Trump survives an assassination attempt.

The former president was nearly killed by a 20-year-old shooter.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: Longer than usual.

Two things you might have missed.

Obviously, the news cycle has been overwhelmed by coverage of the Donald Trump assassination attempt. However, in case you missed it, we wanted to alert you to two important pieces of new Tangle content.

1. On Friday, we published a deep dive into Project 2025. This is one of the most requested topics we’ve ever covered, and it’s already generated some of the highest levels of reader engagement we’ve received for any piece. You can read it in full here.
2. On Sunday, we published an interview with Alon Gat on our podcast. Gat was captured by Hamas on October 7. He escaped, but his wife was brought into Gaza and held hostage for several weeks, and his sister is still a hostage. He shared his harrowing first-person account of what happened that day on the podcast. You can listen here.

Quick hits.

1. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents prosecution against former President Donald Trump in Florida, finding that Special Counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed. (The decision) 
2. President Biden will conduct a live interview with NBC's Lester Holt at 9:00 pm ET on Monday night. (The interview)
3. The European Union charged X with several breaches of its 2022 Digital Services Act. (The charges)
4. Israel said it targeted Mohammed Deif, one of Hamas's top commanders, in an airstrike on Saturday. The strike killed at least 90 people and wounded over 300, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Deif reportedly survived the attack and remains active. (The strike)
5. An NBC poll released on Sunday that initially showed President Biden leading former President Trump by three percentage points was amended and corrected to show that Trump was actually leading Biden by three percentage points. NBC cited an error with original polling documents. (The poll)

Today's topic.

The Trump assassination attempt. On Saturday, former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Around six minutes into his remarks, gunshots rang out and Trump grabbed his right ear, dropping to the ground as Secret Service agents swarmed him. Moments later, Trump stood up surrounded by Secret Service with blood covering his ear and running down his face, raised his fist to the crowd, and mouthed “fight” multiple times. He was quickly led off stage and taken to a local hospital. On Saturday night, Trump posted on Truth Social “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” He was otherwise uninjured.

Secret Service snipers killed the shooter, who was positioned on a rooftop a few hundred feet from where Trump was speaking, after he fired an estimated eight shots. One rallygoer, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, was shot and killed by the gunman after moving to protect his wife and two daughters, according to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D). Two other people were wounded and are in stable condition. 

Note: Tangle does not typically name shooters because of the documented contagion effect. However, in this case, we have decided to share the shooter’s name given the historical significance of this event and the relevance of ongoing reporting about his identity. 

Authorities identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, a resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) determined that he acted alone and found bomb-making materials in the car he drove to the rally, though they have not identified a motive. The FBI also shared that Crooks used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle purchased by his father, but said it was not clear how the younger Crooks obtained the weapon. Records show he was a registered Republican but had donated $15 to a progressive political action committee on the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. 

Eyewitnesses outside the rally said they attempted to alert law enforcement to a man “bear crawling up the side of the roof” of a nearby building before the shooting began. The Secret Service is investigating how Crooks was able to access the roof, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers have called for investigations into the incident. The Department of Justice is investigating it as an act of domestic terrorism. 

President Biden addressed the nation twice in the wake of the shooting. On Saturday, he delivered brief remarks condemning the attack and all acts of political violence. On Sunday, he delivered an address from the Oval Office, confirming that he had spoken with Trump and once again denouncing the attack. "I'm sincerely grateful that he's doing well and recovering," the president said. "Jill and I are keeping him and his family in our prayers." Biden also announced that he has ordered an independent review of the security at the rally.

The Republican National Convention begins today in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Trump is expected to officially become the party’s presidential nominee. The former president arrived in the city on Sunday and is slated to address the convention on Thursday. In an interview with The Washington Examiner, Trump said he had completely rewritten his speech after the shooting to focus more on national unity and less on his political opponents. 

Today, we’ll share responses to the shooting from the left and right. Then, as always, my take. 

Agreed.

• Virtually all commentators condemn the attack, expressing relief that Trump’s injuries were relatively minor while mourning the loss of life at the rally.
• Most worry that the shooting will further inflame political tensions and call on both Democratic and Republican party leaders to scale back their rhetoric. 
• Many also remark that the media and American public have a responsibility to turn down the temperature of political discourse. 

What the left is saying.

• The left is alarmed by the shooting, calling it an attack on American democracy.
• Some frame it as the culmination of a rising tide of political violence in the U.S.
• Others question whether the attack will prove decisive in the election.

The New York Times editorial board wrote “the attack on Donald Trump is antithetical to America.”

“Any attempt to resolve an election through violence is abhorrent. Violence is antithetical to democracy. Ballots, not bullets, should always be the means by which Americans work through their differences,” the board said. “It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.”

“Democracy requires partisans to accept that the process is more important than the results. Even before Saturday’s events, there were worrying signs that many Americans are failing that essential test,” the board wrote. “Trump’s political agenda cannot and must not be opposed by violence. It cannot and must not be pursued through violence. The attack on Saturday was a tragedy. The challenge now confronting Americans is to prevent this moment from becoming the beginning of a greater tragedy.”

In The New Republic, Michael Tomasky called the shooting “the most shocking act of a shockingly violent age.”

“The attempt on Donald Trump’s life is obviously a horrendous development. It seems unique because he’s a presidential candidate and one of the most famous people in the world. But in many ways, it’s not. Threats of political violence have increased dramatically in the United States, and support for political violence has risen recently by shocking levels,” Tomasky said. “There was the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise in 2017. The attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy, in 2022. Those are just the headline-grabbers, but political violence, or at least the threat of it, is now a constant in American life.”

“Trump’s own violent rhetoric is, for the time being at least, largely nullified by this act. The man who led an insurrection and made light of the attack on Paul Pelosi is politically inoculated, for now. In time, as memory of this event recedes and as the election nears, it may be that partisan passions reassert themselves and this event won’t influence that many voters. But of course Trump is ahead already, and the shooting certainly isn’t going to hurt him politically,” Tomasky wrote. “The real fear, though, is escalation of violence, in a country with more guns than people. I’d write that we’re about to enter a very dark period, but in fact we entered it long ago, and there’s no end in sight.”

In Vox, Andrew Prokop asked “will Trump’s shooting change everything? Or surprisingly little?”

“For much of this year, there has been low interest in political news on both sides of the aisle, but there have been questions about whether Trump’s base in particular was less mobilized than they were in years prior… That began to change after Trump’s criminal conviction on May 30, which unleashed a massive surge in donations to Trump’s campaign that erased Biden’s cash edge. Perhaps the assassination attempt on Trump will be a similar catalyst,” Prokop said. “Regardless of the facts around the shooting, the conspiracy theories around it will inevitably be twisted to advance the narrative that ‘they’ — Democrats, the media, shadowy powers that be — wanted this to happen and are in some way responsible for it.”

“It is a long time between now and November 5, 2024. Many other events will consume the news between now and then; just last week, the biggest political story was whether Joe Biden could hold onto the nomination. It is very far from clear that this is the one event that will loom over the rest of a campaign that is still a ways off from concluding,” Prokop wrote. “As shocking as this event was, the vast majority of voters have long made up their views about Trump and seem quite unlikely to change their minds because of his injury. And if there is a short-term ‘sympathy bounce’ for Trump, it may not last.”

What the right is saying.

• The right is similarly horrified by the attack, but many hope Trump can turn it into a unifying moment for the country.
• Some blame anti-Trump messaging on the left for contributing to a culture of political violence. 
• Others say Trump will emerge stronger from the shooting.  

The Wall Street Journal editorial board suggested the attack “could be a redemptive political moment.”

“The assassination attempt against Donald Trump on Saturday evening is a horrific moment for America that could have been much worse. But we can’t say it comes as a complete surprise. Political hostility and hateful rhetoric have been rising to a decibel level that far too often in the American past has led to violence and attempted murder,” the board wrote. “It’s nothing short of miraculous that Mr. Trump avoided death by a literal inch. The former President can’t help but think that Providence played some role in sparing him… The country was spared, too, from what could have been a furious cycle of retribution.”

“Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions,” the board said. “If they weren’t already, Americans after Saturday will be looking for stable, reassuring leadership. The photo of Mr. Trump raising his fist as he was led off stage by the Secret Service with a bloody face was a show of personal fortitude that will echo through the campaign… His opportunity now is to present himself as someone who can rise above the attack on his life and unite the country.”

In Fox News, David Marcus asked “what did [the] hard left expect, after years of hateful anti-Trump rhetoric?”

“It's long been a staple of the stump speech for President Joe Biden to compare Donald Trump and his supporters to the Nazis, and his fellow Democrats and the liberal media eagerly amplify the ratcheted-up rhetoric. Now, sadly but predictably, this kind of talk has gotten somebody killed,” Marcus wrote. “At 8 p.m. the night before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Biden posted on X, ‘Americans want a president, not a dictator.’ It isn't just Biden. For nearly a decade, Democrats have been ratcheting up the rhetoric and marching the nation towards this political violence.”

“In the wake of the near killing of a former president and leading candidate today, you will hear solemn voices in the liberal media, the same ones who days ago gave high-pitched warnings about the unique danger Trump poses, saying this is a problem on both sides. No it isn't. There may be fringe elements of the American right who dehumanize the left with such rhetoric, but it is the very coin of the realm for progressives. It is their mainstream media that has all but called for Trump to be taken out,” Marcus said. “Democrats understand this is not tenable, that they are still inviting more and more violence.”

In PJ Media, Scott Pinsker wrote about “how the Trump assassination attempt changes the presidential campaign.”

“When something profoundly shocking and emotionally uncomfortable happens, we psychologically deal with it in piecemeal fashion, because it’s just too big and overwhelming to comprehend all at once. So, we first try to analogize the attempt on Trump’s life by comparing and contrasting it to other events… but these analogies fail to capture the sheer magnitude of what we all witnessed,” Pinsker said. “In part, it was different because Trump is different… Trump is an expert at forging personal relationships with large swaths of people via media platforms, but more than anything else, it’s today’s culture that fueled this sense of one-on-one familiarity: Trump isn’t just someone we watch — he’s someone we personally know.

“And last night, the American people saw someone they personally know get shot in the frickin’ head on live television,” Pinsker wrote. “The sharpest colors draw the cleanest contrasts. But now, the language Biden can freely use in public discourse has been dulled. Before, Biden was demonizing the Devil. Now, he’ll be demonizing not just a man, but a man who deserves our sympathy, respect and admiration… Biden has built his brand as a likable family man who’s simply a ‘nice guy.’ Alas, he’ll have to sacrifice that image if and when he demonizes a man who just stared the Reaper in the eye.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism, or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

First and foremost, I am glad President Trump is okay. 

I say that for obvious reasons, but reasons important enough to state in full: Political violence is an abhorrent way to resolve ideological issues. Donald Trump is a husband and father, and no candidate in our country should fear being shot in the head for their politics. Furthermore, if Trump had been killed, the consequential political turmoil and violence would've been historic, deadly, cyclical, and could have irredeemably broken our country. 

I am also thinking of and praying for the family members of the rallygoers who were killed and injured. While Trump was mostly unharmed, it is important to remember someone was murdered on Saturday: a father who died shielding his family from gunfire. Others are still recovering in the hospital.

Since I am a political analyst, I know many of you are opening today's email expecting me to analyze. I have a job to do, and so I’ll do it: I think this event is going to help Donald Trump's candidacy. It will make Trump harder to attack, make him tantamount to a martyr, and confirm the right's worst fears about how the rest of the country views them. It will guarantee every Trump supporter is a Trump voter, and in a close election, maximizing voter turnout matters.

I'm also cognizant of the fact that the election is still four months away. I've warned readers repeatedly to remember that this will not be the last gigantic news story — I said that after the recent debate and after Trump's conviction and after the Special Counsel report on Biden's mental state and after a half dozen other major stories that everyone thought would make a huge difference — and I say it again today. Granted, it's hard to imagine anything "bigger" than this, but bigger things inevitably do happen.

And of course I'm aware that many of you want me to assign some blame. Who is at fault for something like this? Unsurprisingly, I think there is plenty of blame to go around — all secondary to the shooter himself.

Hysterical media outlets have been telling their disparate audiences for years that the other candidate is going to destroy their lives and turn everything they love to ash. The New Republic runs cover images of a half-Trump half-Hitler face. Fox News suggests to viewers that Biden is inviting immigrants into the country to rape their daughters. Both sides have turned the volume up as loud as possible, and while we don’t know the shooter’s motives, no one has the moral high ground to express shock at an act of political violence.

Some Democrats — like former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill — have told voters that Trump is more dangerous than Hitler and Mussolini. I sure wish someone had killed Hitler before he murdered six million Jews, so it’s not hard to imagine someone believing that statement and connecting the dots into action. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has told her supporters to harass Trump administration officials anytime they show themselves in public. Even President Biden has warned voters that Trump is an aspirational dictator whom the Supreme Court just greenlit to kill his political opponents, take bribes, and lead a coup with total immunity — “literally a threat to everything America stands for.” Who might not take up arms to stop that? If Democrats believed their own rhetoric, why would they have any sympathy about the attempt on Trump's life? Assassinating the person they’re describing would actually be justified. And if they don't believe Trump is an aspirational mass-murderer, maybe they can stop the rhetoric?

And Republicans have no space at all to lecture Democrats on divisive speech. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has called for Obama to be executed, and is running political ads of herself literally shooting a car with a rifle and making it explode while she talks about Joe Biden, then lectures Democrats on political rhetoric. Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) has told his followers that Biden "sent the orders" to shoot Trump, a comment so inflammatory and unhinged that the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board dedicated a whole editorial to criticizing it. There are endless examples of Republicans glorifying guns or wink-winking at political violence or insisting to their supporters they better be ready to take up arms and fight.

And then there is the victim himself — Donald Trump — who mocked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after her husband was brutally beaten with a hammer in a politically motivated kidnapping attempt. Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., joked about wearing a Paul Pelosi Halloween outfit while the man was still recovering. Trump has repeatedly used violent rhetoric at campaign rallies, he in part encouraged the events of January 6, has glorified weapons, and consistently accuses Democrats of being perverts and child molesters — all deranged political rhetoric that feeds into the perception not just of partisan division, but partisan war.

However, at the top of the blame pyramid is the shooter himself: a young, white, registered Republican his classmates remember as a bullied loner who almost certainly held right-wing views. He also donated to a liberal Super PAC, has an almost entirely non-existent political footprint, is so young he has never voted in a presidential election, and hardly ever posted about politics on social media. That all makes it hard for either side to pigeonhole the worst actor in this drama as part of “the other team.”

It's worth remembering that violent actors often have motivations we cannot even begin to fathom. Partisans on the right would like the shooter to be a diehard progressive to prove their worst fears about the left true. Partisans on the left would like him to be a MAGA Trumper so they can indulge themselves in deranged conspiracies that this shooting was staged for Trump's political gain or a symbol of the unhinged people Trump has drawn to the fore. Few of us remember that the man who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan did so because he wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster — yet we all prefer to jump to conclusions in the first minutes of an incredibly complex event like this.

There’s still more blame to go around. We could blame the Secret Service and local police, whose response was agonizingly slow even as attendees of the rally pointed the shooter out on the roof for at least a minute. We could blame the shooter’s dad, who owned the gun that his son used without much trouble. 

I could keep doing this. I could keep analyzing and dissecting and making obvious points that our broken punditry seems keen on ignoring. But I'd actually like to stop now to say something else:

It occurs to me that over 100,000 people read this newsletter. Tangle readers are, in some ways, a team — a team committed to an ideology founded on considering views we may not like, a team of people willing to have their minds changed, a team that is open to a diversity of opinion. And as a collective, we could look around after an event like this and assign blame, find motivations, call out the various political factions, and make ourselves feel good and high-minded and — best of all — correct.

Or we could do something different. We could look in the mirror, look inward, and think about our own roles in this great big messy country. 

If I have a message for you, it is this: We are on the precipice. We, the people, are standing at the end of a diving board looking down into a great vast pool of darkness — a pool we could collectively decide to jump into with no return trip scheduled. Some people believe we've already leapt. I do not. I think there is still time. Time to turn around, to reconsider, to choose a different path.

President Biden addressed the nation twice in 24 hours and pledged to walk the other way and return to something better. He temporarily pulled his ads against Donald Trump and vowed to pivot his campaign to one that appeals to our better angels. Donald Trump has promised the same, saying he is already rewriting his speech for the RNC, believes he was saved by divine intervention, and views this as an opportunity to bring the country together.

It's easy to be cynical about both candidates’ promises and how long any truce will last. I am cynical. But I'll express my sincere wish that they follow through on behaving differently.

In the meantime, we can do the same. We could actually lead our leaders, show them who we are and what we want. We can talk to our neighbors, the people we disagree with. We can look for humanity in our political rivals and even our enemies — in Donald Trump and Joe Biden, yes, but also in your angry gun-toting MAGA uncle or your self-righteous politically correct pronoun-declaring neighbor. Better yet, we could abandon these caricatures of the other side entirely, refuse to play ball on the binary field of blue and red, and turn our own rhetoric down in our daily lives and genuinely try to understand or engage the other. 

We can blame the people we already hate, or we can take individual responsibility. I'm going to try my best to do my part — to speak plainly and honestly about our country and its political candidates in this newsletter. I will not spare words or throw softballs for the sake of unity, but I will refuse to exaggerate, inflame, or sensationalize when there is already enough awful going around. My pledge is to do this work realistically, humanely, with compassion. Not the kind of compassion that valorizes evil or assumes the best intentions of bad actors, but the kind of compassion that genuinely tries to understand the perspectives of people I feel furthest from. That approach has always been core to Tangle's mission, and events like this only strengthen my resolve. I'm going to walk back from the edge and I am going to ask you to walk with me, away from the vast pool of darkness, if we can.

On Saturday afternoon someone tried to kill Donald Trump. The shooter came shockingly close — an inch or two difference and the entirety of the country would have been pushed into a political tailspin that may have required decades to recover from. 

We should all be grateful it didn't happen, and we absolutely must not waste the opportunity now afforded to us. 

Take the survey: Who do you blame for the attempt on Donald Trump’s life? Let us know!

Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.

Dear readers...

I hope you find today's coverage emblematic of the kind of work we try to do at Tangle. If you are someone who is genuinely interested in pulling our country back from the precipice, I believe one of the best ways to do it is to get people out of the media bubbles they exist in. This is, quite literally, the very reason I created Tangle.

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1. If you are already a Tangle member, you can support us by simply telling your friends and family about Tangle. You can do that by forwarding this email to friends or clicking here to share it with anyone you'd like via email.
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Best,

Isaac & the Tangle team

Your questions, answered.

We're skipping the reader question today to give our main story some extra space. Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

A year ago, Georgia launched the first-ever Medicaid plan to include a work requirement. By now, officials hoped it would be providing health insurance to 25,000 low-income residents and potentially tens of thousands more. Instead, the program has accrued only 4,300 members, much fewer than expected and a fraction of the half-million state residents who could be covered if Georgia — like 40 other states— undertook a full Medicaid expansion. Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has blamed the Biden administration for delaying the program’s start, while critics say the results are proof the work requirement is too burdensome. The Associated Press has the story. 

Numbers.

• 75. The number of Wisconsin police departments and sheriff's offices that are providing security assistance for the Republican National Convention this week.
• 63. The estimated number of law enforcement agencies that will be assisting security efforts. 
• 900. The approximate number of threats made against lawmakers in 2016, according to the Capitol police. 
• 3,900. The approximate number of threats made against lawmakers in 2017.
• 8,600. The approximate number of threats made against lawmakers in 2020.
• 10,000. The approximate number of threats made against lawmakers in 2021.
• +500%. The approximate percent increase in campaign spending on security by House and Senate candidates between 2020 and 2022.
• 23%. The percentage of Americans who agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” according to a 2023 Public Religion Research Institute survey.
• 15%. The percentage of Americans who agreed that political violence was necessary to save the country in 2021.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just covered a potential No Labels third-party candidate.
• The most clicked link in Wednesday’s newsletter was the full text of the 2024 Republican party platform.
• Nothing to do with politics: A llama went on the lam to avoid going to the dentist.
• Wednesday’s survey: 1,266 readers answered our survey asking about the direction of the Republican party with 33% saying it’s moving in mostly the right direction. “It sounds good and more moderate than some previous things from the right, but I don’t trust Trump not to completely backtrack if it’s in his best interest,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Gallup’s Global Emotions poll indicated that stress has decreased globally while positive emotions and experiences have increased. Four Latin American nations had the highest positive experiences in the poll: Paraguay, Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico. Of these nations, Gallup Global News editor Julie Ray noted that “the situation can be crumbling around you, but we still see positivity. Safety was an issue, but you have this strong presence of social networks.” Time has the story. 

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