>> Hey everybody. I absolutely hate that we have to do this. I'm Jerry D. H. Sexton. My good friend and partner Nick Houseman who's been on vacation is interrupting the end of that vacation in order to address the breaking news. Obviously, you all know what this is in response to at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump survived an apparent assassination attempt. Multiple rounds appeared to have been fired at him. One spectator was killed. It appears that the alleged shooter was killed. There is a lot to get into here, but Nick, it is good to see you. I hate that we have to do an emergency thing like this. All of this is terrible, just awful. >> Yeah. For everything that he comes in against worse and worse, other than the fact that he survived, that's always good. You don't want to hear anybody die of political violence. But the notion that they'll be able to sort of play this into a lot of different ways politically as a benefit to the Republican party is frustrating the right word, Jared? >> I think frustrating is a euphemism and I appreciate it. First of all, I just want to say, and I think it's important, I'm glad you've already broached on it. I'm already seeing a ton of people who are making light of the fact that there was an attempted assassination of a political leader. I think Nick, you join me in saying that Donald Trump is an existential threat to this nation. I want him to be defeated electorally. I want him to be driven from public life because he has been rebuked by voters and society at large. There is absolutely no room for this type of authoritarian bullshit, and I think that it does damage to not just our society, but individuals, and literally everything the moment that you start wishing for things like that. >> The only problem I have with characterizing that, which is everything he says 100% accurate, is that it could be twisted to say that when you characterize Trump in that way, it will lead to violence perhaps against him because people will see him as this threat that you are accurately describing as. They're going to turn it around on us. We keep warning people that the more Trump is, his rhetoric is so violent and so dividing that we are always worried and we've seen it already happen, that people are going to get violence committed upon them. They're going to be able to turn this right around and say, "You've been calling him authoritarian in the threat's democracy, and this is what happens. See?" >> I've already received messages to that, and I've already been blamed for this attempt on Donald Trump, I think it is repellent and repugnant. I also, because this is the podcast, this is what Nick and I do, I want to say a few things. One, this is added to a large swath of either political assassinations or attempted assassinations. Of course, we saw Shinzo Abe killed in Japan. Multiple leaders in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela who have been targeted. I need to remind people Gretchen Whitmer was being targeted for a kidnapping and assassination plot. Steve Scalise and members of the GOP were obviously targeted. Multiple plots to kill Barack Obama, an attack on Nancy Pelosi's household and husband. The list goes on and on. The violence, this political violence cycle continues on and on and this is what happens when we get in this environment. Nick, I want to say two things on that. One, you had mentioned very, very recently that you would not be shocked if there would be some type of assassination attempt on either one of the political candidates. We also talked about how the environment here was growing to the point where we were looking at something that looked a lot like the 1960s in which political violence became one of the foremost, not just possibilities, but almost guarantees. Not only is this ugly and awful, I think we can sit here with certainty and say that there is going to be violence or at least a potential for violence that follows this and this might not even be the last chapter in a larger story. And we still have all of the different things to talk about here, but I think we need to take a look at this, see it as the horror that it is, and also what is capable of following it. For sure. And my memory was I said Trump would probably, there would be an assassination attempt on him and it very well could have been something that was staged. This one is not staged. It does not say staged, no. Yeah, there would be no circumstance where he'd say, you know, because you know, Trump continues to be a very lucky man, right? A rich white guy in this country can be if it can make his own luck. A quarter of an inch in the other direction and he wouldn't be alive today to raise his fists and pump it to the audience. I just want to say on that note, Nick, I don't know if you've gotten this piece of information. A lot of my sources are now confirming what was initially sort of floated, which is that Trump's injury to his ear might very well be from a fragment of the teleprompter, which might have been hit by a bullet, which is a wild thing. And I'm glad that you brought this up, by the way. And I think that because we are a podcast that attempts to be better, I want to be honest, and I don't know how you felt about it. I felt when this happened very much like what you just said about what you had floated. I originally when this started, I was like, man, this is very fishy. This is very convenient. But as the facts emerged, I was able to get over that conspiracism. There's all kinds of different things to talk about here, but we need to remember the last thing that we should do is go down the rabbit hole that we've been criticizing. Donald Trump supporters, MAGA supporters, all those people, and not follow this thing down a rabbit hole that makes us feel better or somehow or another, creates a reality we're more comfortable with for sure. And I saw an interview with a guy who was there who said that there were two minutes, three minutes where they saw the sniper on the roof, getting into position, trying to wave somebody down. And it's not like you already mentioned a whole bunch of acts that have been committed recently, but you could go back from starting, you know, with JFK through, we know that, you know, Ford, there was at least one or two, SASH tips on Ford, Reagan, and the Reagan one is even worse. So basically what I can conclude is that the secret service kind of sucks. It's terrible. No, you could not have nailed that more on the head. The secret service is actually really terrible. Yeah, you know, we had another guy who had reached the White House grounds and got kind of close to the White House while the bomb was in the White House. I believe that was when it was. I don't think it was Trump. I think it was Obama. And it was like they continually display over the course of all these years a very distinct inability to do their job, which might be impossible to do. But the idea that somebody would have been crawling around on a rooftop of one of the few rooftops in that area. And nobody would have reacted until he got, you know, the latest reporting, have you heard how many shots were fired by the sniper until they got him, you know, it's unclear because one of the things that always happens in this and you know, you're a historian of the JFK assassination. Whenever these things happen, the accounts vary wildly of how many shots are heard. Some people have said three, some have said five, some have said seven. We're not going to know that for a very long time. If we ever know it for certain, right? Well, I mean, certainly you can hear on the video, you hear more than one shot. So the idea that he got even one shot off much less to or whatever it was is it seems to be an incredible happening when you have supposedly, you know, the Secret Service out there trying to, you know, lock the place down. And so the fact that someone saw that. And so it just never ceases to amaze me that there could be these critical failures by people in their roles. And again, the you know, I suppose it would make sense if it was a teleprompter because that would have probably been around him in front that maybe had shattered and got him. But again, we are we now know that there's somebody who is has passed away that was behind Trump, I believe at least one person, maybe somebody else in critical condition. It does cast a whole Paul. I do think that that was probably the only chance we're going to we're going to see something like this. I would imagine from here on out at both of these candidates, the likelihood of anything remotely like this coming the past will be almost well, it would have to be really, really almost impossible to pull off again, I would think. I want to say this when I'm not being lipid when I say it. Every staff member of a democratic representative or senator or a state level position needs to be on high alert because what you're saying is true. Like there's going to be a higher alert when it comes to Biden and Trump. The the Republican National Convention, which we have talked about in a second, is going to be a fortress. The DNC, which we're planning on going and covering is going to be a fortress. Like those types of high profile events and figures are going to be locked down. But what we are probably going to see is a slew of threats. What we've already seen, by the way, and Nick, of course, you've been traveling. I just want to give you get you up to speed in our listeners as well. This is merely the list that I have so far of statements from Republicans outside of lionizing Trump and sort of spreading all these now infamous photos of him with blood on his face, which I can't wait to see what the Republican Party does with that. Georgia representative Mike Collins has now claimed that Joe Biden personally ordered the assassination attempt. Ronnie Jackson has blamed MSNBC. Scott Walker has come out and said that Trump was literally saved by the hand of God. We're heading into the RNC next week. It will be locked down. Meanwhile, you know, as well as I do, that the way that the Republican Party is going to talk about this, that MAGA diehards are going to talk about this, it is going to escalate and grow and gain fervor as it happens. And what have they been talking about? It's what we've covered on the show. It's what we've made our work. It is the idea that there is an apocalyptic battle between good and evil that must be won at all costs. We covered it just the other day, the Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation said we're in the middle of a bloodless revolution if the left allows it. You think that that's not going to get picked up and run with? You think that they're not going to put Trump up as some sort of a grand warrior survivor. They went after him legally. Now they're trying to kill him. This thing is not going to cool down. And I know people are calling for cooler heads to prevail, but that is simply not how this is going to play out. Yeah, I mean, obviously the worry could very well be of retaliation and maybe of Biden per se because of the heightened security, but it's soft targets. Like you mentioning, people in and around that aren't as closely guarded could be targets as well as, again, retaliation because you like to sort of imagine the Democratic Party, the left, the progressives. They're the ones who are not violent. They don't want to take up arms. They don't want to do any of these things. It remains to be seen who this person was, but it doesn't really work that way. I think traditionally we're not going to find necessarily somebody who is clearly doing this for one party or the other versus a whole host of issues that they're probably plagued with. But that won't stop probably a lot of hardcore Second Amendment right wing people to take this personally and want to make a statement on their own. And it is it does feel a little bit like we're in the midst of sort of that tumultuous time period we had seen in the 60s when everyone was a lot of people were getting assassinated. And I don't know what to make of it. I mean, are you worried at all about Chicago all of a sudden? I'm worried about a lot of different things. I have to do and I said this man, I want to say that I think I said this back in January or February. I said, this summer prior to the election is going to kick off one of the wildest times that we are ever going to see in at least to this point. You know, it's like that meme where it's like it's the hottest year you we've ever experienced. No, it's the hottest year we've ever experienced so far. And this thing is going to grow because there's no reason not to. And I want to say a couple things on this front. First of all, Nick, we haven't brought up guns like we said, you know, that you was shot at. We have not brought up the fact that we are a deeply unwell country that is absolutely drowning in weapons. And what happens when you have a society that's unwell and drowning in weapons? People who feel powerless or scared are going to pick up those weapons and take matters into their own hands. That's what guns are for. That's why they're marketed. That's why they're sold. That's why America is awash in them. So as a result, we now have this terrible situation. It sucks. Meanwhile, a lot of people who have thought that Donald Trump was endangered and that it was an apocalyptic battle, they've got guns as well. And you know, some of them are maybe as unwell as the person who did this. So all you need are people who have been pushed to the brink of radicalization that all they need is a gentle nudge. And this isn't a gentle nudge. It is a push. And when you talk about something like everything from the RNC, which Nick, it's this coming week, it's next week. I can't even imagine what that thing is going to look like. And that even in its best time, if you remember back in 2020, I mean, even when it was like televised, it was unhinged. You know, in 2016, unhinged. This thing is going to take on a flavor and a volume and move forward. And by the way, you've been gone. I don't know if you haven't turned on the news. There's been a massive nomination crisis within the Democratic Party that is eating itself and is engaging in like a soft civil war. Nothing right now feels good. Nothing right now feels conducive to this thing getting better. And I look at it and I don't want to be terrified of it. But I also want to be honest about what this might look like. And it's not great. I got a couple of things. So the gun issue, this will be a rallying cry. And I guarantee you you're going to hear people at the RNC say, we need more guns. Someone else in there, they could have shot the sniper before the secret soldiers did, you know what I mean? That's going to be the call. And, you know, we had Adam Wiggler and recently, but the first time we had him on, and I had an interview with him, we talked about what would have happened if there was some awful, like the worst, you know, gun violence we've ever seen, we all rallied around that awful thing, which let's just pretend, let's just say Trump didn't make it out of this, right? The guy ended up having better aim. That would have probably been the catalyst for someone saying, once and for all, wait a minute, guys, we have to stop this gun violence. We have to, you know, do something that proper gun legislation. And Adam had predicted that even if they had gotten that through, even let's just say it was a horrible thing that happened to Trump, the Supreme Court would strike it down anyway, eventually when someone challenged that law. So we are so stuck in this ridiculous, you know, cycle of what Second Amendment's supposed to mean. And it's hard to imagine that we can't ever, we'll never have any kind of move it either way. And then what's interesting now is, how does this affect Biden? You know, is this going to have any influence on Biden and whether or not he's going to get in or get out of the race or stay in the race or get out of the race? Is this going to say, well, he's going to really triple and quadruple down now because of this. It's really interesting because there was a bit of waffling, perhaps, maybe, where there was still a lot of pressure on him to drop out and maybe this sort of prevents that from the pressure from increasing anymore. By the way, Nick, just a little bit of information that is trickling in. It seems that there is a, oh God, I've got an update from JD Vance here in just a second as well, the possible running away in Donald Trump. But it appears that a lot of reports are now saying that the weapon is surprise, surprise, an AR 15 type rifle, which shouldn't be a surprise. Also that just to give people a preview where this is going, Biden had mentioned earlier today that if reelected that he was going to try and ban assault style rifles, we'll undoubtedly get tucked into all this. JD Vance, absolute piece of shit and blight on on planet earth and possible running may of Donald Trump says, quote, today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is the president Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. So what will we see probably among the rank and file of the Republican Party, either Joe Biden in the deep state did this or that they have gone ahead and created the situation in which this thing could occur. Again, neither great. Neither works very well. Was that all JD Vance? That was JD Vance. Okay. Real fast. I just want to say, by the way, Nick, you brought up something that we need to touch on. We are talking about politics here. We can't like, first of all, this is an absolutely vile thing. It sucks in every way possible political violence is only going to be get more political violence. It is awful. We also are in, we're just a few months away from a presidential election. And by the way, one thing that you have to think about as this is occurring, I don't know what's going to happen with Joe Biden. You don't know what's going to happen to Joe Biden. Like that stuff is happening so far deep in the halls of power. We have no idea how that's going to play out. We also don't have any idea how does a campaign work like this? Like Trump's not going to suspend his campaign. The Biden campaign has gone ahead and suspended its ads and attacks on Donald Trump right now, who even knows how long that goes, who even knows how this thing moves forward. Like the tone and the tenor and the shape of everything that's going on right now is so far up in the air. And Nick, I'm a historian and like, I'm an analyst. I have no idea where this is going. We have not really had much in the way of historical precedent for anything that we're dealing with right now. Right. I mean, I'm trying to think of like, well, you know, Reagan was already in the office when there was a assassination attempt on him. Ford is the same. Yeah, because, well, it would have been great. It's 68 would have been the only thing, but fortunately, RFK didn't survive. Again, 1960 is the only thing you can really point to at this point. Right. So again, you know, what is this going to mean? I mean, I think what here's the thing, again, I lament that we have to speak in these terms when we're talking about someone's life, but like this assassination attempt isn't going to change any votes who anybody was already like for Biden isn't going to switch their vote, right? And certainly anybody who was for Trump isn't going to switch or, you know, that will now it'll give them a rallying cry. So again, I don't know. Do we have any kind of do you have a sense of what that is? I mean, we're talking about like these these undecided voters and their battling desperately for I don't know that we can know that right now. I don't know that we can know that right now. All I know and by the way, Donald Trump has posted something on Truth Social. I'll get to that in just a second. All we know is this here and again, Nick, we can we consider and pontificate as we record this Saturday night, July 13th, we don't know. And I think it's important for us to admit when we don't know we can make educating issues. We can, you know, pontificate all that we don't know. Here's what I do know. We have a see a current president whose party many of that party are trying to pressure him into getting out of the race. We have seen multiple polls that show that the majority of Americans and Democrats want him to step aside from the race. We are watching every appearance that he makes through like our fingers, hoping that things don't fall apart in some kind of awful, nasty way. We have a former president, authoritarian thug who just survived an assassination attempt who is lead. And I mean, we're seeing multiple polls coming out that like certain states you never would have expected being a battleground might suddenly become a battleground who now has survived an alleged assassination event. And there's no way to know. There's no way to know what that calculus adds up to. It doesn't feel good. But I also have doubts about how many people will change their minds about Donald Trump. Do you know what I mean? I don't think this person evokes sympathy. I don't think anything about who he has been evokes sympathy. But I will say, like, we do have a tendency as a culture to see stuff like this and like there's a primal response to it. And I don't know how many Americans might be affected by that. I'm not you're not, I assume. Like, I don't know how many Americans are vulnerable to that. So I there's just no way of telling right now. Well, as he's played the victim card through all this through all the lawsuits and now after this, he has listed plenty of sympathy from tens and millions of voters in America. They all, they sympathize as him being a target as a victim. And this continues to stress that. So this is, I have no doubt there will be something that comes out of this where people will feel for him more than they might have before. And one thing about the, just to get back to the Biden thing, you know, the real reason why Biden simply cannot step down is because if he did, basically, wouldn't there just sort of be a call for the 25th amendment, get him. If he can't run for president, he, how can he be president right now? And so he's kind of trapped in that situation where he would, he would sort of end his presidency. He'd almost have to sort of step down and give Kamala Harris the presidency and then let her run in November. You know what I mean? I feel like that's the biggest calculation they're making right now. And I'm not even sure I would argue with the fact that if he did step down, I'd be like, yeah, he probably shouldn't be running the country every day either. So I have no idea what to think about any of that, by the way. And I think everything you just said is important and insightful. A couple of things. One, Donald Trump is claiming that he was shot with the bullet that ripped his ear, which runs counter to a lot of the reporting and a lot of the investigation so far. So we shall see. I know this is going to surprise everybody. Donald Trump sometimes fabricates and exaggerates. We don't know. Also, just got a handful of threats as we were talking. So that's fun. Give us a little bit more detail. Yeah, just a lot of MAGA supporters who, and by the way, some of them are multiple, multiple receivers, a lot of journalists, a lot of political analysts and commentators like put on a list that is basically like, you did this watch, watch yourself. Also, by the way, I'm keeping an eye as we're talking on multiple channels involving right-wing extremist. They're very excited. They're very, very, very excited. It seems to be the consensus opinion among the far, far right that this could not have worked out any better had it been planned. I mean, when you say excited, I think it's the implication that game on, okay, if that's going to happen to our game exactly that there is a need to retaliate. I've seen multiple calls for retaliation. Great. Yeah, I mean, I asked you about Chicago, but I don't know. I'm probably in more concern now than I was before today. There was already a lot of stirring in people in Chicago, my family. Everyone seems to be on edge for provincial violence anyway. That to me was a little bit hard to kind of conjure exactly who was going to create all the violence there. But now, there's no question that there certainly would be heightened tensions to the end degree, and that's not that far away either. The DNC is going to be on, what's the August 19th, like a month from now? Yeah, roughly. And by the way, that is a perfect amount of time for this entire situation to phone in and get worse. Also, Nick, I'm so glad you were able to phone in and have this conversation. I think we needed to say something for everybody. I want to say one thing before we jump off here, and then I want to get your final thoughts. Joe Biden came out, gave his remarks, they were short professional what they what they were supposed to be. He says, there's no room in America for this kind of violence. It's sick. He says it's unheard of. Number one, it's not unheard of. Number two, America is absolutely plagued by violence on every single level. You can't go to the store. You can't go out in public. You can't go to a movie theater. You can't go to school. It's everywhere. And I think going back to one of the theses of this show and what our reporting has been about and what our work has been about, Nick, we can't continue to live in a fairytale reality in which we pretend that this stuff doesn't happen and that this stuff doesn't continue to happen. You have to stop it if you want it to stop. You have to do things like ban AR 15s. You have to figure out ways to live together without radicalization and extremist behaviors and languages. Those things have to happen. And I want to make it clear that this is what happens in America. Unfortunately, it's not unheard of. We've seen political violence before. We've seen violence nearly every single day. All of us have been touched by it in some way or another. It needs to be made clear that that is simply not accurate. I agree wholeheartedly. I also think that in 2020 when Joe Biden was running, he did make a distinct delineation in his language that he wanted to be able to be the president for everybody and not alienate the Republicans. But I don't think that that language is there anymore. It doesn't feel like it. He feels much more bold to criticize Donald Trump and to continue to drive that wedge, not in a necessarily violent way with any kind of triggering words. But it doesn't seem different this time around where he doesn't seem to be at all encompassing as he was trying to do last time. Yeah, it feels completely different in every way, shape and form. I think one of the criticisms I've had of Joe Biden from the very beginning of his candidacy that Biden, we have a half century of political record of Joe Biden. He has been a weather vane the entire time. He shows you where the Democratic party is going, where the prevalent sentiments are. He has been whipped up into multiple things that have not been great. Meanwhile, we got to say, you go into the presidency and you either use the presidency to change the country or the presidency changes you. And I think that we now see something that I mean, he's been saying this stuff all along, right? He's been saying this isn't America. It's not who we are. But like, but the tone in the tenor, we've gotten to the point where I've been happy that he is called manga. I think what he say, sort of fascist? Is that how he said it or fascist like semi fascist, right? That like, I think that stuff is important. But at the same time, I have been frustrated by the inability for him to weather and address the situation head on. And I think there's been, I think there's a vacuum of leadership. And I think that that's only going to make the situation worse. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Nick, before we go, any final thoughts about what you're expecting over the next couple of days, how you're feeling, just anything? You know, maybe a calm before the storm. But I do, you know, they were retaliation notions on my mind and makes me worried. However, that's going to take its form. And yeah, it would be nice if this would have burned to some sort of moment, you know, like, like after the Sandy Hook massacre, you know, Obama had this impassioned speech, if we remember, but part of the impassionate was knowing already that nothing was going to happen, right? You can almost feel it on his end. Even though it was a valiant effort, I thought for in that speech, we're not going to get that, right? We're not going to get any kind of speech from Biden that could, that could, that could galvanize or something like that or Trump for that just to be clear. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess the Trump is the interesting wild card, how they're going to end up portraying this for the next couple of days and into the RNC. So anyway, it's going to, I have no problem following your train of thought in fact, and in the notion that it will continue to to to digress, go downwards, go into a steeper, you know, prominent of a of a morass, you know, and it's just leading to probably more violence since to some degree. If it's not a gun violence, it could very well be a balance on the street and that kind of thing around these two events. So it doesn't, it doesn't, nothing feels good right now. Let's say that it feels bad. I'm going to be watching the responses, see if there's anything in the way of retaliation and so forth. Nick, this is not the way that I wanted to reunite and see you after a week off. We will be back Monday night. We will start recording a live stream immediately following the first night of the Republican National Convention. Again, I do not see this being something in the anyway, shape or form that resembles anything that we've ever seen before. I, I just want to, I just want to go ahead, I'll give people a quick assignment to finish out the weekend. If you don't know about the bloody shirt and the politics of the bloody shirt that came out of the Civil War, go and look it up, become familiar with it. Just the idea that you are making an appeal based on violence and using that appeal to forward your political agenda. I just want to put that out for everybody. Meanwhile, Nick, I hope you, you return home safely. I hope you're able to settle in that rest a little bit. Again, we will do our live coverage after the first night of the Republican National Convention. And really, really, really terrible day. Be safe out there. You
