--:-- [Up First theme music fades out]
--:-- Steve Inskeep: 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.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: What do those facts add up to?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I'm Sasha Pfeiffer, that's Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News.
--:-- [Up First theme music continues]
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: 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.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We have an assessment this morning from our colleague Franco Ordonez in Milwaukee.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: 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.
--:-- [Up First theme music fades out]
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.
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--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: This message comes from NPR sponsor AARP. Where do you see your career in 12 years? What are you doing now to help you get there?
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--:-- Steve Inskeep: 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.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: We may disagree. We are not enemies. We're neighbors. We're friends, co-workers, citizens. And most importantly, we're fellow Americans.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: 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.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The FBI is leading the investigation, and NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is following that investigation.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Good morning, Steve. What are the facts you know?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Well, the FBI says they believe that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, acted alone.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: It's investigating the attack as an assassination attempt and possible domestic terrorism act.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: The FBI official leading this investigation, Kevin Rojack, spoke to reporters yesterday.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: He also says investigators haven't found any social media posts or writings that contain threatening language.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: And he says there's no indication that Crooks had any mental health issues.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: We in the media, of course, are also doing our own digging.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: I have confirmed that Crooks was a member of a shooting range near his home, the Clareton Sportsman's Club.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Crooks was also a registered Republican, but had donated $15 to a Democratic group back in 2021.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: It doesn't appear to have had any criminal record.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: So what does the FBI do to try to get into that hole?
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Well, there are two key pieces of evidence that they have recovered that they're working on, the alleged shooter's gun and his cell phone.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Both have been sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, for analysis.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Now the FBI says the gun was purchased legally it believes by the shooter father Rojek identified it as an AR which is an AR rifle
--:-- Ryan Lucas: The cell phone though to your question is an urgent focus for investigators
--:-- Ryan Lucas: The FBI has the phone, but as of yesterday afternoon, hadn't been able to crack into it to get access to its contents.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: And that would be useful for the FBI. 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: I want to think about the way that President Biden framed this. He named a large number of incidents over a number of years.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: What are authorities making of this wider pattern?
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: And there have also been plenty of examples of real political violence as well, some of which President Biden mentioned last night.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Members of both parties have been shot in recent years. Democrat Gabby Giffords, Republican Steve Scalise come to mind.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: 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 Lucas: Ryan, thanks very much for the insights. Really appreciate it.
--:-- Ryan Lucas: Thanks, Steve.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: That's NPR's Ryan Lucas.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: We still don't have a clear understanding of why a gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Saturday.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: So some people are coming up with their own reasons.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: The shooting happened in the middle of a presidential campaign that was already saturated with conspiracy theories and threats of political violence.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: We're joined now by NPR's Lisa Hagan and Odette Youssef.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: Good morning to both of you. Good morning.
--:-- Odette Youssef: Good morning.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Lisa, would you give us a sense of how conspiratorial rhetoric has been stirred up by this attack?
--:-- Lisa Hagan: Yeah, you know, we still have relatively few facts about what occurred here.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: 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.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: Social media, we all know, helps these kinds of narratives spread quickly.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: 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.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: There are also claims, also without evidence, that Trump or his supporters may have staged this.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: 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.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: And lots of everyday people have also gotten caught up in this.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: 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.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: Folks are looking for someone to blame.
--:-- Odette Youssef: 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.
--:-- Odette Youssef: But experts say it yet appears to be a case of violent extremism because so far there no clear motivation behind it
--:-- Odette Youssef: You know there hasn been any evidence so far of connections to an organized extremist movement or to any group.
--:-- Odette Youssef: Politically speaking, the case isn't really clear cut either.
--:-- Odette Youssef: You know, the alleged shooter was a registered Republican, but he also made a single donation to a Democratic organization a few years ago.
--:-- Odette Youssef: And, you know, as confusing as that may sound, it's actually not terribly strange to people who understand extremism today.
--:-- Odette Youssef: Elizabeth Newman is a former official with the Department of Homeland Security.
--:-- Odette Youssef: She's now with Moonshot, which is a company that tracks and tries to de-escalate online radicalization.
--:-- Odette Youssef: Increasingly, individuals have very fluid ideologies.
--:-- Odette Youssef: Sometimes it's not ideological at all. It's just a glorification of violence or glorification of previous shooters, previous attackers.
--:-- Odette Youssef: That's very prominent online these days.
--:-- Odette Youssef: So we are seeing more and more individuals who carry out these attacks, and they don't fit our categories.
--:-- Odette Youssef: 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 Youssef: Odette, there are four more months till the election that obviously has people concerned that could violence breed more violence?
--:-- Odette Youssef: What are concerns among extremism experts?
--:-- Odette Youssef: Yeah, there's a lot of worry about the coming weeks.
--:-- Odette Youssef: I spoke about this with Cynthia Miller Idris of American University.
--:-- Odette Youssef: 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.
--:-- Odette Youssef: So concern about copycats, revenge acts, militia groups mobilizing, or other bad faith actors trying to capitalize on this moment of extreme tension.
--:-- Odette Youssef: 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 Hagan: Lisa, as the investigation unfolds, we may learn more about the psychology of the shooter, what was the motive.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: But we have seen in the past that even when facts do come out, people choose to believe what they want to believe.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: I imagine that's the same concern here.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: Absolutely. We're in a time when trust in all kinds of institutions is very low, in many cases for understandable reasons.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: 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.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: That's sort of a core tenet of conspiracism.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: I talked with Jared Sexton about this.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: He writes about conspiracism and extremism.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: 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.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: It's a hinge point.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: You know, this has been a very good live demonstration of how natural a tendency it is to fill chaotic information voids with something.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: So to answer your question, you know, this is going to spin out to a number of narratives.
--:-- Lisa Hagan: But the ones that are going to linger on are also going to show us what individuals already believe about the world.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: That's NPR's Lisa Hagan and Odette Yusuf.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Thanks to both of you.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Thank you. Thank you.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: The attack came the weekend before the Republican National Convention, which begins today in Milwaukee.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: 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.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: NPR Franco Ordonez covers the campaign and has been in Wisconsin since the shooting.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Good morning Franco.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Good morning Sasha.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: What the mood in Milwaukee?
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Well you know it certainly on a lot of people minds here.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: I spoke with Mia Costello a member of the RNC Platform Committee representing Alaska.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: She's here with her son.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, she told me this weekend that friends have been texting her to keep her head down if she hears a popping noise.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: But she really feels safe despite the tragedy and thinks people will come together.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: 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.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, and she says that really goes for both parties, Republicans and Democrats.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: She still expects, though, that most of the convention to focus on policy and speeches to be about the direction of the country.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: There have been limited sightings of Trump since the shooting, but he has released some statements.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Yeah, so far he's been pretty tempered.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, he's calling for unity.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Steve was talking about Biden's speech.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, Trump's saying similar things about unity and coming together.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, as we know, Trump's not shy about using strong language.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: So I'll be very, very interested to see if that tempered, you know, talk kind of continues throughout the convention this week.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: And meanwhile, there is official business that needs to happen at this convention.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Run through us what will take place.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Yeah, this is a time when party officials on the state and national level get together to officially nominate the president and the vice president.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Trump's scheduled to speak Thursday when he formally accepts the nomination.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: But as we've been reporting, he is in town already.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: And we're all waiting, of course, for him to nominate his vice president or name his pick for vice president.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: He needs to make that announcement before the Republican National Committee holds its roll call vote to officially nominate the running mate.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: 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 his ticket.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: And Franco, what is the sense of how the shooting will impact the convention?
--:-- Franco Ordonez: Yeah, the RNC says that it's not going to alter any official business.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: But there's no question it's going to have a strong impact on the speeches and the tenor.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: I spoke with Doug High, a veteran of these events.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: He's a former RNC spokesman.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: He told me he'll be watching for the context in which this is discussed.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: What we don't know at this point is what is the impact that this will have on the convention.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: And will this be a moment of reflection and responsibility or more of a rallying cry with increased heated rhetoric?
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, he mentioned past shootings of political figures like former Arizona Congressman Guy Giffords in 2011.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, that rhetoric was condemned, but it didn't really go away.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: And in the midst of Saturday's shooting, Trump was defying, you know, pumping his fists and mouthing his words, fight.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: His allies took to social media, blaming Democrats.
--:-- Franco Ordonez: You know, we're now hearing a more thoughtful response from Trump and his allies.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: That's NPR's Franco Ordonez.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: And that's Up First for this Monday, July 15th.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: I'm Steve Inskeep.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: And I'm Sasha Pfeiffer.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Your next listen is Consider This from NPR.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: We here at Up First give you the three big stories of the day.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Our Consider This colleagues take a different approach.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: They dive into a single news story and what it means to you in just 15 minutes.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Listen now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Today's Up First was edited by Krishnadev Kalamer, Padma Rama, Brett Neely, Andrew Sussman, Olivia Hampton, and Alice Wolfley.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: It was produced by Ziad Butch, Ben Abrams, and Monsi Karana.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent, and our technical director is Carly Strange.
--:-- Sasha Pfeiffer: Join us tomorrow.
