Donald Trump Survives Second Assassination Attempt

On Sunday, as former President Donald Trump played golf on the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach, a gunman lay in wait at the edge of the golf course. The gunman had been hidden there since 2am, and he’d brought an AK-47 rifle with a scope and a GoPro.

The Republican presidential candidate’s last publicly scheduled campaign event had been on Saturday evening in the state of Utah. 1:30pm Sunday afternoon found him a few miles from his Mar-A-Lago Florida residence on hole 5 of his golf course. Ryan Routh was waiting for him in the shrubbery only 30-50 yards from hole 6.

A Secret Service agent moved one hole ahead of the former President to scope out the area and noticed a rifle barrel poking through the chain link fence at the perimeter of the golf course. Thinking quickly, the Secret Service agent fired his weapon in the direction of the gun.

A bystander outside the court noticed a man run out of the bushes and jump into a black SUV. She took a picture of the license plates and sent pictures to law enforcement, who ran the plate number through a tracking system. Within minutes law enforcement had surrounded the car and forced it off Interstate 95, 45 miles north of the golf course.

The man they caught and identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, age 58, had spent most of his life in North Carolina, moving to Hawaii in May. NBC News found records of more than 100 criminal counts against Routh in North Carolina, including the possession of a machine gun. According to NBC, “Records also show convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property and hit-and-run. In those cases, which included misdemeanor convictions for violations such as resisting an officer and driving on a suspended license, the defendant received a suspended sentence and parole or probation. There is no record of time spent in state prison related to those cases in the early 2000s.”⁠

During a town hall in Flint, Michigan, Trump said Biden and Harris had each called him after the assassination attempt, “He was so nice to me yesterday.…Same with Kamala today. She could not have been nicer,” Trump said.⁠

This second assassination attempt comes only 64 days after a gunman in Butler County, PA attempted to take the former president’s life, grazing his ear with a bullet from an AR-15.

Israeli Pager Attack

On Tuesday, pagers used by hundreds of Hezbollah members exploded in a deadly attack executed with “cinematic precision,” in the words of Axios. Israel's Mossad spy agency had planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported months before by Iranian-backed Hezbollah. According to The New York Times, “The pagers began beeping just after 3:30 in the afternoon in Lebanon on Tuesday, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their leadership in a chorus of chimes, melodies, and buzzes. But it wasn’t the militants’ leaders. The pagers had been sent by Hezbollah’s archenemy…

“By the end of the day, at least a dozen people were dead and more than 2,700 were wounded, many of them maimed. And the following day, 20 more people were killed and hundreds wounded when walkie-talkies in Lebanon also began mysteriously exploding.”

The Israeli Mosad had booby-trapped each of the pagers with as little as one to two ounces of explosive material implanted next to the battery of each pager. By The New York Times reporting, the Israelis had not merely sabotaged the pagers, they actually had a hand in creating them, using multiple shell companies to mask the true identity of the manufacturers of the pagers being used by Hezbollah.⁠

Israel has headed up high-tech operations to take out senior Hezbollah commandos in Lebanon, at times using cell phone ping data to pinpoint targets. Distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, instructed his operatives to “bury” their cell phones and use pagers instead, which would be limited in functionality but would not give their location away. Little did he know that the pagers in the pockets of his men would be Israeli weapons.

Other News

• Feds cut interest rates: On Wednesday, the Fed cut interest rates by 0.5%. Many economists see the interest rate cut as a hedge against the rising unemployment rate, and a move necessary to maintain a stable economy. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Eleven of 12 Fed voters backed the cut, which brings the benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between 4.75% and 5%. Quarterly projections released Wednesday showed a narrow majority of officials penciled in cuts that would lower rates by at least a quarter-point each at meetings in November and December.”
• U.S. passports can now be renewed online: The State Department has announced that a web portal for online passport renewal is now open. This new service isn't available for children, and first-time passport applicants still need to apply by mail.