TGIF: No One Ate Miss Sassy

You know why we’re here. It’s to look at the news through the objective lens of an American with strong opinions, loosely held. I’m the loudest nonvoter this bottle of sauv blanc has ever met. I hold myself to such a high standard of objectivity that I also simply ignore jury summons, lest it influence what I write for you here. 

Now let’s get to the news, which you can watch Free Pressers discuss in our new FP Live. And if you want to find me and see the ankle monitor, I’ll be at the next FP Debate!

→ Trump survives his weekly assassination attempt: This one really should have worked, and if a CIA operative is getting demoted today, I just want to say he gave it his all. But Trump is still alive, waving his arms around, pointing, being the candidate. The would-be Trump shooter set himself up right on the golf course where Donald Trump was playing, about 400 yards away from the former president. Very close. But before he could fire a shot, a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a gun in the shrubs. He opened fire. Ryan Routh ran for it, was tailed by a patriotic Floridian (never bet against the Karens) and was apprehended somewhere on I-95, which is how most sentences about Florida usually end.

Ryan Routh must have been crazy, right? Depends how low your opinion of the media is. Because this particular would-be Trump assassin, Ryan Routh, was actually a media darling. Routh was quoted frequently as a sophisticated pro-Ukraine activist. He was quoted in The New York Times and Semafor and even by one of my Free Press colleagues (check out her recent reflection on interviewing Routh in 2023). He was parroting Kamala on Twitter and sounded honestly pretty sane. 

Responses to the thwarted assassination varied. The activist Rachel Vindman—wife of retired lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman, who helped impeach Trump—thought it was pretty funny. “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon,” she wrote. (She later apologized and deleted the tweet.) 

Others argued that someone with a gun in the shrubs does not an assassination attempt make. As the leftist writer Ed Krassenstein put it: “No physical [a]ssassination attempt was ever made by Ryan Routh on Trump’s life. In fact, he never even took a shot at Trump or anyone else, nor did he have a line of sight to Trump.” It’s not an authentic assassination attempt till he shoots and hits! Otherwise, it’s just sparkling stalking.

Or perhaps, if it was an assassination attempt, then it was the former president’s fault? Have you ever considered that? The Cincinnati Enquirer published a letter to the editor with the headline: “Opinion: There is no place in politics for violence. That said, the former president, Donald Trump, brings a lot of this stuff on himself.” (They later changed the headline.) 

He’s nearly dying, and he’s doing it wrong, says the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols: “Donald Trump is using another possible attempt on his life to inflame tensions in America, which is one more reason he should never be president again.”

And others said that if you found yourself upset that someone tried to kill the former president again, well, that’s pretty partisan of you. Republicans are outraged, Politico says. It’s really not hard to argue that no one, even an opposition leader, should be assassinated in America. Like, take Green Party candidate Jill Stein—I don’t like her and I don’t want her to win. And yet—stay with me, now—I don’t want her to be assassinated. It’s that easy! For America’s media, it is not that easy. 

→ Where are you, Mrs. President? Kamala Harris is being very, very selective about which reporters she’ll allow to ask her questions, and this week even The New York Times is calling her out for it, which means she has turned them down for interviews. It means the staff was like, Kamala, we are the stans, and Kamala said, you’re not stanning hard enough. Kamala said, I don’t see enough coconut, and she meant it. Kamala Harris exists as an idea, a meme, a catchy jingle in my head. Interviews with journalists who don’t preface by saying they are huge fans and can they please have an autograph? That’s beneath her, she says (no words spoken obviously, but I feel it). 

Trump, meanwhile, won’t stop talking. Trump will answer questions from anyone at any time, for any length of time. If he walks by a Labrador retriever giving him a quizzical stare, he’ll engage. For how long did Trump stay on a Fox News comedy show Wednesday night? The full hour. He gave Gutfeld! an hour. No one even knows Gutfelds!’s first name! The closest Kamala got to a big media interview this week was being interviewed by Oprah onstage at one of her own campaign events in Michigan last night.

One reason for Kamala’s hiding from the press might be that she wants America to forget she’s currently the vice president. Here’s how she frames her campaign this week:

Kamala wants to be crystal clear: She has never been to the White House. She’s never even seen it. Her campaign is simple: WE START NEW! And we are NOT going back. Finally, the page is turned, the new way found! She cannot wait to get to the White House for the very first time and find the people who set us on this bad old way so she can chart the new way. 

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→ J.D. Vance deleted his old, better self: J.D. Vance used to be a smart, interesting conservative with nuanced views and a strong moral core, CNN reveals this week in a shocking report. Here is the link to J.D. sounding like a sensible man: “When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites.” J.D., who wrote that for a blog in 2012, later asked for it to be deleted. The guy who runs the blog obliged. See, J.D. is thorough. He makes sure to find the most appealing parts of himself and hide them, bit by bit. It’s 2024. Who cares about swing voters? J.D. is running for vice president of Twitter trolls, so crack open a Mountain Dew and delete the hopey-changey blog post, brother. If the American electorate were indeed all guys who post Haiti cat memes and laugh about women hitting the wall (at maybe 25 years old?), J.D. would definitely win.

Then, to really get popular, J.D. said this week, let’s fight about healthcare! J.D.’s bringing preexisting conditions back into play, baby! It’s simple, he says; we’ll split up the healthy and the sick into totally different insurance pools: “Now, what that will also do is allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” So the sick just have to pay more. I’m so curious about J.D.’s strategy, which I would describe as goblin-like: randomly mean and creepy (cat-eating) mixed with ancient grudges (Obamacare). 

→ Hezbollah has to give consent: Israel planted explosives in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that were then sold to Hezbollah—and this week, Israel detonated those explosives remotely, destroying Hezbollah’s communications system. The international community is aghast! Yes, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel for almost a year now. Yes, Hezbollah bombed a youth soccer game in Israel, killing 12 Israeli Druze children in Majdal Shams (Hezbollah denied involvement). But that’s not starting war. No. That’s solidarity. When Israel hits back at Hezbollah, that’s starting war. 

As Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur put it: “Israel hasn’t been defending itself for months, this is just an offensive war that Israel is starting all over the Middle East.” Again, guys, I’m being really clear: The soccer field bombing was mere Hezbollah self-defense. You have no idea how hard a Druze teen kicks a soccer ball. 

Here’s UN chief António Guterres: “I think it’s very important that there is an effective control of civilian objects, not to weaponize civilian objects.” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has this to say: “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict.” It’s only odd because she didn’t say anything about Hezbollah bombing that Israeli kids’ soccer game. She’s actually never tweeted about Hezbollah before. Odd. Weird. Civilian objects, like the pagers that terrorists use, are sacred. 

Here is Heidi Matthews, a Harvard-educated professor who teaches on the laws of war, after the Hezbollah pager explosions: “What we are witnessing is the intentional degradation of humanity and racialized dehumanisation [sic] in real time.” And she called it “an unconscionable terrorist attack.” Meanwhile, here she is, that very same professor, after October 7: “A lot of obfuscation going on about what the right of resistance looks like in brutally asymmetrical contexts.” Fascinating. 

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was injured, because of course he too was carrying a pager. And in response to all this, Hezbollah is lobbing more missiles over to Israel, including at a town named for Trump, Ramat Trump. We’ll be following.