Up First from NPR - Trump Shooting Investigation, Disinformation and Extremism, RNC

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Details emerge about the person who allegedly tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Conspiracy theories abound over the event that left Trump hurt. And the attempted assassination will impact the tenor of the Republican National Convention and speeches there.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Krishnadev Calamur, Padma Rama, Brett Neely, Andrew Sussman, Olivia Hampton and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Mansee Khurana. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Investigators are gathering information about the man they say was the gunman who shot former President Trump. He was a high school graduate, a nursing home worker, and a member of a gun club. What do those facts add up to? I'm Sasha Pfeiffer, that's Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News. And a former Republican National Committee spokesman has a question about the meeting that begins today. Will this be a moment of reflection and responsibility or more of a rallying cry with increased heated rhetoric? We have an assessment this morning from our colleague Franco Ordonez in Milwaukee. And while the facts about Saturday's shooting are limited, that has not stopped conspiracy theories.

We've checked on a few that have been spreading. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day. This message comes from NPR sponsor Organic Valley, a co-op of small organic family farms. Farmer Tyler Webb shares why caring for his land has always been a priority. I'd like to contribute to my community an array of ecosystem services beyond just milk. Building topsoil and holding on to water and supporting wildlife to build that resilience

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of the Velshi Banned Book Club podcast, Ali Velshi speaks with authors of banned books to try and find out. Search for Velshi Banned Book Club to follow and listen to the series. In a speech to The Nation last night, President Biden listed a series of violent incidents in recent years and called on Americans to cool down. Well, we may disagree. We are not enemies. We're neighbors. We're friends, co-workers, citizens, and most importantly, we're fellow Americans. We must stand together. The president went on to say there is no place in America for violence, like Saturday's assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

The FBI is leading the investigation, and NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is following that investigation. Ryan, good morning. Good morning, Steve. What are the facts you know? Well, the FBI says they believe that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, acted alone. The main question hanging over this, of course, is motive. And the FBI says at this point, it has not identified a motive or an ideology that drove Crooks. It's investigating the attack as an assassination attempt and possible domestic terrorism act.

The FBI official leading this investigation, Kevin Rojek, spoke to reporters yesterday. He also says investigators haven't found any social media posts or writings that contain threatening language. And he says there's no indication that Crooks had any mental health issues. We in the media, of course, are also doing our own digging. I have confirmed that Crooks was a member of a shooting range near his home, the Clareton Sportsman's Club. Crooks was also a registered Republican, but had donated $15 to a Democratic group back in 2021. Doesn't appear to have had any criminal record. The FBI, though, has its own tools to dig, and officials caution that this is going to be a long investigation, and there's a lot of work to be done.

This feels familiar to a lot of shooting investigations. You have all these data points, they're gathering data points about the person, and in the middle is this question of motive, which is a blank. So what does the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia for analysis. Now, the FBI says the gun was purchased legally, it believes, by the shooter's father. Rojek identified it as an AR-556, which is an AR-15 style rifle. The cell phone, though, to your question, is an urgent focus for investigators. The FBI has the phone, but as of yesterday afternoon, hadn't been able to crack into it to get access to its contents. And doing that, of course, would likely reveal a ton of information about the alleged gunman's communications, his whereabouts, text messages, and so on. And that would be useful for the FBI as it's trying to build out a timeline, a sequence of events to understand what Crooks was doing, where he was in the weeks, the days, and then hours leading up to the

shooting. I want to think about the way that President Biden framed this. He named a large number of incidents over a number of years. What are authorities making of this wider pattern? Well, look, two of the top law enforcement officials in this country, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, have been warning about the problem of political violence for years now. And there has been a steady drumbeat of violent threats against everything from local election workers and local government officials to federal law enforcement and judges and, of course, also members of Congress. And there have also been plenty of examples of real political violence as well, some of which President Biden mentioned

last night. Members of both parties have been shot in recent years. Democrat Gabby Giffords, Republican Steve Scalise come to mind. There has been violence directed at the FBI. There was the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. And now we have this attempted assassination of former President Trump. Biden in his speech was clearly, as you noted, trying to cool things down and to remind Americans not to head down that path, that violence isn't the way to solve political differences. We had a similar statement from House Speaker Mike Johnson on TV over the weekend, urging people from both parties to cool down the rhetoric. Ryan, thanks very much for the insights. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Steve. That's NPR's Ryan Lucas. We still don't have a clear understanding of why a gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Saturday.

So some people are coming up with their own reasons. The shooting happened in the middle of a presidential campaign that was already saturated with conspiracy theories and threats of political violence. We're joined now by NPR's Lisa Hagen and Odette Youssef. Good morning to both of you. Good morning. Lisa, would you give us a sense of how conspiratorial rhetoric has been stirred up by this attack? Yeah, you know, we still have relatively few facts about what occurred here, but that is more or less irrelevant when it comes to the alternative and conspiracist media landscape, where folks have pretty much every incentive not to wait for official information. Social media, we all know, helps these kinds of narratives spread quickly. For example, there are claims without evidence made by people like Senator J.D. Vance

and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, that the Biden administration is somehow behind this. There are also claims, also without evidence, that Trump or his supporters may have staged this. We've also seen plenty of casual talk and jokes, memes, you know, you name it, about the shooting from people across the political spectrum. And lots of everyday people have also gotten caught up in this. People wrongly identified as the shooter. They've had their addresses posted, family members' names posted online, and much immediate anger also at news media. Folks are looking for someone to blame. Odette, acknowledging that Lisa just said that there are relatively few facts, is there any information so far about whether this will be considered an act of violent extremism? Well, the FBI is investigating the incident as an act of domestic terrorism, you know, primarily because this is what they are calling an attempted assassination. But experts say it doesn't yet appear to be a case of violent

extremism, because so far there's no clear motivation behind it. You know, there hasn't been any evidence so far of connections to an organized extremist movement or to any group. Politically speaking, the case isn't really clear cut either. You know, the alleged shooter was a registered Republican, but he also made a single donation to a Democratic organization a few years ago. And, you know, as confusing as that may sound, it's actually not terribly strange to people who understand extremism today. Elizabeth Newman is a former official with the Department of Homeland Security. She's now with Moonshot, which is a company that tracks

and tries to de-escalate online radicalization. Increasingly, individuals have very fluid ideologies. Sometimes it's not ideological at all. It's just a glorification of violence or glorification of previous shooters, previous attackers. That's very prominent online these days. So we are seeing more and more individuals who carry out these attacks, and they don't fit our categories. Newman says what's proven to be, you know, more helpful, instead of trying to categorize people into specific extremist ideologies, is to try to understand what was happening in their lives that ultimately led them down this path. Odette, there are four more months till the election that obviously has people concerned

that could violence breed more violence? What are concerns among extremism experts? Yeah, there's a lot of worry about the coming weeks. I spoke about this with Cynthia Miller Idris of American University. We have such a high level of us versus them thinking and the idea of an existential threat and an incredibly armed population that the likelihood that another lone actor tries to take action is always out there as a possibility. So concern about copycats, revenge acts, militia groups mobilizing, or other bad faith actors trying to capitalize on this moment of extreme tension. And this is all especially worrisome because anger is just snowballing against a variety of targets as we

wait for actual facts to come out. Lisa, as the investigation unfolds, we may learn more about the psychology of the shooter. What was the motive? But we have seen in the past that even when facts do come out, people choose to believe what they want to believe. I imagine that's the same concern here. Absolutely. We're in a time when trust in all kinds of institutions is very low, in many cases for understandable reasons. So even when we start to get a clearer picture from sources like the FBI or journalists, we're going to see suspicions that crucial things are being hidden from the public. That's sort of a core tenet of conspiracism. I talked with Jared Sexton about this. He writes about conspiracism and extremism. This is one of those moments where politicians, journalists, members of the institution, they can make a choice, like we can all make a choice, which is to look at what is happening and continue to make it worse or to understand that a lot of factors and a lot of events have led us to this moment.

It's a hinge point. You know, this has been a very good live demonstration of how natural a tendency it is to fill chaotic information voids with something. So to answer your question, you know, this is going to spin out to a number of narratives. But the ones that are going to linger on are also going to show us what individuals already believe about the world. That's NPR's Lisa Hagen and Odette Youssef. Thanks to both of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The attack came the weekend before the Republican National Convention, which begins today in Milwaukee. Yeah, the gathering aims to nominate Donald

Trump for president, although the details will be very different than what was planned just a couple of days ago. And Paris Franco-Ordonez covers the campaign and has been in Wisconsin since the shooting. Good morning, Franco. Good morning, Sasha. What's the mood in Milwaukee? Well, you know, it's certainly on a lot of people's minds here. I spoke with Mia Costello, a member of the RNC Platform Committee representing Alaska.

She's here with her son. You know, she told me this weekend that friends have been texting her to keep her head down if she hears a popping noise. But she really feels safe despite the tragedy and thinks people will come together. I do believe that in times where our country has seen political violence, that it does have the positive effect of bringing people together because we're all human. You know, and she says that really goes for both parties, Republicans and Democrats. She still expects, though, that most of the convention to focus on policy and speeches to be about the direction of the country. There have been limited sightings

of Trump since the shooting, but he has released some statements. What is he saying? Yeah, so far, he's been pretty tempered. You know, he's calling for unity. Steve was talking about Biden's speech. You know, Trump's saying similar things about unity and coming together. You know, as we know, Trump's not shy about using strong language. So I'll be very, very interested to see if that tempered, you know, talk kind of continues throughout the convention this week. And meanwhile, there is official business that needs to happen at this convention. Run through us what will take place.

Yeah, this is a time when party officials on the state and national level, you know, get together to officially nominate the president and the vice president. Trump's scheduled to speak Thursday when he formally accepts the nomination. But as we've been reporting, he is in town already. And we're all waiting, of course, for him to nominate his vice president or name his pick for vice president. He needs to make that announcement before the Republican National Committee holds its roll call vote to officially nominate the running mate. You know, of course, there's going to be a lot of speeches by high-ranking Republicans,

including many of those who are on the list to join this ticket. And Franco, what is the sense of how the shooting will impact the convention? Yeah, the RNC says that it's not going to alter any official business, but there's no question it's going to have a strong impact on the speeches and the tenor. I spoke with Doug High, a veteran of these events. He's a former RNC spokesman. He told me he'll be watching for the context in which this is discussed. What we don't know at this point is what is the impact that this will have on the convention, and will this be a moment of reflection and responsibility or more of a rallying cry with increased heated rhetoric.

You know, he mentioned past shootings of political figures like former Arizona Congressman Guy Giffords in 2011. You know, that rhetoric was condemned, but it didn't really go away. And in the midst of Saturday's shooting, Trump was defiant, you know, pumping his fists and mouthing his words, fight. His allies took to social media, blaming Democrats. You know, we're now hearing a more thoughtful response from Trump and his allies. Steve mentioned House Speaker Mike Johnson calling for temperatures to be turned down. So again, I'll be watching for what Trump has to say later this week. That's NPR's Franco Ordonez. Thank you.

Thank you, Sasha. And that's a first for this Monday, July 15th. I'm Steve Inskeep. And I'm Sasha Pfeiffer. Your next listen is Consider This from NPR. We here at Up First give you the three big stories of the day. Our Consider This colleagues take a different approach. They dive into a single news story and what it means to you in just 15 minutes. Listen now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's Up First was edited by Krishna Dev Kalamar, Padma Rama, Brett Neely, Andrew Sussman, Olivia Hampton, and Alice Wolflich. It was produced by Ziad Butch, Ben Abrams, and Manasi Khurana. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent, and our technical director is Carly

Strange. Join us tomorrow. Studies have shown that elections can spike feelings of stress and anxiety. That's why NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is there to help you feel more grounded as we talk about the buzziest TV movies and music. Try a show on HBO's Industry or a roundtable on rom-coms to take a step back from the news of the day, at least before you plunge back in tomorrow. New episodes every week on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.