First Lt. Daniel Weiss was a 25-year-old Army Ranger preparing for his fourth combat deployment to Afghanistan when he died by suicide at his Tacoma, Wash., apartment in 2012. There were difficult days after that, recalled his father, Andy. But what proved both surprising and hurtful, he said, were efforts to ensure his son’s death was viewed differently than those of fellow service members who had been killed in action.

The family learned, for instance, that Daniel’s name would be excluded from a monument at Joint Base Lewis-McChord memorializing casualties of war. A few years later, at a brunch for military survivors back home in Illinois, the Weisses were told their invitation had been an accident. Though they were allowed to stay, he said, it was made clear the event was for Gold Star families.

“To this day,” Andy Weiss said he feels a “profound sense of loss” when thinking about his son — a pain made worse by “this divisive ‘you’re a Gold Star and you’re not.’” There should be no distinction, in his view. To suggest otherwise, he added, is “ridiculous.”

Weiss’s frustrations are part of a larger, emotionally charged dispute over how America recognizes the families of deceased U.S. troops. The debate was expected to come to a head soon, after the Biden administration spent months reviewing the recommendations of a congressionally appointed working group assigned to settle on a standardized definition for Gold Star families — a process that included consideration of not only troops killed in combat but also suicide victims like Daniel Weiss, and those who die in tragic accidents, such as helicopter crashes, or from fatal service-related illness.

On Friday, however, after multiple inquiries from The Washington Post, the Pentagon withdrew the working group’s proposal — which remains shrouded in secrecy — as it awaited final approval. Maj. Grace Geiger, a Defense Department spokeswoman, declined to detail the group’s recommendation but said the decision to pull it back was based on initial feedback from within the administration. It will be resubmitted, she added, “at an appropriate time.”

The “Gold Star” term dates to World War I, when families hung window banners in their homes bearing blue stars for loved ones fighting overseas and gold ones for those who died. Congress later passed legislation stating that the families of those who die overseas shall receive a Gold Star lapel pin, a small, distinctive decoration with a gold star and purple background. Among the actions that qualified were dying “in military operations involving conflict with an opposing enemy force” or in a terrorist attack against the United States.

The family of service members who die off the battlefield qualify for what’s called the Next of Kin pin. And while both kinds of families generally receive the same government benefits, culturally one stands apart, some say.

The Gold Star title is a “unique and special honor for those who have given their lives in defense of this nation in combat,” said retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until last year, and a wartime commander for many years before that, developed a kinship with many families of those killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. In an interview, Milley said he supports maintaining the narrow definition the Pentagon has had in place for years.

This report is based on interviews with more than 20 people familiar with the issue. No matter what decision is made, those most closely involved in the discussion said, the outcome is certain to cause pain to grieving families and inflame long-simmering tensions among organizations typically united in their support for military families.

The broadest proposed change would encompass families of combat casualties and those whose deaths were from suicide, accident or illness. The latter category could include President Biden, whose son Beau, a lawyer in the Army National Guard, died of brain cancer in 2015. The president has linked his son’s death at age 46 to noxious smoke he inhaled while deployed to Iraq years earlier.

The White House declined to discuss its preferred course of action. In a statement, the National Security Council said the president “respects — and remains deeply grateful for — all those military families” grieving.

“Each loss hurts,” the statement says. “Each one tells a story. Each story deserves the country’s solemn recognition.”

The dispute

The effort to broaden the Gold Star definition is led by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), an influential nonprofit established in 1994. Andy Weiss leads Chicago-area grief support groups for the organization. Its founder, Bonnie Carroll, lost her husband, Army Brig. Gen. Tom Carroll, in a plane crash in Alaska two years earlier, and in 2015 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work.

In a June letter to senior lawmakers, TAPS and a few dozen other military and veterans nonprofits made their case that it’s time for Congress to legislate an “inclusive definition” that recognizes an array of military deaths. The signatories estimated that doing so would cover about 3 million people, and include all kinds of survivors, any time Congress looks anew at the government benefits provided to military survivors. Past legislation, they argued, has not included consistent language, muddying understanding of what a Gold Star family is.

“Creating a consistent, legal definition,” the letter said, “will ensure future legislative proposals improve benefits for ALL surviving families.”

Among the organizations that co-signed were Blue Star Families, the Independence Fund and the Military Officers Association of America. But other major nonprofits withheld their support, including the American Legion, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the Travis Manion Foundation and the Wounded Warrior Project.

Ryan Manion, chief executive officer of the Travis Manion Foundation, said the definition of a Gold Star family doesn’t need to change to properly recognize other grieving military families. Her brother, a Marine Corps officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007.

“Loss is loss, and I run an organization that represents and has programming for families who have lost a loved one, no matter the circumstances,” she said. “But I think we run a slippery slope when we try to take a specific designation or recognition and expand that.”

Allison Jaslow, an Iraq War veteran who is CEO of IAVA, credited TAPS for its work on behalf of grieving families, but said she sees this proposal as overly broad.

“What I wouldn’t want to do,” she said, “is for the sake of inclusivity not appropriately honor those who truly made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our country.”

The American Legion in May drafted a resolution defining Gold Star status narrowly as close family members of someone who has been killed or died in a variety of other actions overseas. Matthew Shuman, a senior official with the organization, said members discussed the issue for some time and decided to act as it became apparent Congress was interested.

Carroll, the TAPS founder, said that ultimately her objective is to eliminate the “hierarchy of grief” that can compound the challenges mourning families face.

Leaders ‘need to step up’

The dispute’s volatility caught senators by surprise two years ago in an episode that has not been reported previously.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) united to introduce legislation that would have created a new federal holiday, Gold Star Families Day, on the last Monday of September, elevating a day first recognized by Congress in 1936. The proposed legislation defined Gold Star families broadly as the immediate loved ones of any service member who died “while serving in the Armed Forces” or “from a service-connected injury or illness.”

That definition, supported by TAPS, caused a backlash from the families of service members killed in combat and some senior defense officials, prompting some co-sponsors of the bill to withdraw their support and effectively tanking the legislation, said Tony Cordero, president of Sons and Daughters in Touch, a nonprofit supporting the children of U.S. troops killed in action during the Vietnam War. Two other people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, confirmed the account.

Warren’s office declined to comment. Ernst, a retired Army officer, “has spoken directly to Gold Star spouses and families, and understands the importance of honoring their fallen loved ones accordingly,” her office said in a statement. The bill never received a vote.

Cordero, whose father, William, was killed when his plane went down during a mission over North Vietnam, said his group is “adamantly opposed” to an “all-of-the-above approach.” He recommended instead a rebranding and redesign of the Next of Kin pin, and encouraged the Pentagon to regard the designation with appropriate seriousness such that those families don’t feel slighted.

“It is incredibly difficult to thread the needle with the precise words so that you don’t offend someone who’s loved one died of natural causes, died in a training accident, died of suicide, died of anything other than combat,” Cordero said. “Because the minute you use the wrong word, the entire conversation descends into an emotional mess, and that’s not good for anybody.”

Others are split on the issue.

Jane Horton, whose husband, Christopher, was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2011 while serving in the Army National Guard, said the issue can’t be left to surviving military families to decide because “it is not possible to make an unemotional decision regarding our loved one’s service and sacrifice.” Horton, who worked on military casualty assistance issues in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said senior military leaders “need to step up and make hard decisions” to define the Gold Star designation “once and for all.” She declined to share her opinion on how the issue should be handled.

Pam Zembiec, whose husband, Douglas, died in an ambush in Baghdad while serving in the Marine Corps in 2007, said the Pentagon is not diminishing the deaths of U.S. troops outside combat zones by withholding the Gold Star designation from them. She supports keeping the designation focused on those killed in action.

“It’s not about the grief and the death and the loss,” she said. “It’s about taking away from history.”

Nancy Mullen said that while her husband, Sean, was killed in action in Afghanistan while serving in an Army Special Forces unit in 2013, she favors making the title apply broadly.

“We don’t choose how our loved one dies, and they die from service,” she said. “I hate to see our community fighting over that when there are so many other things that are more important.”

Donald Trump deemed cryptocurrency “a scam” and a “disaster waiting to happen” during his term in office.

In the official Republican Party platform that Trump edited last week, he struck a different tone.

“Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and un-American crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency,” reads the platform, which will be formally adopted Monday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their digital assets and transact free from government surveillance and control.”

The about-face comes after an aggressive campaign by wealthy cryptocurrency executives, who have lavished Trump’s campaign with donations, spent money at Mar-a-Lago to hold events, promised to hold fundraisers for his 2024 campaign and lobbied him with sharp criticisms of President Biden and his administration, according to eight people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and fundraisers.

While seeking big checks from some of the country’s wealthiest Republicans, Trump has often promised donors at fundraisers to enact policies they would like — from cutting their corporate taxes to approving their oil permits to throwing pro-Palestinian demonstrators out of the country.

In recent months, Trump advisers say the former president has held numerous meetings about cryptocurrency with donors and prospective donors. His interest was piqued on cryptocurrency — a digital currency not tied to any central bank — when a group of donors came to Mar-a-Lago and said they would support his campaign and complained about Biden administration officials, including SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.

Trump recently attended another large fundraiser in California that was stacked with cryptocurrency executives, according to people who attended. Trump vowed to support their “innovation,” according to an attendee.

Trump and his campaign have met repeatedly with David Bailey, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who has promised to hold Trump a $15 million fundraiser in Nashville later this month, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump is also expected to headline a cryptocurrency conference there, where he was sold on the idea of a large crowd and celebrities.

One of the private meetings Bailey had with Trump was in New York at Trump Tower this past spring during the former president’s criminal trial on business fraud charges, according to people with knowledge of the meeting.

His campaign announced they would take donations through cryptocurrency days after that meeting. Cryptocurrency executives and supporters have also held multiple events at his Florida club, according to people who have attended.

Over a dinner last month, Bailey also pitched Trump senior adviser Vince Haley on a number of cryptocurrency ideas, the people said, the same meeting where he pitched the fundraiser in Tennessee.

Haley then drafted the platform that had the supportive language about cryptocurrency, the people said. It was a topic the party had never touched in the past and surprised some longtime party members, who wondered where the language came from. It passed overwhelmingly in Milwaukee last week and received little scrutiny.

A Trump spokesman declined to answer questions about the donors supporting Trump’s push and his reversal on cryptocurrency.

“Crypto innovators and others in the technology sector are under attack from Biden and Democrats,” said Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes. “While Biden stifles innovation with more regulation and higher taxes, President Trump is ready to encourage American leadership in this and other emerging technologies.”

Advisers said Trump knew very little about cryptocurrency until the donors approached him — and had long held negative feelings about it, viewing it as fake money.

“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter in 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”

A senior Trump 2020 campaign adviser said there were never discussions about focusing on cryptocurrency in the campaign or including it in the party’s official platform because Trump was so opposed.

“He thought it was … weird and he wanted nothing to do with it,” the official said. “He had no clue what it was and wasn’t interested in learning.”

A second adviser who spent hundreds of hours with Trump said, “I only talked about it with him once or twice, and he wasn’t a fan.”

Two donors described talking to Trump privately when he promised to be helpful on the issue, but he did not seem to know the intricacies of cryptocurrency. Trump’s thinking, according to people who have spoken to him, is that there are cryptocurrency supporters who can help him win back the presidency, and there are potential donors to his campaign who like the currency and want to use it.

“Trump understands that the Biden administration has mishandled crypto policy and misjudged its significance,” said Trump donor and cryptocurrency executive Kyle Samani, who attended the California fundraiser. “A lot of crypto people are single-issue voters, have money and are looking for a candidate to support. He and his team recognize all of the above and are capitalizing on it.”

Samani, Bailey and other donors said the industry was frustrated by the Biden administration’s regulatory actions. Others in the industry, including some who dislike Trump, said Gensler had been particularly aggressive and that they needed to come up with reasonable regulations for a largely unregulated industry.

The SEC has filed more than 80 cases against figures in the cryptocurrency industry during the Biden administration, according to the agency’s website. The charges have often included defrauding customers, misrepresenting assets or conducting unregistered offerings of cryptocurrency.

“The SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy continues to urge investors to be cautious if considering an investment involving crypto asset securities,” the agency warns on its website. “Investments in crypto asset securities can be exceptionally volatile and speculative, and the platforms where investors buy, sell, borrow, or lend these securities may lack important protections for investors.”

A spokeswoman for Gensler declined to comment on the administration’s regulatory actions. A Biden campaign spokesman, Ammar Moussa, declined to comment. In recent days, top White House officials have met with cryptocurrency executives, where they heard a range of complaints.

Tim O’Brien, a longtime biographer of Trump, said Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency was not surprising.

“Anyone who has ever walked into Trump’s office and offered him an easy way to make some money, they get his attention. They are off to the races,” O’Brien said. “He’s always been opportunistic about policy.”

The industry has jumped at the chance to shape Trump’s thinking. In recent years, cryptocurrency executives have flooded Washington with contributions, according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign contributions. The industry is responsible for about $121 million in contributions so far this election cycle, according to the group.

According to an analysis provided by the group, more contributions have gone to Republicans than Democrats during this cycle. That is the first time Republicans have taken the financial advantage in donations from the industry, data from the group shows.

Earlier this year in the hills of San Francisco, multiple cryptocurrency executives attended a fundraiser at the home of donor David Sacks, according to an attendee sheet reviewed by The Washington Post. Cameron Winklevoss and his twin brother Tyler — famed cryptocurrency investors — both maxed out in donations to the Trump campaign, a campaign official said.

Multiple questions were asked about cryptocurrency at the fundraiser, and Trump gave supportive though not substantive answers, attendees said. He also voiced support for cryptocurrency in his opening prepared remarks.

“It was probably 20 percent of the fundraiser,” one attendee said.

The donors have been pleased with their access to Trump’s inner circle.

“We’re really excited about what the Trump campaign has done publicly. We’re excited to see what they do in the future,” Bailey said.

Greg Xethalis, a lawyer for the cryptocurrency firm Multicoin Capital, said he was happy the party platform had included such supportive language. Xethalis said he never expected his firm to be involved so much politically.

“It’s pretty strong and good language. It sets the right general policy objectives and can be followed with creating good, consistent legislative and regulatory frameworks,” Xethalis said. “Crypto has become more of a political issue than we necessarily would have thought … The Republican Party has seen an opportunity here.”

Ashley Parker and Yvonne Wingett-Sanchez contributed to this report.

In the chaotic hours after former president Donald Trump was spirited offstage Saturday by Secret Service agents, his face streaked with blood, a doctored photo of the scene began bouncing around on X, falsely showing Trump with a wide smile.

The faked photo was held up as bolstering a baseless theory, promoted among some on the far left, that the shooting — deemed an attempted assassination by law enforcement — had been staged to boost Trump’s political chances. “Why is he so happy?” one woman said in an X post viewed more than 900,000 times.

The altered image, like another one that showed the grimaces of Secret Service agents manipulated into grins, highlighted how the historic moment — captured live from multiple angles — was being warped online in real time, as social media users worked to skew the truth of what happened, win attention or score political points.

As the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee opens Monday, the confusion hasn’t ebbed, even as more details of the shooting emerged. On Sunday, tens of thousands of X users saw or shared a baseless post suggesting an official conspiracy to harm the former president. The post purportedly came from one of the rally’s countersnipers, who said the Secret Service refused to let him fire on the gunman. The claim was sourced only to 4chan, an anonymous message board infamous for lies and trolls.

While GOP delegates gather in Wisconsin, social media platforms are stoking false narratives amid the most divisive presidential campaign in recent history. Some of the biggest have backed away from moderating content, partly out of concern about drawing blowback for removing too much. Sites once lauded as places for views to be exchanged have increasingly become echo chambers for those with like-minded political views serving up falsities to bolster shared beliefs.

The conspiracy theories bubbling up on social media since Saturday’s shooting in Butler, Pa., have given conservatives and liberals alike a lens through which to explain and process such a catastrophic event, said Dannagal Young, a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware who studies conspiracy theories.

“The kind of content that goes viral is the content that is moral and emotional,” regardless of accuracy, and it can drive people to political extremes, Young said. After an event like Saturday’s shooting, “it’s like all you think about is how the world looks through the lenses of your partisan glasses,” she added. It was “a match that was just lit and thrown.”

The flurry of false information threatened to muddle the public understanding of what happened ahead of the GOP convention, where Trump arrived Sunday. The presumptive Republican nominee is scheduled to address delegates Thursday, after a parade of GOP heavyweights, celebrities and Trump family members who are expected to demonstrate a party in lockstep behind Trump, especially in the wake of his close call in Pennsylvania.

Trump and his allies often draw political rhetoric from X and other social media platforms, foreshadowing the possibility that some of the claims could be repeated on the convention stage. Key speakers — including potential vice-presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — took to social media to blame the assassination attempt on President Biden’s campaign. Trump’s convention speakers include some of his top social media supporters, including Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk.

Saturday’s shooting also appeared to energize political opportunists keen to undercut their ideological opponents and recruit new allies.

“Time to get to work[,] meme army,” said a post on the pro-Trump message board Patriots.win. The post included a cartoon comparing Trump’s reaction to the shooting with an onstage fall by Biden last year. Some posts on the site were removed by moderators, one of whom warned users not to “spread messages which my backfire on you, or this site.”

In the comments on one of Trump’s posts on his social network Truth Social, his followers championed his bravery after the shooting and accused his political opponents of being behind the attack. One comment — which showed an illustration of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and was captioned “When Democrats don’t get their way, they get dangerous” — was liked more than 3,000 times.

In the aftermath of a shocking episode like Saturday’s shooting, people don’t just want to understand what happened, but for that information “to align with our political aims, if possible,” said Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who studies information flows. “We are all currently participating in a massive ‘collective sensemaking’ process, attempting to gather and interpret evidence to give meaning to this terrible event,” she wrote on Bluesky. Online audiences enter the fray to “signal their political identity … and help their political team.”

The welter of false theories isn’t set to die down as facts emerge over Saturday’s shooting, given that many Americans see threats to the country’s democracy, said Brian Fishman, who led Meta’s effort to stem terrorism and hate on its platforms before co-founding Cinder, a company that promotes internet trust and safety.

“Misinformation is more resonant when social divisions and political divisions are starker and that always happens during a political campaign,” he said. “People have lost confidence in those sort of foundational facts and truths, and that’s a really dangerous place to be.”

Social media is less policed and more fragmented than three years ago, when Biden and U.S. lawmakers promised a political reckoning in Silicon Valley following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In the immediate aftermath, Democrats criticized social media companies for providing Trump an online megaphone to make false claims about the results of the election, and law enforcement scrutinized the way the rioters used group chats and fringe platforms to organize the attack.

But Congress and the Biden administration ultimately did not develop new rules that would make tech giants more responsible for the violent screeds or falsehoods that circulate on their platforms. The Jan. 6 committee’s 800-plus-page report left out the evidence that the committee collected on the role platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and others played in the attack, due to political tensions on the committee and fear of a public battle with the tech giants.

Meanwhile, Republicans used their control of the House to investigate what they saw as systematic censorship of their views online, conducting a probe that eventually eroded some of the key academic programs and government initiatives to stem conspiracy theories and other falsehoods online.

Mainstream social media companies — including X, Meta and YouTube — have weakened or eliminated policy and programs meant to fight political misinformation. Following billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October 2022, tech companies cut teams that handled misinformation and reversed policies barring certain political conspiracy theories — such as the notion that the 2020 election was rigged. The platforms have also largely removed the restrictions they placed on Trump’s accounts in the fallout of Jan. 6, after suspending him for violating their rules on inciting violence.

As Americans have grown increasingly polarized, Democrats and Republicans have started to consume and share social media content in more partisan ways. Right-leaning internet users often flocked to platforms such as Rumble, TruthSocial and Telegram to consume and spread commentary and information about the shooting while many on the left stuck to mainstream sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Even mainstream social media sites such as Facebook can funnel people into environments where they mostly encounter news and opinions from people they agree with, research shows. After Musk bought Twitter, the share of Democrats who said the site was good for American democracy decreased while it increased for Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center, a Washington think tank.

Violent extremism has also increasingly moved to more opaque corners of the internet or services with lighter content moderation rules, after many companies deplatformed accounts that stoked the attack on the Capitol in 2021. In the immediate aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life, calls for more violence or a civil war ricocheted in Telegram channels associated with the Proud Boys militia group as well the pro-Trump Patriots.win, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Advance Democracy Inc.

“War now. They don’t want to live and let live,” one user on Patriots.win wrote.

In the aftermath of the shooting, viral claims distorting the facts became almost impossible to ignore. Trump’s supporters shared false names and photos for the shooter, saying they were proof that the gunman — identified by the FBI on Sunday morning as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican — was a “Democrat” and “Antifa thug.”

One troll on X shared a video of himself lying that he had committed the crime and adding, “I hate Trump. And guess what, you got the wrong guy.” He later locked his account, but not before the video was circulated millions of times online, entrenching a false narrative about the shooter’s motive, which the FBI has yet to publicly describe.

Musk has pledged that his platform, renamed X, is better at covering current events than the mainstream media due to its crowdsourced commentary from anonymous users and its speed of information flow. But the platform played host to some of the most viral strands of misinformation since the shooting, including the troll who purported to be the shooter in a video and received millions of views.

Some left-leaning accounts alleged without evidence that the shooting was fake, sending the word “staged” to X’s “trending topics” list. “I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but you don’t just stand around and fist pump when there’s an active shooter,” said one X post, which has more than 2 million views.

Others alleged that the shooting was an “inside job” or that there was “evidence of a set-up” by the “deep state” to remove Trump. Musk himself questioned whether the Secret Service’s failure to stop the gunman in advance was “deliberate.”

Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidant, falsely accused a man who was not Crooks of being the shooter, citing unnamed “sources,” in an X post Sunday. That man, whom The Washington Post is not naming, was an anti-Trump protester who pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a scuffle with police in 2016. By the time Stone’s X post was removed Sunday morning, it had gained more than 1.6 million views and 10,000 likes.

A separate man described as an “Antifa extremist” was also falsely named as the shooter in posts that received millions of views. His name, Mark Violets, was briefly one of the top “trending topics” on X in the shooting’s aftermath.

Some of the posts with that false name included a photo of Marco Violi, an Italian soccer journalist. In an Instagram post, Violi said he was awoken in the middle of the night to numerous notifications about the allegations and that he intended to file a complaint about the accounts on X.

“I didn’t have the slightest idea of what had happened,” he wrote in Italian. The claims, he said, are “totally baseless and organized by a group of haters who have been ruining my life since 2018.”

Unproven claims about the shooter’s motives were also popular on Trump’s Truth Social and other social networks catering to conservative users.

After Crooks’s name first surfaced in a New York Post report late Saturday, several fake accounts with his name emerged on Instagram, X and other platforms — a common phenomenon after violent political attacks in the social media era.

Violent rhetoric tied to the assassination attempt is likely to increase online across the political spectrum in the coming weeks and months, said Graham Brookie, vice president for technology programs and strategy at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

“This is a very challenging moment of political violence in this country,” he said, “and platforms have to address this event as an act of violence as opposed to a political topic that is sensitive to engage on.”

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

BETHEL PARK, Pa. — The FBI said Sunday that investigators have not yet identified any ideology fueling the gunman who fired at former president Donald Trump at a packed campaign rally, and they believe he carried out the horrifying assassination attempt on his own.

The gunman was identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, a strong math student in high school who was working as a nursing home employee.

Seconds after he opened fire from a rooftop outside the rally’s security perimeter Saturday evening, using an AR-style rifle that was legally purchased by his father, he was fatally shot by the Secret Service, authorities said.

“At this time, the information that we have indicates that the shooter acted alone and that there are currently no public safety concerns,” FBI special agent in charge Kevin Rojek said in a telephone briefing. “At present we have not identified an ideology associated with the subject, but I want to remind everyone that we’re still very early in this investigation.”

Officials said they had not reached any final conclusions and are still scrutinizing Crooks’ associates to see if anyone aided his violent plan.

The wounding of a former president and presumptive nominee at the outdoor event in Butler, Pa., shocked the nation and brought calls for calmer political rhetoric on the eve of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. It also sparked significant questions about what security lapses allowed the gunman to get onto the roof undetected.

At the White House, President Biden pledged that every measure would be taken to get to the bottom of the attack, and he urged the public to give the FBI time to properly investigate before reaching conclusions.

Speaking from the Oval Office on Sunday night, Biden said the country needs “to lower the temperature … Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, god forbid, a literal killing field.”

While authorities have not given details of Trump’s injuries, the former president said in a post on Truth Social that he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.”

The bullets that missed Trump still proved deadly. One spectator was killed, and two others were critically injured in the attack.

Rojek identified the firearm used in the attack as an AR-style rifle chambered in 5.56 mm, a common caliber for such weapons. The gunman’s family, the FBI said, is cooperating with investigators. Other law enforcement officials said the weapon helped investigators identify the dead gunman after ATF agents quickly tracked down the gun purchase paperwork.

During a search of a vehicle used by the gunman, agents found a “rudimentary” suspected explosive device, officials said. “We have seized the device, rendered it safe and we are also in the process of analyzing that further,” Rojek said. In a later update, the FBI said suspicious devices had been found in his home and vehicle, and both had been rendered safe by bomb technicians.

FBI officials said they have reviewed some of the gunman’s recent electronic communications and hope his cellphone will provide more such evidence.

Officials said he did not have a history of interactions with law enforcement or of mental illness, and they had yet to find any accounts of him making threats. Former classmates described him as kind, polite and smart.

Lacking a clear sign of his motive, investigators searched for every scrap of potential evidence. The shooter’s phone was sent to technical experts at FBI labs in Quantico, Va. His vehicle was towed to undergo further examination. And his online activity, which so far appears sparse and inconclusive, will be carefully examined.

“We are investigating this as an assassination attempt but also looking at it as a potential domestic terrorism attack,” senior FBI official Robert Wells said. The FBI urged anyone with relevant information to submit it to the agency.

The gunman worked as a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in the Pittsburgh suburb of about 34,000 people located about 40 miles south of Butler.

Crooks “performed his job without concern, and his background check was clean,” the administrator of the facility said in a statement.

“A quiet kid” is how Sarah D’Angelo, 20, remembered the teenager she saw before 7:30 a.m. almost every school day for years at Bethel Park High School. Organized by their last names, they sat a few chairs apart.

He would arrive on time and spend most of the 20-minute period either finishing homework or playing video games on his computer, D’Angelo recalled. They hardly talked, D’Angelo said, mostly because it was early and everyone was tired.

“He was nice to anyone he talked to,” D’Angelo said.

D’Angelo said that Crooks did not appear to have many friends, but that he also did not strike her as particularly lonely. He was good at math, “a calculus-type person,” she said. A local media outlet’s list of graduates of Bethel Park High School in 2022 listed Crooks as one of 20 students to have received a $500 prize for math and science from the school that year.

“There were a few people that were more violent in school,” D’Angelo said. “He was not one of those kids.”

On Sunday, she found herself thinking about their final project in honors American history, which was about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Their teacher instructed them to determine what they thought happened — including how many gunmen there were, and where they hid to fire the fatal shots.

Summer Barkley, 19, who lives in Bethel Park, remembered Crooks as a quiet, polite and intelligent student in her freshman history class. “He didn’t talk a lot, but when he did, it was never anything negative,” Barkley said.

“Our history teacher could always count on him to be able to talk about different things about history, know his facts,” she said.

Barkley said she saw Crooks at high school frequently until the pandemic hit during the spring of their sophomore year. Classes went online for the rest of the semester and then to a hybrid model.

She was with a group of friends Saturday night playing video games when she heard he had been identified as the gunman.

“Our jaws were open because we just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I’m not excusing anything he did, but it was a shock to see someone who was nice to me in high school and got good grades and things like that to have such a horrible outcome.

“It was just something that was never something we could have seen coming. It was not at all something where we were like, ‘Okay, maybe I can see his behavior here, or something like that.’”

According to state records, Crooks was registered as a Republican, though campaign finance records show that someone with his name and street address gave $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a Democratic voter-turnout organization, in January 2021.

An initial review of online social media platforms revealed little about the shooter. Discord, the online gaming chat platform, said Sunday that it had removed a “rarely utilized” account that was linked to him.

“We have found no evidence that it was used to plan this incident, promote violence or discuss his political views,” said Clint Smith, Discord’s chief legal officer. Discord is cooperating with law enforcement, Smith said.

Bethel Park residents described the borough as a tightknit community made up of small-business owners and self-described family men who like to talk about their children but not politics.

The fire department consists entirely of volunteers, said Stephen Diethorn, 66, who with his wife owns Ma and Pop’s diner. “People like to help each other, and they like to get along.”

By early Sunday, authorities had sealed off the area around the shooter’s home. Fire department vehicles restricted access for several blocks, allowing only residents and investigators to enter.

In the streets outside that area, the neighborhood seemed apolitical, with no yard signs for any cause or candidate.

But Diethorn, the diner owner, said he had noticed political tension intensifying somewhat in recent years.

Last year, he had to come out from the kitchen to break up an argument between a man who supported President Biden and another who liked Trump. They were yelling. He encouraged them to “be civil.”

Then a few months ago, a man who rides his bicycle around town in a colonial outfit and with a big Trump sign decided to park outside of the diner. Diethorn asked him to move across the street. He didn’t want anything controversial to discourage business.

The separation between food and politics collapsed Sunday morning, as the TV mounted above the four pots of coffee flashed pictures of the former president bleeding from the ear next to the words “Bethel Park.”

“To see a statement talking about [Bethel Park] High School on TV, it’s insane, like out of a movie or something” said customer Tony Serkis, 51. “Unfortunately, it is scarring this community right here.”

Serkis, a lifelong conservative who works in IT, credits Trump with pushing economic policies during his first term that helped Serkis and his family. They were supposed to go to the rally Saturday, but scheduling conflicts prevented them from attending.

Serkis said he grew up with close friends who were liberal and thinks it is important for people who have differences to be able to talk to each other. “We’ve lost that,” he said. “I mean, someone tried to assassinate a former president.”

Barrett, Stein and Hilton reported from Washington. Steve Hendrix in Bethel Park, Annabelle Timsit in London and Shawn Boburg, Alex Horton and Cat Zakrzewski in Washington contributed to this report.

At a conservative evangelical church in Visalia, a farming community in the central valley of California, the pastor’s sermon Sunday included a reminder that trumpets sounded a warning to Christians when judgment was coming.

The gunshots fired at Donald Trump on Saturday, according to the Rev. Joel Renkema, were also a trumpet blare, a “clear and quite obvious warning to our country.” Political discourse had gotten out of control, he told parishioners at Visalia Christian Reformed Church, and it was time to stop “hating and demonizing our opponents.”

“This is a warning shot!” Renkema boomed. “Can we hear it? Will we listen?”

By the time worshipers assembled for services across the country Sunday, not even 24 hours had passed since a suspected assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa. — almost no time for church leaders to figure out how best to guide their shocked congregations through a bloody moment in U.S. history.

Trump, never one to display religiosity, had emerged even before Saturday’s shooting as a messiah-like figure to many hard-right Christians who form the backbone of his MAGA movement. With Trump positioned as a symbol of the faith, an attack on him was cast by some supporters as an attack on Christianity. At a moment of intense division in America, that potentially explosive track led many church leaders — with some notable exceptions — to issue urgent appeals for calm Sunday.

“As Americans, we all have to be horrified today at what took place not too far from here in Butler last evening,” said the Rev. Kris Stubna in remarks Sunday at St. Paul Cathedral, a Catholic parish in Pittsburgh.

“We’re far better than what we saw,” Stubna added. “We condemn what happened to President Trump and will never, ever accept the use of violence for any reason at all.”

The Trump campaign gave no indication that the former president attended church Sunday, though a person who spoke to him said he was almost “spiritual” about the near miss assassination attempt and felt as thought he was “handed a gift from God” by surviving.

Given the mosaic of Christian communities, responses at the pulpit and in the pews varied widely according to location, denomination and demographics. But many drew on similar biblical teachings urging peace and healing — scripture that repeatedly has guided believers in the aftermath of hate-fueled killings and political unrest in recent years.

Some evangelical leaders made pointed allusions to “enemies” and “tests” of the faithful without specifically mentioning Trump or the attack. Others, especially affiliates of the fast-growing Christian supremacist subset known as the New Apostolic Reformation, mentioned Trump by name in sermons and declared spiritual warfare against his opponents.

Joel Osteen, the celebrity preacher with millions of followers, exuded a positive, hopeful energy from his Houston megachurch, which experienced a deadly shooting on-site earlier this year and is now involved in hurricane relief efforts after a storm battered the city.

Osteen’s sermon, streamed live online and on SiriusXM radio, stayed away from direct mention of politics and instead urged Christians going through hardships to look forward to “fresh vision, fresh anointing, fresh favor.”

“We believe the best is still yet to come, that 2024 won’t be a ‘get-by’ year, but a favor-filled, productive, blessed, prosperous year where we see your goodness in new ways,” Osteen told the crowds packed into his cavernous Lakewood Church. “We are victors and never victims.”

There was a decidedly darker tone at a church in neighboring Oklahoma, where Tulsa-based Jackson Lahmeyer, founder of the national group Pastors for Trump, made the sermon topic clear in the name of the live stream: “Trump Assassination Attempt.”

Lahmeyer told congregants at his Sheridan Church that “yesterday we experienced a tragedy, yet a miracle,” alluding to the death of a bystander, Corey Comperatore, and the near miss for Trump. Lahmeyer displayed the viral image of the former president with a bloodied face and a defiant fist in the air. Worshipers erupted in cheers.

“Right now I know many are struggling with the emotional roller coaster — we’re angry, we’re scared, we’re glad,” Lahmeyer said. “And what I want you to know is: We are in a war, and it is a spiritual war. That if we do not win this spiritual war, it will turn into a very physical one.”

Lahmeyer stressed that he wanted to avoid civil war and that differences weren’t between Republicans and Democrats. But in the same sermon, he alluded to “wicked” people who hold on to power and claimed to the audience that evangelicals are “the largest voting bloc in the United States.”

“We are in a war that is between good and evil, period,” he said. “There is no neutrality and we must choose a side.”

For decades, White evangelicals have embraced the idea that they are victims of a hostile culture. Since 2016, they have voted overwhelmingly for Trump, viewing him as a bulwark against liberal values they see as eroding the “Christian identity” of the nation.

A fall poll by the firm PRRI found that White evangelical Protestants are the most likely among faith groups to say the country has gotten “so far off track that true patriots may need to resort to violence in order to save our country,” with more than 3 in 10 White evangelicals agreeing.

“We pray you’d shake this nation to righteousness. Lord, it’s evident we’re in our last few moments,” preached Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel, an evangelical megachurch in Chino Hills, Calif.,. “We’re gasping for breath as a nation.”

The Rev. Patricia Phaneuf Alexander, rector of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Bethesda, Md., cited the Episcopal prayer, written for the days after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, asking God to “transform our rage and hate.”

She also invoked President Barack Obama’s words in 2011 after the Arizona shooting that injured then-Rep. Gabby Giffords. “In the week ahead, I challenge us all — myself very much included — to take yesterday’s tragic events and today’s Gospel to prayer,” Alexander told congregants. “Take them to Jesus. And then listen to what Jesus has to say. Align ourselves with the way of love.”

Trump’s political opponents also prayed for him, as in the sermon Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) delivered Sunday from the pulpit of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, located just steps from the gravesite of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Warnock, the church’s senior pastor, opened with a fierce condemnation of the assassination attempt on Trump and the “coarsening rhetoric of political violence” that he described as a threat to all Americans.

The man who tried to kill Trump “was no patriot,” he said. “And neither were the people who attacked our Capitol and assaulted police officers and tried to stop the nonviolent transfer of political power on January 6.”

“They are cut from the same cloth,” Warnock added. “We must cry foul, we must call out the hypocrisy of anybody who would try to condone one and condemn the other.”

At one point, Warnock said he was thankful that Trump had survived the attack with only minor injuries.

“We pray for him,” he announced to the mostly Black congregants, who offered a muted reaction.

“I said, ‘We PRAY for him,’” Warnock repeated, a little more sternly.

The audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. “Amen!” someone shouted.

Donald Trump, who was injured in what authorities are calling an assassination attempt Saturday, touched down in Milwaukee Sunday evening after calling for Americans to unite as his party prepared to officially nominate him this week at the Republican National Convention.

“Based on yesterday’s terrible events, I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and The Republican National Convention, by two days, but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else,” Trump posted Sunday on his social media site Truth Social.

Trump landed in Milwaukee Sunday shortly before President Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office, who urged Americans to settle their differences at the ballot box.

“Disagreement is inevitable in American democracy,” Biden said. “It’s part of human nature. But politics must never be a literal battlefield — God forbid a killing field. I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate.”

Trump has not made any public remarks since the Secret Service rushed him offstage shortly after shots were fired at his rally in Butler, Pa., around 6:12 p.m. on Saturday. But on social media Sunday, he said he looked forward to addressing the country from Wisconsin. His most recent social media posts echo statements from campaign officials that the Republican National Convention, slated to begin Monday, will go on as planned.

Trump’s plane arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey early Sunday after the shooting, according to flight records. In Bedminster, N.J., police guarded the entrance to his golf club and residence, prohibiting any vehicle from idling anywhere near the gate. The officers directed press to the parking lot of a library nearly four miles from the entrance of Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.

A driver in a red convertible with its top down and a pair of American flags perched on top of it cruised by and honked at the scattering of media.

The FBI is investigating the Saturday evening shooting at Trump’s campaign rally as an assassination attempt and have identified the suspected gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa. Trump said he was struck in his right ear, and officials said one attendee was killed and two others were critically injured.

Trump’s campaign increased security Saturday night, and political leaders urged one another to dial back heated political rhetoric. Top Trump advisers told staffers to stay away from the campaign’s offices in Washington and West Palm Beach on Sunday as security at those locations was assessed.

“We are enhancing the armed security presence with 24/7 officers on-site. Additional security assessments will be in place,” Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a joint memo obtained by The Washington Post and first reported by Politico.

“We also urge you to recognize the political polarization in this heated election,” they added. “If something looks or feels off, please flag it immediately for leadership or an on-site security team.”

LaCivita and Wiles also advised staffers not to comment publicly on the shooting and said the Republican convention would “continue as planned.”

In Bedminster, N.J., Trump loyalists spent the day at a busy intersection about four miles from the former president’s golf club and residence. They waved Trump 2024 flags as drivers blared their horns and as a DJ in the group blasted country tunes and songs with MAGA messaging.

Miguel Magera, 58, who owns a small business that does home improvement work, said he had planned to go on a ride on Sunday but the day after the Trump rally shooting, he answered a call from an organizer of Trump devotees in the area to meet at the spot they frequent.

Magera said he switched his plans to come to the rally partly because of the shooting and its impact on him. Magera said he was watching tennis on TV when he flipped to a news program and saw the shocking news, leaving him “devastated.”

Terry Beck, 60, organizer of the event, was sitting on a beach towel on the wide lawn behind a public library on Sunday afternoon as Trump prepared to leave the area for the RNC in Milwaukee. Nearly drowned out by the horns and shouting, she recalled running errands and had finished chores at home when she sat down for a break. “All of a sudden my phone is ringing, ringing, ringing. 87 messages, 55 texts. All of a sudden it was going and going,” Beck said.

Authorities said they cannot yet speak to the shooter’s motive. As they raced to learn more, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that Congress would investigate any potential lapses in security that allowed the attack.

“In the meantime, we’ve got to turn the rhetoric down,” Johnson urged on NBC’s “Today” show on what he called a “surreal” morning. Like other Republicans, Johnson noted President Biden’s recent call to put Trump in a “bull’s eye” — saying he knows that Biden “didn’t mean what is being implied there” but also believes “that kind of language on either side should be called out.”

“So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye,” Biden had told donors.

Leaders across the political spectrum, including Biden, condemned the rally shooting. Biden’s campaign rushed to take down its television ads afterward.

Trump’s defiant response to the shooting — he pumped his fist and shouted “fight!” before being rushed offstage — triggered deep emotions in his supporters. “I look at him, and I feel proud,” said Patty Harnish, a 58-year-old Dollar General sales associate in Butler, where the rally took place.

She held up the morning paper. There was Trump on the front page, blood streaking his face, fist raised in the air.

“He’s like: Screw you,” she said as customers trickled into the store Sunday a few miles from where bullets flew at the former president. “I can’t be stopped. I still have another ear.” She’d been surprised by the heft of her emotions, she said, after feeling so disconnected from politicians for decades. She hasn’t cast a vote in 28 years since backing Bill Clinton, she said, and now, “It’s Trump.”

Paquette reported from Butler. Jacobs reported from Bedminster. Amy B Wang contributed to this report.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate said Sunday they would investigate the apparent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, demanding documents and testimony from the U.S. Secret Service, while others moved to enhance the security provided to presidential candidates.

At the center of the maelstrom on Capitol Hill are questions posed by Republicans and Democrats alike about the agency charged with safeguarding Trump and top U.S. leaders — and how a gunman managed to open fire on someone under its protection.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) called for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to appear before the committee next week, and Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, requested documents, details and a briefing pertaining to the security plan for Trump’s rally Saturday in Butler County, Pa.

In a three-page letter released Sunday, Green raised “serious concerns regarding how a shooter was able to access a rooftop within range and direct line of sight of where President Trump was speaking.”

Later, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, announced a separate investigation into the shooting, which officials said left one rally attendee dead and two others injured. Trump said on social media that he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” The gunman, identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., was killed by the Secret Service.

Peters and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas were set to speak Sunday and committee staff were due to receive a briefing from the department.

The House Sergeant-at-Arms held a call with House Republicans, who were told to expect increased security at the party’s convention this week in Milwaukee, according to people familiar with the conversation. Lawmakers also were told they can request additional security in their districts.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) opened the conversation with a call for Republicans and Democrats to lower the temperature, according to members who participated in the call. He also asked that Democrats specifically tone down their rhetoric claiming that a Trump victory in November’s election would mean the “end of democracy” or a “national emergency,” according to one member who, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what was said.

Members who spoke during the call called for accountability and largely echoed concerns about the Secret Service and why the shooting was not prevented.

“It’s unthinkable, unfathomable,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) said in an interview on CNN. “We need to know: Was this a protocol failure? Was this a resources issue? Or is this just a failure of those who were on-site that day?”

Other potential investigations will be considered after the Republican convention, according to a person who was briefed on the call. Those could examine Secret Service security protocols and resources, and whether sufficient funds are dedicated to former presidents, presidential candidates and those who need protection, the person said.

President Biden, in brief remarks at the White House on Sunday, said he would also seek a review of the Secret Service’s planning ahead of the rally and its response after the shooting.

Not all members agreed with the rush to question the planning and response from the Secret Service, including Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who witnessed the bloodshed at the rally from the front row and the response by those who whisked Trump safely off the stage.

“There’s a danger in saying these people didn’t do their jobs — when I saw them rush to rescue the president, they were doing their job,” Kelly said in a brief interview with The Washington Post. “We need to step back a little bit and let the process play out.”

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a combat veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, sent a separate letter to Cheatle seeking details about the agency’s planning around the rally, including information about threat assessments, any failures in protocol and requests for additional resources. Gallego also asked whether the agency will “reconsider its denial of protection” for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an Independent.

“This was a security failure at the highest level, not seen since the attempted assassination of President Reagan” in 1981, Gallego wrote. “This cannot happen, and I demand accountability.”

Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) introduced a bill on Sunday that similarly proposed enhanced protection for all major presidential candidates.

“Anything less would be a disservice to our democracy,” they said in a joint statement.

Abigail Hauslohner contributed to this report.