As you know, I’ve been pressing the simple point that we don’t have any information about the injury to the former president’s ear or what caused it other than a social media post from him on Truth Social a few hours after the Saturday afternoon shooting. That’s not just inadequate. It’s frankly bizarre. Someone did just flag to me that two days ago the Times made a very oblique reference to this in an article devoted to Congressman Ronny Jackson’s description of changing the gauze on Trump’s ear on his flight to Milwaukee (“Former White House Doctor Describes Tending To Trump’s Wounded Ear“). That article says in passing: “So far, only Mr. Trump has described his injuries; his team has not provided any formal medical briefing to the public since the shooting.” And that’s it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this note.

Today we are kicking off our fifth annual TPM Journalism Fund drive.

We plan these drives months in advance. So let me start by saying we had no way of knowing that we’d be launching in the midst of what has been perhaps the most chaotic, bewildering, and often agonizing three-week stretch in our political life in recent memory. After we’d processed launching during the post-debate frenzy, then came last weekend’s Trump rally shooting. I say this simply to note that we’re fully cognizant of the fact that it may seem jarring to be holding a drive in this current news moment. But in an odd way, it all fits with our drive’s focus this year, which is on “preparing TPM for what’s next.”

The success of our drive last year made possible all sorts of big, exclusive stories — like our expose of SACR, the Trumpist secret society of white Christian men prepping for a “national divorce,” the Ken Chesebro document trove that shed new light on the fake electors scheme, our profile of a tough-talking sheriff taking on the neo-nazis who surged into central Florida, or our look, before anyone else was looking, at the surreal, extreme post-2020 world of the man who became the GOP nominee for governor of North Carolina. It’s also made possible what I believe has been unparalleled, deeply knowledgeable coverage of the Trump trials from Josh Kovensky and of the right-wing judiciary from Kate Riga.

I’m sure we’ll have more big exclusives like these over the next year. But when we say “preparing for what’s next,” we mean something slightly different, more expansive. At this moment, we very much don’t know what’s next. I don’t mean the lead-up to the November election. No one knows what the next three and a half months hold, but our team has been preparing for a campaign in which literally almost anything is possible for months. We’re ready for all of that. I’m talking about what comes after that, which is very much up in the air at this moment.

So what we mean is fortifying and strengthening TPM for the long haul, to be able to react, grapple with, make sense of any number of future possibilities. In the last three weeks, especially, I’ve had so many TPM readers reach out to me and say they’ve found the site as valuable and as necessary as it’s ever been precisely now — not just for our efforts to explain, as best as we’re able, the unprecedented, but to do so with a unique steadiness and transparency about our reasoning. While I’m admittedly biased, I believe TPM is a unique beacon in the journalistic firmament, an oasis for our community and a source of news and insights that spread far beyond our virtual pages. We want to make TPM strong enough — financially, editorially, legally — for whatever comes next.

That’s what this year’s drive is about. So I hope you will be able to contribute in whatever amount you feel able to. Let me add that in addition to keeping TPM robust and vital, the Journalism Fund is what provides the resources that allow us to provide free memberships to TPM Readers who cannot afford a subscription as well as to any registered student. Last week we held our first of what we hope will be many TPM community happy hours in New York and in other cities. And a reader came up to me and told me she had one of these free memberships and thanked me personally. I told her that was very nice of her to say but that it was our pleasure and, really, the thanks goes to our larger community, which makes them possible. But it was gratifying to hear because this part of our financial model is part of what makes me proud of what we do and of our community.

Publications around the country are shuttering, retrenching, laying off employees, getting sold to private equity funds. We’re not. This year, like last year, our goal is to raise $500,000 for the drive. Last year I made clear that it was critical that we reach that number. And we did. For reasons tied specifically to 2023, the wolf was truly at the door. And that is not the case this year. But let’s be honest: the wolf lives in a co-op down the street from TPM. He’s never far away. So this year’s drive remains very important. We aim to and believe we can strengthen the financial footing of the organization, get ready for what comes next and even modestly expand. And that’s the spirit in which we’re coming to you today

If you’re ready to join us in this year’s drive just click right here.

Thank you so much in advance.

I don’t know what will happen. But if party leaders are going to move to have Biden step aside, I think it’s going to happen right now. It is really the last time it can happen. And the key is that whatever happens has to happen and be done and then all Democrats get behind the candidate, whoever it is, and move forward.

My two cents is that it can only be Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

Update: To clarify the meaning here, I don’t mean we’re going to see some announcement today. I’m not saying there’s going to be one ever. What I’m saying is that the optimal and really the last time to make a real attempt to persuade Joe Biden to leave in the race is in the days just after the RNC. And if that’s going to happen the key events leading to that have to happen now.

This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision as a way to limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access medical records to stymie or criminalize access to legal reproductive health services, most specifically abortions, but not only abortions. It also applies to contraception and the full range of other endangered reproductive care.

So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. Of course, local police agencies might simply take it upon themselves to pull records to see who had unexplained disruptions to their menstrual cycles.

Your local sheriff might just want to know.

And so does JD Vance, it turns out.

Jon Chait has a new article up at New York Magazine in his series of articles about Joe Biden and the need for him to end his candidacy to make way for a younger, more viable candidate. His main issue now is that the people in the Democratic Party who were pushing hardest to get Biden to step aside have, he says, simply given up and accepted losing the presidency. He then analogizes this move to the atmosphere after 9/11 in which Democrats rallied around George W. Bush as an act of national unity. He finds this perverse because there’s nothing about national unity that makes you suddenly accept the ascension of the primary driver of political violence and national chaos simply because that person became the target of violence.

I find myself disagreeing with most of these particular claims but agreeing with the overriding one: I recoil at the center of my being from Democrats’ tendency to just fold at the first, second and third sign of difficulty.

If there was any question about what the rest of this campaign is going to be like, I think we got the answer with the selection of JD Vance. Vance is no dummy and he is probably the most revanchist nationalist choice Trump could have made. He’s definitely an anti-U.S. alliances person, isolationist in a very Trumpy way, but more coherently so. He was out aggressively over the weekend blaming Democrats for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I expect that to be the theme of this week’s convention, whatever the early claims about national unity. He’s one of those guys who initially found Trump disreputable and beyond the pale and then did a full makeover to embrace the man and his politics after Trump took over the GOP. Notably Vance comes out of the Peter Thiel world in Silicon Valley. So he likely brings a significant amount of money with him, which won’t hurt. It’s the kind of choice you make if you’re pretty confident you’re going to win because this takes you from 100% Trumpy to more like 130% Trumpy. It’s a fateful choice. We’ll see if that prediction is right.

Here’s something I’ve been confused about. In the first moments of a major news story like the attempted assassination of a former president, there is a chaos to the reporting. Initial reports turn out not to be true. They turn out to have been based on misunderstandings or false assumptions. A lot of that happened in the first minutes and hours after the shooting Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania. But there are gaps in the public reporting about just how Donald Trump was injured that have confused me, specifically whether the injury to his ear was caused by a grazing wound from a bullet or whether one of the bullets shot by Thomas Crooks struck his teleprompter and then shards of that plexiglass material struck the former president. In the biggest sense it doesn’t matter: Crooks tried to shoot Trump and in the process Trump was injured. Whether it was the bullet itself or shards of plexiglass, the bullet struck is a matter of kinetics rather than guilt or innocence or the reality that Trump could have been killed. One spectator was killed, and two others injured. The bullet that almost killed Ronald Reagan, if I’m remembering correctly, was actually a ricochet rather than a direct impact. But it’s still something that’s worth having some clear answer to.

Here’s why I’m still looking for more information on this.

From TPM Reader PB …

As someone who has worked in gun violence prevention for a long time, I was very much struck by how much Trump’s would-be assassin fit the school shooter profile — young, male, alienated and gun-obsessed — much more than any identifiable political or ideological profile. 

I realize this won’t stop Republicans from claiming he was a crazed leftist on the basis of a $15 donation to a voter registration PAC, but outside the right-wing echo chamber, as Bill Clinton would say, “that dog won’t hunt.” 

I have no idea why this guy decided to target Trump, and we likely never will get a clear motive. It certainly had something to do with the fact that he was swimming in the toxic stew of gun culture. Over the past twenty to thirty years, gun clubs have transformed from gathering places for hunting enthusiasts to hotbeds of white supremacist and anti-government sentiment and activity. They are also powerful forces at the state government level, serving as an often successful organizing force against gun reform laws. 

Yesterday Axios reported that a “senior House Democrat” said, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitter to say that if this is someone’s attitude then the first thing they should do is resign from Congress. My sentiments exactly. The first thing to say about this is that we see many blind quotes in publications like this and they often trigger rounds of recriminations among Democrats when it’s unclear what if anything was actually said. I’m not saying they are fabricated. I’m sure they are real in the narrow sense. But you don’t know the context of these remarks or the identity of the speaker. So it’s a really bad idea to jump to some general diagnosis of the situation based on them. These asides are meant to spark drama and attention.

With that said, though, it’s also very clear that Democrats are caught in a wild moment of demoralization and pessimism and that it is to a real degree characterological. And a lot of that is among Democratic electeds in Washington, DC, the kind who talk a lot to the newsletters. We’ve seen a lot of it on-the-record during the Biden drama.