Two days before the second apparent attempt on Trump’s life, I was a few feet from the former President as he stood outside in the bright morning sun, his back to the Pacific. He was talking about landslides. Below us, on his golf course in Southern California, snipers had their guns pointed at the ocean. It was a cinematic tableau. On Sunday, Trump was on another of his golf courses, this one in West Palm Beach, when an SKS-style rifle was pointed through a fence near the sixth hole. His Secret Service detail shot in the direction of the weapon. The suspect, who had been hiding in the area for almost twelve hours, ran, leaving behind his loaded gun, a GoPro, and a bag of food.
Soon after, the gunman was identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, a fifty-eight-year-old man with a long criminal record who had, in recent years, called on foreigners to fight against Russia. “I am an American coming to fight with you in Ukraine; I am flying into Krakow and will take any transport to Kyiv to meet you and fight to the death,” he tweeted at President Volodymyr Zelensky, in March, 2022. (The post got seven likes.) Newspapers described Routh’s desperation for a crusade. It reminded me of some of the international volunteers in Ukraine I’ve written about, who travelled there hoping to join the newly formed foreign legion around the same time. Many of them had no military experience, had been involved in various sorts of extremist activities in the United States, and were eager both to cosplay war and to restart their lives. I sat with three of them in a hotel room in Poland as they tried on their body armor and gas masks before calling an Uber to take them to the border. One wore a patch that read “I don’t believe in anything.”
On Monday, Trump’s campaign claimed that “Democrats’ rhetoric inspired another attempt on President Trump’s life.” At the same time, Trump was sending supporters chain e-mails (“Forward this message to 10 friends… I want to spread the LOVE!”) and advertisements for mugs with “FEAR NOT” printed on them. That afternoon, he met with the director of the Secret Service and reportedly asked him whether he could keep playing golf. (“It’s my only little bit of a form of exercise,” Trump told Sean Hannity.) Trump’s camp often rails against the “mainstream media” for downplaying the first assassination attempt, in Butler, Pennsylvania; he had carried on campaigning, undeterred, almost immediately after. A Trump official told the Washington Post that the subsequent increase in security meant “we live in a military combat zone,” but, other than snippets I’d heard last month about how Trump didn’t want to take too many questions outdoors at the southern border before getting back in his motorcade, he seemed no different than before. On Monday evening, Trump launched a new crypto venture via live stream from Mar-a-Lago. He retold the Butler story—“The ear is the bloodiest part of the body because of cartilage”; “That was some crazy day”—and then, as he had done soon after that incident, returned to the theme of the divine. “There’s something going on,” he said. “I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country. Nobody knows.”
On Tuesday, I flew to Michigan to see Trump’s first in-person public appearance since the golf course, at a town hall in Flint moderated by Sarah Huckabee Sanders. At the Dort Financial Center, screens above the stage read “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.” And everything was the same as usual. Many people wore the “FIGHT” T-shirts that became popular after Butler. (Another one: “YOU MISSED BITCH.”) Charles Hoye, a retired truck driver, told me, of what happened in West Palm Beach, “I was kind of expecting it, the way things are in society.” He went on, “And I expect it to happen again.” People sang along to “Jessie’s Girl” as staffers installed the town-hall audience onstage; there was a long line for Dippin’ Dots.
“They’re at it again,” Eber John Atkins, who works in quality control for General Motors, told me. They? “They’re trying to kill him because he’s trying to stop the deep state.” Atkins said that everyone he knew (“one hundred per cent of them”) believed the same thing, and that he wished the left and the right could work together, but “the higher-ups have an agenda of control.” He continued, “If Trump got hurt bad, I ain’t never gonna vote again. It’s way too big for me and you to figure out. Let’s get educated people together and pull the curtain out and see who’s really behind this.” A volunteer named Charlie told me, “We’re all human beings. We have common sense as humans to see the truth. Why are they trying to get rid of this guy? Think with your primal human brain. There’s some truth they don’t want to come out.” The audience was now practicing their flag waves and cheers; Charlie yelled at me over the music to “dig for the truth.” (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had just announced that the state would carry out its own probe of the incident. “In my judgment, it’s not in the best interest of our state or our nation to have the same federal agencies that are seeking to prosecute Donald Trump leading this investigation,” he said.)
As Sanders came out to introduce Trump, I asked Jason Miller, a campaign adviser, how his boss was feeling. “You’ll see his mood in a second,” he told me. Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, stood near us as the former President emerged, with a spotlight on him. I told Cheung that the scene reminded me of when Trump entered the Republican National Convention after being shot at in Butler. “Yeah, it’s like déjà vu all over again,” Cheung said. Trump told the crowd that there was “a lot of love in this room. I love you. You love me.” He said that he’d had a nice phone call from President Joe Biden (people in the audience screamed, “Fuck Biden!”) and a very nice phone call from Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jumbotrons at the event read “KAMALA IS A LIAR,” and the crowd booed). Last time, the official messaging post-shooting had been about unity and love—even if those themes curdled into the usual tropes by the end of Trump’s Convention speech. This time, it was all about bravado. “Being President, it’s a little bit dangerous,” Trump said. “They think race-car driving is dangerous. No. They think bull riding, that’s pretty scary, right? No. This is a dangerous business.” He went on, “Only consequential Presidents get shot at.”
It was more like a seated rally than a town hall, the assassination story loosely braided with various campaign topics: giving drug dealers the death penalty, a forthcoming visit from Narendra Modi, the immigration chart from Butler that saved Trump’s life (put up on the Dort Center’s screens to applause), electric cars and how they don’t go far enough (“They say a new one is going to be hydrogen, who the hell knows,” Trump said. “A slight problem—it blows up”). Trump was careful to pepper in glowing references to women and autoworkers, two demographics he needs to win. “I’m putting a two-hundred-per-cent tariff on,” he said, of Chinese cars made in Mexico. “And then you wonder why I get shot at?” He said that it was a woman in West Palm Beach who had helped track down the license plate of the would-be shooter on Sunday, leading to his arrest. “Women are smarter than men,” he said. Sanders responded, “The women of this country love Donald Trump.”
During the crypto launch the evening before the rally, a moderator of the conversation had said to Trump, “I know many people in crypto feel this way, as we’re trying to change the financial system, quite literally. We’re trying to change things and make a difference, but it always feels like there’s some sort of a force against us. In your case, do you feel, similarly, that there’s a force out there to get you?” Trump said, “Well, you have a radical left force, and we have forces . . . it’s an amazing country in some ways, but we have evil forces.” In Michigan, forty-nine days from the election, Trump pressed the group to push back against these forces. “We have to be brave, otherwise we’re not going to have a country left,” he said. ♦
