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      Gunman Appears to Have Acted Alone, but Motives Remain Unclear

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      The 20-year-old gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania appears to have acted alone, F.B.I. officials said on Sunday, but investigators remain unsure of his motives and political beliefs and have not yet been able to determine what evidence might be on his cellphone.Agents found what officials described as a “rudimentary” explosive device in the gunman’s vehicle, and possible explosives were also found at his residence, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.F.B.I. officials confirmed that the gunman’s father had legally purchased the AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle used in the shooting. But they said it was not clear whether the father gave his son the weapon or whether he took it without permission.Kevin Rojek, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, said the family was cooperating with the investigation.Dozens of federal investigators scrambled to determine why the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., climbed atop a nearby building and squeezed off a volley of shots on Saturday evening that injured Mr. Trump, killed a man attending the rally with his family and left two other people at the site critically injured before he was killed by a Secret Service sniper.F.B.I. officials said Mr. Crooks did not have a history of mental illness or criminal activity.He does not appear to have left behind any written statement that could easily explain his motivations or provide clues to any external connections or influences, according to a senior law enforcement official.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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      The Reason People Aren’t Telling Joe Biden the Truth

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      They entered with courage and exited as cowards. In the past two weeks, several leaders have told me they arrived at meetings with President Biden planning to have serious discussions about whether he should withdraw from the 2024 election. They all chickened out.I don’t know whether Mr. Biden should drop out of the race. It’s impossible to predict the outcome with certainty. My concern is about the decision process. There’s a gap between what people say behind the president’s back and what they say to his face. Instead of dissent and debate, they’re falling victim to groupthink.According to the original theory, groupthink happens when people become so cohesive and close-knit that they put harmony above honesty. Extensive evidence has debunked that idea. The root causes of silence are not social solidarity but fear and futility. People bite their tongues when they doubt that it’s safe and worthwhile to speak up. Leaders who want to make informed decisions need to make it clear they value candid input.Mr. Biden has done the opposite, declaring first that only the Lord almighty could change his mind and then saying that he’ll drop out only if polls say there’s no way for him to win. That sends a strong message: If you’re not an immortal being or a time traveler from the future, it’s pointless to share any concerns about the viability of his candidacy.The president is in a tough spot. Even conceding privately that he might consider stepping aside could crush the confidence of his advisers and risk a leak to the press. But a little humility could go a long way: “I believe I’m the best qualified to govern, but I don’t know for sure. I think I can win, but I might be wrong.” Along with inviting dissent, these acts of receptiveness might make Mr. Biden more persuasive. People put more faith in a balanced argument and a leader who wants to learn.Showing openness can raise people’s confidence, but it’s not always enough to quell their fear. In our research, Constantinos Coutifaris and I found that it helps for leaders to criticize themselves out loud. That way, instead of just claiming that they want the truth, they can show that they can handle the truth. If he hasn’t already, Mr. Biden could do that by gathering his family and advisers to watch a video of the debate with him and then kicking off a candid discussion by talking about what he thought he did wrong. Reviewing the game tape together would demonstrate that he’s willing to take an honest look in the mirror.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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      The Sunday Read: ‘A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies’

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      Tally Abecassis and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeCindy Elgan glanced into the lobby of her office and saw a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the front counter. “Let’s start a video recording, just in case this goes sideways,” Elgan, 65, told one of her employees in the Esmeralda County clerk’s office. She had come to expect skepticism, conspiracy theories and even threats related to her job as an election administrator. She grabbed her annotated booklet of Nevada state laws, said a prayer for patience and walked into the lobby to confront the latest challenge to America’s electoral process.The deputy was standing alongside a woman that Elgan recognized as Mary Jane Zakas, 77, a longtime elementary schoolteacher and a leader in the local Republican Party. She often asked for a sheriff’s deputy to accompany her to the election’s office, in case her meetings became contentious.“I hope you’re having a blessed morning,” Zakas said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are still very concerned about the security of their votes. They’ve lost all trust in the system.”After the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump’s denials and accusations of voter fraud spread outward from the White House to even the country’s most remote places, like Esmeralda County. Elgan knew most of the 620 voters in the town. Still, they accused her of being paid off and skimming votes away from Trump. And even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.There are a lot of ways to listen to “The Daily.” Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      America’s Gerontocracy Problem Goes Beyond the President

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      Whether or not Joe Biden persists in his run for president, America’s gerontocratic crisis will keep on worsening. But high-profile symptoms like Mr. Biden’s difficulties provide an opportunity to confront the issue — a social form of sclerosis that will persist unless and until more power is transferred from the wrinkled to the rest.Gerontocracy transcends government as a full-scale social phenomenon, in which older people accumulate power of different kinds, and then retain it.This form of power is both old and new. The term “gerontocracy” was popularized a century ago by the Scottish anthropologist J.G. Frazer to refer to a very early form of government, in which power reposed in councils of elders. Since premodern societies valued the past over the future, and the ancestral over the innovative, it was only natural to allocate authority to those with cumulative experience and nearer the realm of the honored dead.When the Constitution imposed an age minimum of 30 (and no maximum) on the Senate, that restriction alone excluded roughly three-quarters of the white population from serving. This set up the distant possibility of our present, in which Mr. Biden could become one of the youngest senators ever when he took his seat at age 30, while Dianne Feinstein (age 90), Robert Byrd (92) and Strom Thurmond (100) all either died in office or just months after retirement.The Supreme Court is also an outpost of elder rule. The Constitution gives federal judges life tenure, so it is entirely up to them when they finally depart, alive or dead. And it is not surprising when they die in the midst of opining on the law: Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87, William Rehnquist at 80 and Antonin Scalia at 79. At least five federal judges have passed 100 years of age while on the bench.The Supreme Court was quasi-gerontocratic from the start, like the Senate, only more so. The popular and professional ideology of the judicial role emphasizes even more the association of age with wisdom. And the Supreme Court’s oracular purposes, priestly trappings and mystical rituals make it resemble, more than any other American political institution, gerontocratic clubs like the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals.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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      A Female President? Big Deal.

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      In her concession speech to President-elect Donald Trump in November 2016, Hillary Clinton declared, “We have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will — and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”There was lots of talk about gender in politics then. Many of us thought that Clinton lost in part because of both hard-core misogyny and a softer unconscious bias that led just enough voters to think of presidents only as guys in suits.I’ve been thinking lately of that glass ceiling because of a conversation we’re not having — one about the gender of the Democratic nominee if Joe Biden takes advice from so many of us to drop out of the presidential race.If Biden withdraws, his most likely successor is a Black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls a bit better than Biden against Trump. Some of us have urged instead that Democrats nominate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, believing that she would be the nominee most likely to defeat Trump. And a few of us have mentioned the talented Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a former governor and a star of the Biden cabinet.Our argument isn’t a feminist one about the significance of elevating women. It’s not even an argument that these politicians would perform better than Biden as president. Astonishingly given our history, it’s that they would also be more electable.Perhaps even more intriguing, gender has largely gone unmentioned. I’ve had people push back at my recommendation of Whitmer on the basis that she’s untested nationally, that choosing her over Harris would antagonize Black voters, that her name recognition is weak. All fair objections. But I haven’t heard anyone scoff: But Whitmer is a woman. We tried that in 2016, and it got us Trump.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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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.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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      Kennedy Sent Apologetic Text to Woman Who Accused Him of Sexual Assault

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      The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. privately apologized last week to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in a recent magazine article, The Washington Post reported on Friday.The woman, Eliza Cooney, now 48, had worked for Mr. Kennedy’s family as a weekend babysitter in her early 20s, the year she graduated from college, and at the same time was an intern at his environmental legal clinic at Pace Law School in White Plains, N.Y. In an article in Vanity Fair last week, she said Mr. Kennedy made unwanted sexual advances toward her while she was at his family home in the late 1990s, including by groping her in a pantry.Ms. Cooney told The Post that Mr. Kennedy had called her twice on July 3 of this year, after the Vanity Fair article had run, and then sent her two text messages, which she also showed to The New York Times.“I hope you are well,” he wrote in the first message. “Please call me if you have a moment.”In the second, sent shortly after midnight, he wrote: “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings.”He said he hoped she would be willing to speak to him over the phone or in person.Mr. Kennedy declined to comment on the messages or on Ms. Cooney’s allegations. In a podcast interview last week, after the Vanity Fair article came out, he declined to address her allegations but said he was not a “church boy.” He added, “I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”Ms. Cooney did not respond to his outreach, and did not welcome it, she told The Times. “Sending a text at 12:33 a.m. is not considering his actions’ effects on someone else — me,” she said. “At that time, on Fourth of July weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to him.”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