What happened a year ago yesterday in Butler, Pa., dominated the news yesterday. We all went back to that moment when bloodied candidate Donald Trump rose from a mound of Secret Service agents to show that he had survived an assassination attempt.
In a magisterial piece in The Free Press, headlined “The Shot that Changed America,” (republished from Unherd), Christopher Caldwell meditates on “the great symbolical moment of the 2024 election”:
The striking thing about Trump’s behavior on 13 July 2024 was that it was excellent, and it was excellent in a way that was unreflective and spontaneous. Everything about it was at odds with the American postwar conception of leadership. In a culture where equality of opportunity is everything, the public came to believe there was something reprehensible about the idea that anyone has any special aptitude for anything. We’re not living in a democracy, they felt, unless anyone can go out and become a leader, through hard work or a degree-granting course. Nothing could be more repugnant than the notion that leadership is something you either have or you don’t. And yet here was Trump, in a moment of disruption, behaving like a born leader….
But the event was about more than vitality. “On a personal note,” Mark Zuckerberg said that week, “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air, with the American flag, is one of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life. At some level, as an American, it’s hard not to get emotional about that spirit.” Trump was doing something archetypal: the pose in which many photographers caught him that day was almost exactly the one you will see in Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, the great symbol of revolutionary republican patriotism that hangs in the Louvre: the raised right hand. The flag. The rallying of wounded followers. Trump was not just being brave or strong. He was, without meaning to, summoning Americans to feelings buried so deep that they had forgotten they had them. It was a powerful irruption into politics of reality, and even of religion.
A Washington Post reporter seized upon the belief of some Trump supporters (and Trump) that God had spared him to distort that into a piece on “the divine right of MAGA.”
Salena Zito—the authoritative journalist on all things Butler—reports that a year later, we still “have few answers” on the events of that day, especially regarding Thomas Crooks, the would-be assassin. Kurt Schlichter has a terrific piece about why Butler changed us at Townhall, but he also captures why Zito is THE go-to journalist for this story.
The Trump campaign says that requests to bolster security before the rally were rebuffed by the Secret Service. Helen Comperatore, widow of Corey Comperatore, who died that day, says she has not received answers from the Secret Service.
Remembrance of Butler in no way suggested to California Governor Gavin Newsom that he might temper his remarks on Vice President J.D. Vance’s taking his wife and small children to Disneyland over the weekend:
Videos of the Vance family, including the vice president with his two children and wife Usha, enjoying the California amusement park quickly spread online on Saturday, eventually reaching Newsom’s feed.
The lefty governor — who was busy this weekend addressing the lawsuits California is currently facing on top of a disastrous raid on illegal immigrants at a marijuana farm — tried to light a proverbial fire under Vance’s feet as he took to X to share his grievances over the family enjoying a weekend out.
“Hope you enjoy your family time, @JDVance. The families you’re tearing apart certainly won’t,” Newsom wrote on X.
It’s fair to say that Newsom had a meltdown over the Vance family outing. While Newsom lately has been spending time with kingmaker Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Clyburn’s previous protégé gave an interview to the New York Times essentially averring, “Yes, darn it, I did know who my autopen was doing.” Twitchy is skeptical. Ditto Townhall’s Matt Vespa.
The Jeffrey Epstein Client List was always a little too neat and pat in Ms. Must’s humble opinion: Suddenly, all your enemies will be certified pedophiles! President Trump is rallying around Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino and AG Pam Bondi in the wake of what some consider a disappointing report that Epstein killed himself, and there is no client list. AOC has been utterly dependable: She said President Trump’s administration did not release the Epstein client list because the president is “a rapist,” which is a maliciously fanciful falsification. The E. Jean Carroll case, as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who cost his network millions by making the same claim, could verify.
Miranda Devine writes that the “Epstein drama is an unnecessary distraction for the Trump administration and plays into the hands of malign Democrats.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues that the Epstein case has come back to haunt President Trump for previous dalliances with conspiracy theories, such as the Obama birth certificate or that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had a link to the Kennedy assassination.
Ms. Must knows the Epstein drama is loads of fun, but she can’t help thinking this might be more significant: The president is sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine. President Trump says Ukraine will pay for the sophisticated weapons. Axios reports that “in a major shift,” President Trump will announce a plan for aggressively arming Ukraine. Killian Kay Melchior writes in the Wall Street Journal about Russia’s intensifying drone warfare against Ukraine.
Do you ever get the feeling that Al Gore just doesn’t get the credit that he deserves? Well, Andy Kessler is out to remedy that:
I never thought I’d write these words, but Al Gore is responsible for America’s success in leaving Europe in our dust. He spewed climate-change rhetoric based on flawed models, and Europeans believed him. The German Renewable Energy Sources Act pushed solar panels in not-always-sunny Düsseldorf and elsewhere. High-cost renewables are 55% of the Germans’ energy generation—a burdensome tax on citizens. And Russian natural gas is their backup strategy!
Despite self-inflicted wounds like last week’s copper tariffs and our on-again, off-again going goo-goo for greens, the U.S. is a relative free-market paradise. Whatever the Europeans did on their road to stagnation, let’s make sure we don’t. The ingredients include large government, socialized medicine, limited-hour workforce, anti-innovation Luddite policies, rabid regulatory mandarins, unaccountable plutocrats and antirisk capital markets controlled by large banks.
The Wall Street Journal is hot this morning. Michael J. Petrilli, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a Hoover Visiting Fellow, writes about the big, beautiful act that flips the switch on Democrats and forces them to defend their unpopular stance against school choice.
Allyssia Finley writes about Governor Gavin Newsom’s ringing defense of the rioters who threatened federal agents who raided a pot farm. Finley makes the point that pot farms aren’t as popular in middle America as they are in California. National Review’s Beckett Adams says that the mainstream media isn’t being clear about who’s being picked up in federal operations against illegals:
Enjoy this headline from the Cincinnati Enquirer: “Cincinnati Children’s chaplain detained by ICE.”
Notably absent from the headline is mention of the fact that the former chaplain is an Egyptian national whose asylum status was revoked in December 2024 by the Biden administration. Also missing from the headline are mentions of the fact that the chaplain was flagged on the FBI’s terror watchlist during a background check, although the chaplain maintains that the fingerprints that led to his being flagged are not his. In the body of the story itself, it’s not until several paragraphs later that the reader learns the chaplain has filed multiple lawsuits against the federal government, most of which have been dismissed, except for one lawsuit that remains pending.
Meanwhile, a WSJ front-pager reports that the return to the office affects men and women unevenly. The article underplays somewhat the choices women make about their own lives and timing.