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      Secret Service Did Not Search Trump Golf Course Perimeter Before Gunman’s Arrest

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      The Secret Service did not search the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Sunday before former President Donald J. Trump began his round, an acknowledgment that has put the besieged agency under renewed scrutiny two months after a similar episode in Pennsylvania.The decision raises further questions about whether the Secret Service has the resources and ability to adequately perform its duties during a time of increasing violence and a unique campaign between a sitting vice president and a former president.While the agency’s acting director hailed a Secret Service agent for acting swiftly and preventing any harm to Mr. Trump on Sunday, the F.B.I. said that data from a gunman’s cellphone indicated he spent almost 12 hours near the course before he aimed a rifle in the direction of Mr. Trump while he was golfing.In remarks to reporters at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office on Monday afternoon, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the Secret Service’s acting director, said, “The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there.”Mr. Rowe said Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, did not have an outing on the course on his official schedule. Mr. Rowe did not clarify in his statements whether this meant that agents did not have time to sweep the golf course. Yet it is public knowledge that Mr. Trump frequently plays golf at one of his Florida courses on Sundays, raising the risk level for the former president.Mr. Rowe praised his agents for spotting the barrel of a gun poking through the bushes of the golf club and firing at the suspect, Ryan W. Routh, 58, before he could get off a shot. A manhunt commenced, leading to Mr. Routh being detained soon after. He was charged in federal court on Monday with possession of a firearm as a felon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Suspect Never Took a Shot at Trump but Hid Undetected for 12 Hours

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      Ryan W. Routh was charged with two federal gun crimes a day after Secret Service agents fired on him as he pointed a rifle toward the golf course where former President Donald Trump was playing.The man arrested after pointing a rifle through a fence ringing former President Donald J. Trump’s golf course in Florida on Sunday never got off a shot, but appears to have remained undetected for nearly 12 hours before being spotted by a Secret Service agent who drove him off with a volley of gunfire, officials said on Monday.The man, Ryan W. Routh, 58, a building contractor with an extensive criminal history, never had the former president in his line of sight but was able to hide in the bushes just outside the fence on the edge of the course until Mr. Trump was only hundreds of yards away.Mr. Routh did not fire at “our agents” before they fired at him, Ronald Rowe Jr., the acting Secret Service director, said at a news conference in West Palm Beach, Fla.Mr. Routh wore a blue inmate jumpsuit at his initial appearance in a federal courtroom in Florida on Monday. He faces two felony gun charges that allow the authorities to keep him in custody while they continue their investigation into what the F.B.I. has called an assassination attempt.The F.B.I.’s top agent in Miami, Jeffrey B. Veltri, speaking to reporters, said the bureau had no information that the suspect was working with anybody else. Agents in Hawaii and North Carolina — two states where the suspect lived — had fanned out to conduct interviews as part of a broad investigation into his travels, how he had acquired the rifle and what his motivations had been.Among the unanswered questions is how Mr. Routh knew Mr. Trump would be on the course. While Mr. Trump frequently plays golf at his properties, his Sunday outing was not a publicly announced appearance, unlike the rally in July in Butler, Pa., where a gunman got off multiple shots, leaving Mr. Trump slightly wounded, one rally attendee dead and two others wounded.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Deletes His Post Asking Why No One Has Tried to Assassinate Biden or Harris

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      Hours after what the F.B.I. called a second attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk wrote on his social media site — and then deleted — a post suggesting it was odd that nobody had tried to kill President Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.Mr. Musk said the post on X had been intended as a joke.In response to a user who asked, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?” Mr. Musk, who has endorsed the former president and comments frequently on the U.S. presidential campaign, wrote: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” His post, which was captured by X users, included a thinking-face emoji.Mr. Musk took down the post after it immediately drew outrage. X says he has more than 197 million followers on the platform, which he bought in 2022.“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” he said in a follow-up post early Monday. “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he wrote in another.The Secret Service said on Sunday that it had fired on an armed man at Mr. Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., while the former president was playing. A suspect was later arrested. The incident followed one in July in which Mr. Trump was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin while he was holding a rally in Pennsylvania. The shooter was killed by law enforcement officers.Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, has established a reputation as an edgy plutocrat not bound by social conventions when it comes to expressing his opinions and broadcasting what is on his mind to his followers. His power and wealth have made him relatively impervious to criticism, and his bluntness has made him a hero to many on the right who oppose what they call political correctness.Several of his recent posts about the election have drawn criticism. Last week, he amplified the bogus right-wing claims that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. And after the music superstar Taylor Swift said last week that she would vote for Ms. Harris, signing her endorsement “Childless Cat Lady” in a reference to comments by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Musk appeared to offer jokingly to impregnate Ms. Swift, writing: “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” More

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      Trump está a salvo tras reportarse un tiroteo en su campo de golf

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      La Oficina Federal de Investigación dijo que estaba investigando lo que parecía ser un segundo intento de asesinato contra el expresidente Donald Trump.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La Oficina Federal de Investigación dijo el domingo que estaba investigando lo que parecía ser un intento de asesinato al expresidente Donald Trump mientras jugaba al golf en uno de sus clubes en Florida.Las autoridades dijeron que Trump estaba a salvo. Hace poco menos de dos meses, fue herido en un intento de asesinato durante un mitin en Butler, Pensilvania.“El FBI ha respondido a West Palm Beach, Florida, y está investigando lo que parece ser un intento de asesinato al expresidente Trump”, dijo la agencia en un comunicado.Los disparos se produjeron el domingo en el terreno del Trump International Golf Course West Palm Beach, dijo la oficina del alguacil del condado de Palm Beach. “El presidente Trump está a salvo tras los disparos en sus inmediaciones”, dijo en un comunicado Steven Cheung, director de comunicación de la campaña de Trump.El Servicio Secreto abrió fuego contra quien estaba armado y consideraba una amenaza para el expresidente, dijo un funcionario informado del asunto. No estaba claro de inmediato si la persona recibió un disparo.Las fuerzas del orden recuperaron un rifle semiautomático del tipo AR-15 o AK-47 tras el incidente y están realizando un rastreo para determinar quién compró el arma y dónde se vendió, según dos funcionarios con conocimiento de la situación.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Shaken but Upbeat After Secret Service Stops Gunman

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      Former President Donald J. Trump was said to be shocked at what the F.B.I. described as the second attempt on his life in two months, but he was already cracking jokes about it on Sunday afternoon in phone calls with advisers and allies.One such call, with his former White House doctor, Representative Ronny L. Jackson of Texas, reflected the mixture of unease and jocularity that defined Mr. Trump’s immediate reaction. Mr. Jackson said in an interview that he called Mr. Trump to check in on him around two hours after the Secret Service had driven off a gunman from the fence line of Mr. Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course.“He told me he was always glad to hear from me but he was glad he didn’t need my services today,” said Mr. Jackson, who tended to Mr. Trump’s wounded ear while traveling with him the day after an assassin’s bullet flew within inches of his brain, at a rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13.“I just told him I was glad he was OK and he said he can’t believe this happened,” Mr. Jackson added. “But he said he’s doing well and the team was doing well.”Mr. Trump had been playing golf with his friend and campaign donor, the real estate investor Steve Witkoff, around 1:30 p.m. when gunshots rang out. Mr. Trump was between the fifth and sixth holes and Secret Service agents were traveling ahead of him, scoping out potential threats on the course. An agent had spotted the barrel of a semiautomatic rifle poking through the bushes. The agent opened fire on the man, who escaped in his car before being caught by police later, law enforcement officials said.Mr. Trump gave his own renditions of the episode to advisers and allies. Mr. Trump’s friend, the Fox News host Sean Hannity, went on air to deliver dramatic eyewitness accounts he said he received from both Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Stands By False Pet-Eating Claims Roiling Ohio City

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      Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, doubled down Sunday on the false claims that he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, which has received numerous bomb threats in the days since the claims surfaced.Mr. Vance said on CNN that the claims, which have been debunked by city officials in Springfield, had come from “firsthand accounts from my constituents,” and attacked the interviewer, Dana Bash, for fact-checking him, calling her a “Democratic propagandist” for connecting his and Mr. Trump’s words to the bomb threats.“I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months,” he said in the interview. He went on: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”When Ms. Bash noted he had said “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”The false claims about the immigrants in Springfield have exploded since Mr. Vance became the first prominent national figure to promote them last week, repeating them on social media. The Trump campaign quickly amplified them, and Mr. Vance subsequently acknowledged that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”But Mr. Trump repeated the claims to an audience of tens of millions of people during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday.During the interview, Ms. Bash noted that Springfield city officials had asked national figures like Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump to stop demonizing the migrants, who are mostly in the country legally under a temporary authorization program for people whose homelands are in crisis. “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” the mayor, Rob Rue, told WSYX, a local news station in Ohio.Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday morning that the claim that migrants were eating pets was “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.” He said that while there were some “challenges” involved in accommodating thousands of migrants, they had benefited Springfield economically. More

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      Trump Dislikes Ukraine for the Most MAGA of Reasons

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      It’s certainly understandable that many millions of Americans have focused on Springfield, Ohio, after the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. When Trump repeated the ridiculous rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were killing and eating household pets, he not only highlighted once again his own vulnerability to conspiracy theories, it put the immigrant community in Springfield in serious danger. Bomb threats have forced two consecutive days of school closings and some Haitian immigrants are now “scared for their lives.”That’s dreadful. It’s inexcusable. But it’s not Trump’s only terrible moment in the debate. Most notably, he refused to say — in the face of repeated questions — that he wanted Ukraine to win its war with Russia. Trump emphasized ending the war over winning the war, a position that can seem reasonable, right until you realize that attempting to force peace at this stage of the conflict would almost certainly cement a Russian triumph. Russia would hold an immense amount of Ukrainian territory and Putin would rightly believe he bested both Ukraine and the United States. He would have rolled the “iron dice” of war and he would have won.There is no scenario in which a Russian triumph is in America’s best interest. A Russian victory would not only expand Russia’s sphere of influence, it would represent a human rights catastrophe (Russia has engaged in war crimes against Ukraine’s civilian population since the beginning of the war) and threaten the extinction of Ukrainian national identity. It would reset the global balance of power.In addition, a Russian victory would make World War III more, not less, likely. It would teach Vladimir Putin that aggression pays, that the West’s will is weak and that military conquest is preferable to diplomatic engagement. China would learn a similar lesson as it peers across the strait at Taiwan.If Vladimir Putin is stopped now — while Ukraine and the West are imposing immense costs in Russian men and matériel — it will send the opposite message, making it far more likely that the invasion of Ukraine is Putin’s last war, not merely his latest.But that’s not how Trump thinks about Ukraine. He exhibits deep bitterness toward the country, and it was that bitterness that helped expose how dangerous he was well before the Big Lie and Jan. 6.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More