In addition to the right’s lies about immigrants, the news media has been fixated on the second Trump assassination attempt. Or should we even call it that? As Joan Walsh notes, it’s not the former president’s fault that someone tried to shoot him, but “he’s made it more difficult for Secret Service and other law enforcement officials to protect him,” by flouting rules and the suggestions they’ve given him for safer conduct.

Meanwhile, Chris Lehmann looks at the would-be assassin himself, Ryan Wesley Routh, who he describes as a man with “wild-swinging political sympathies.” Routh voted for Trump in 2016, was enamored of Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, and “entertained fond reveries of a Nikki Haley–Vivek Ramaswamy ticket” in 2024. Any finger-pointing from the left or right toward the other direction “misses a good deal of the larger point,” Lehmann insists. Routh’s politics might not make sense, but “the fantasies of assassins mostly hinge on the craving to lurch from fringe obscurity to the center stage of world-shaping historical agency.” Routh, as America tends to at large, envisioned “an outsize image of the role he was destined to play in world affairs.”

-Alana Pockros

Engagement Editor

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