Vance on CNN. While the “creating stories” remark may have gotten the most attention, something else that Vance said caught my ear: when asked by Bash about his responsibility for inciting the threats that institutions in Springfield faced last week, Vance condemned them before essentially echoing what Biden told Holt back in July, asking, “Are we not allowed to talk about these problems because some psychopaths are threatening violence?” This, it’s fair to say, was a far cry from what Vance said after the first assassination attempt, when he accused liberals of inciting violence against Trump. The difference, of course, is the type of problem he wants to talk about. Our job, ultimately, is to have the conversation—and to point out which problems are real and which are made up.
Other notable stories:
- On Friday, the Biden administration, along with the governments of Canada and the UK, formally accused RT, the Russian state broadcaster, of acting as an arm of the country’s intelligence apparatus, at the ultimate direction of the Kremlin. The declaration followed a series of moves on the part of the administration to crack down on alleged Russian information operations ahead of the election, including the recent indictments of two RT staffers for funneling money to right-wing US influencers (which Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen covered for CJR last week). Meanwhile, in other news about foreign election meddling, the Washington Post reports that officials are expected to file charges soon related to an alleged Iranian effort to hack the Trump campaign and leak documents to reporters. (I wrote about that incident last month.)
- For CJR, Lucy Schiller profiles Kit O’Connell, a self-identified “movement journalist” based in Austin whose coverage of the trans community, among others, stands apart from that of major outlets. “Kit does this thing where they find stories everywhere, because we are everywhere,” Jacob Reyes, a staffer at the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, told Schiller. “We’re not just available during Pride month.” O’Connell said that, “as far as specifically Pride goes, I don’t think the national media does a terrible job”—though Schiller writes that “outside of June, and between the coastal cities home to establishment media, they do not find the press, by and large, to be ‘in tune’ with the moment, one in which trans and queer people commonly face existential opposition.”
- According to Fern Shen, of Baltimore Brew, the Baltimore Sun recently fired Madeleine O’Neill, a courts reporter at the paper, after she internally criticized declining editorial standards under the ownership of David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair, who acquired the Sun earlier this year. (The Sun did not comment to Shen.) In other media-labor news, Semafor’s Max Tani reports that bosses at the Times are worried that a potential strike on the part of the paper’s tech workers could disrupt its election coverage, including, perhaps, on the day itself. And the owner of the Anchorage Daily News declined to voluntarily recognize a union formed by staff.
- The Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper in the UK, is in crisis following claims within Israel that it published stories about the war in Gaza that were based on fabricated intelligence aimed at furthering the war aims of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. Late last week, the Chronicle deleted nine articles by the same writer, Elon Perry, who has also been accused of exaggerating his credentials. (He stands by his work.) Yesterday, several prominent columnists announced that they had quit the Chronicle in protest, with one accusing it of reading like an “ideological instrument.”
- And the estranged wife of Mark Green, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, told acquaintances last week that Green was leaving her for a reporter from Axios with whom he had been having an affair—but misidentified the woman involved. After learning of the accusation, an attorney for Axios sent Green’s wife a cease-and-desist letter, accusing her of harming the reporter’s reputation. Green’s wife and the woman with whom he had the affair have since clarified that the Axios claim was mistaken; Politico’s Rachael Bade has the details.
ICYMI: The crackdown on Cuba’s independent press
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.