The Kamala Harris campaign sent a signal to deep-pocketed donors Monday by blessing the work of 13 independent groups that could help elect the vice president over the final 50 days through advertising, registration or other voter mobilization efforts.

The announcement comes as the Harris campaign remains flush with late-summer cash after raising $615 million in the first six weeks after taking over President Joe Biden’s campaign.

But the ecosystem of supportive nonprofits and super PACs that were set up to support her campaign are in many cases still recovering from a tumultuous summer that disrupted fundraising, particularly among wealthy donors who can write large checks.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement Monday that the 13 groups, including several that do not disclose their donors, were important for the vice president’s campaign.

“These groups’ efforts to register voters and mobilize our broad and diverse coalition will play a critical role in winning this November,” she said.

The list includes operations that the Biden campaign previously embraced, including the principal advertising super PAC, Future Forward, along with American Bridge 21st Century, which is advertising in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Priorities USA, which has been doing digital spots to support the Democratic ticket.

The list also included six groups that focus on persuading and turning out specific constituencies that Harris has identified as crucial for November, including several that have partnered with Future Forward on advertising campaigns.

They include BlackPAC, which targets African American voters; Somos Votantes, which targets Latinos; AAPI Victory, which targets Asian voters; Galvanize, which targets White women in battleground states; Won’t PAC Down, which focuses on Millennial and Generation X voters; and Emily’s List, a group focused on electing Democratic women that has been advertising on abortion rights this year.

Other favored groups include Clear Choice, a recently formed super-PAC focused on discouraging potential Harris voters from voting third party, and the Democratic Data Exchange, or DDX, a company that allows for voter information to be exchanged between independent groups on the left and Democratic campaigns like Harris.

Two major liberal donor networks round out the list: America Votes, a hub for coordinating field efforts in battleground states, and Strategic Victory Fund, a spinoff of the Democracy Alliance that focuses on elevating liberal voices in battleground states.

Federal candidates like Harris and their advisers are allowed to encourage independent groups that can collect checks of unlimited value, even if those groups later spend that money to help their campaigns. But candidates and their agents are not allowed to direct spending by the groups or specifically ask for large contributions from donors.

In practice, that means campaign surrogates or candidates will appear at events for groups they support without making a specific donation requests. Since Harris took over the Biden campaign, one of her campaign co-chairs, former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, appeared at an event for American Bridge. Doug Emhoff, the vice president’s husband, is scheduled to attend a separate American Bridge event in the coming days.

The Harris campaign is expected to deploy more surrogates in the coming weeks to help the chosen 13 groups raise money, even as they continue to warn donors that the campaign needs more funding despite raising nearly three times as much as Republican candidate Donald Trump in August.

O’Malley Dillon sent a Sept. 7 memo to major donors called “A Fierce Spending Battle This Fall” that highlighted the deep pockets of independent groups supporting Trump.

“We’re running against an entire army of MAGA-aligned super PACs and outside groups,” O’Malley Dillon said in the memo. “Already, new, billionaire-funded soft money groups are springing up at a rapid pace, trying to make up for his lack of grassroots support by raising hundreds of millions from high-dollar donors — and they are using it to attack Vice President Harris.”

Trump has publicly praised some of the groups supporting him in social media posts, showering public praise on major donors like Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who is funding a field operation to help Trump’s campaign.

“Preserve America has been doing a great job with ads and all other efforts on behalf of MAGA,” Musk wrote on Truth Social earlier this month, before naming out the group’s primary donor, the heir to a casino fortune. “Thank you Miriam Adelson!”

The day after Secret Service agents confronted an armed man near where Donald Trump was playing golf, the former president told Fox News that the rhetoric of Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame.

“He believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said of Ryan Wesley Routh, the man arrested after fleeing the Trump International Golf Club on Sunday. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” Trump continued.

And then, seemingly in the same breath, he accused his opponents of posing a threat to the country — the same sort of assertion that he claimed had served as Routh’s motivation.

“And they are the ones that are destroying the country, both from the inside and out,” Trump said. “These are people that want to destroy our country,” he added later. “It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”

Trump’s political appeals have never been particularly subtle, and this one isn’t either. It’s dangerous for Democrats to say these things about him, he insists — as he says those things about Democrats. It is an immediate, obvious blend of three things: his interest in making Democrats wary about describing him as a threat to democracy, his effort in presenting himself as a victim (the central theme of his 2024 candidacy) and his interest in portraying Democrats as dangerous and threatening. That these outcomes are not internally consistent is not the sort of thing Trump loses sleep over.

Other Republicans are a bit more cautious in separating out those impulses, but they still amplify them. Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), for example, said that Democrats were “100 percent” responsible for Routh’s actions — agreeing with a Fox News host’s leading prompt that it was “the constant drumbeat from the left that Trump is a ‘threat to democracy’” — that last phrase offered with obvious sarcasm. Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), in a separate Fox News interview, suggested Democrats “really need to think about the consequence of using that kind of language.”

Routh’s intent in being at the golf course on Sunday and any motivations are still uncertain as of writing. He was charged in federal court Monday with two gun-related crimes. In social media posts attributed to him, he did express anger at Trump’s effort to retain power after the 2020 election, including criticism of the Capitol riot. He also posted in April that “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.”

The posts also give a sense of instability, with his political interests bouncing between the parties and candidates over time. A neighbor told reporters that he was “a little cuckoo.”

Mental instability and violence against prominent figures have an uncomfortable overlap. When a fervent Trump supporter was accused of sending pipe bombs to Democratic elected officials and members of the media, I spoke with Cheryl Paradis, a professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, who wrote a book on mental illness and criminality. She noted that public events can become a point of irrational focus for those suffering from such afflictions.

“What’s going on politically can galvanize, it can become a focus for people who have serious psychiatric illnesses,” Paradis said in 2018. She added that “this is a time in which many people are watching and very focused on the upcoming election, for example — and people have strong feelings about it. People that have psychiatric illnesses, just like anyone else, can be influenced by what’s going on in today’s political climate.”

The point was made more succinctly (and less empathetically) by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in an interview that aired on CNN several hours before Routh was confronted on the golf course.

“Are we not allowed to talk about these problems because some psychopaths are threatening violence?” Vance told the channel’s Dana Bash.

Vance was defending himself against criticisms that his amplification of false and baseless claims about immigrants from Haiti led to a spate of threats of violence in Springfield, Ohio. Vance insisted that his assertions were unrelated to bomb threats that had followed his helping to amplify the idea — and that those threats shouldn’t prevent him from continuing to amplify it.

Former Illinois representative Joe Walsh, who was elected as a Republican but is now a fervent Trump critic, offered a similar response following news of Routh’s arrest.

“It’s not complicated,” he wrote on social media: “I oppose Trump because I believe he IS a genuine threat to our democracy. Democracy IS on the ballot in November [and] I oppose political violence and strongly condemn this assassination attempt on Trump.”

There are key differences between the situations, however. One is that the claims Vance elevated targeted a community broadly, without evidence to support what he was asserting and without any offered remedy. However one views Trump’s response to the 2020 election, it’s clear he tried to retain power despite his loss, with disastrous consequences. There’s also a nonviolent means of addressing questions about Trump regaining power: “Ballots, not bullets,” as Walsh’s message concludes.

All of this said, many Republicans sincerely believe Trump is a target of nefarious actors. After a man shot at Trump in Butler, Pa., earlier this year, Trump supporters (including Vance) suggested that “they” had tried to kill the former president, attributing Thomas Crooks’ actions to a broad conspiracy and to anti-Trump politics. Further investigation suggested this wasn’t true, so Republicans (including Trump) pivoted to suggesting the shooting was a function of willful negligence on the part of the Biden administration.

Some go further. After Routh’s capture, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) offered a new suggestion that his efforts were part of an overarching plot.

“This is very unlikely to be the last time they try to kill Trump,” she wrote on social media. “I do not believe these are lone wolves — crazy people — mad at him because of his ‘rhetoric’ like they want us to believe.”

Even the less extreme iteration of blaming Democrats for Routh’s actions, though, are politically useful for Trump. If it leads to criticisms of his authoritarian impulses being viewed as beyond the pale, his campaign team is unlikely to complain. If it generates more sympathy from his base or new sympathy from undecided voters, even better.

There is a fundamental dishonesty to it, of course. Trump and his allies seek unilateral disarmament, the ability to bemoan Democratic criticisms of Trump as unacceptable and immoral while shrugging at what Trump himself says. If Trump thought it was over the line to describe him as a threat to the country, he probably wouldn’t then describe Harris in that way.

And, again, those criticisms are rooted in Trump’s actions and campaign pledges, not in invented stories about, say, immigrants eating cats. As a leading national politician once asked, are people not allowed to talk about problems just because some psychopaths are threatening violence?

From Day One of his presidency to this day, Donald Trump has promoted an alternate reality that has caught on with a shocking proportion of his base. But we don’t often get good polling that shows just how much Trump’s misinformation has penetrated the country.

Today, we have such polling. And it’s sobering, if unsurprising.

As Trump has launched a series of claims and suggestions that are bizarre even by his standards, new data shows large swaths of his supporters believe them.

But the most drastic among them — most notably the claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing and eating pets — have not caught on with more middle-of-the-road voters. That suggests there is real potential downside for Trump in pushing these fantasies.

The new data come from YouGov, which has occasionally tested Trump’s false claims. After last week’s debate, YouGov asked voters about a battery of them.

The major findings on what Trump supporters believe:

• A majority of Trump supporters say they believe the claim about Haitian migrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.” Excluding those who are “not sure,” twice as many say it’s at least “probably true” as say it’s at least “probably false.” (There remains no real evidence for this claim. Officials have debunked it and linked it to threats, and Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Sunday called it “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.”)
• More than 4 in 10 Trump supporters say they believe that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth” — another claim Trump referenced at last week’s debate. In fact, slightly more said they believed this was true than disbelieved it. (It is false.)
• Nearly 3 in 10 Trump supporters say they believe that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations,” something Trump has recently suggested is happening but for which there is no evidence.
• And 8 in 10 Trump supporters say they believe Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” to the United States. (There is no evidence that Venezuela or any other country is doing this, and Trump has used bad data to support his claim.)

The claims about Haitian migrants, post-birth executions and sex changes at school are actually some of the least pervasive. But the other claims that Trump supporters believe are more about statistics than ridiculous assertions.

For example, three-quarters say they believe the United States has given more aid to Ukraine than all of Europe combined (false), 7 in 10 say they believe millions of undocumented immigrants are arriving every month (false), and 7 in 10 say they believe inflation is at its highest rate ever (not true today or at any point in recent years).

Americans of all political stripes have a long history of getting such data points wrong and exaggerating perceived problems, especially on the economy. So what’s really striking about the new numbers is how much Trump’s conspiracy theories have caught on.

The numbers on those counts aren’t terribly surprising in context, given the many false things Trump supporters have convinced themselves of in recent years. For example, most Republicans have told pollsters that Trump didn’t try to overturn the 2020 election, that Trump didn’t have classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and that Trump’s offices were wiretapped during the 2016 election. And of course there is the 2020 stolen-election claim that as many as two-thirds of Republicans have believed.

But these things have also generally only caught on to an extent, and that’s a key point with the new data.

For instance, independents disbelieve the Haitian migrants claim more than 2-to-1, and five times as many say it’s “definitely false” (35 percent) as say it’s “definitely true” (7 percent).

The gaps are even wider on executing babies and sex changes in schools. More than 6 in 10 independents dispute both, and relatively few independents — less than one-quarter — embrace them. Many independents are actually reliable voters for one side or another, and the data suggest these are likely Republican-leaning ones.

All of which indicates Trump is largely preaching to a credulous choir here, while the potentially decisive voters generally see his conspiracy theories for what they are.

Whether they will punish him for that is an open question. Voters have long viewed Trump as an unreliable narrator, with a survey last week showing 57 percent of Americans say his campaign messages are “rarely” or “never” based on facts.

But in the meantime, we have apparently tens of millions of Americans embracing a truly bizarre version of reality based on little more than one man’s say-so.

The Secret Service is facing new scrutiny after a gunman came within range of former president Trump for the second time in less than 10 weeks on Sunday, raising concerns about whether the elite protective agency is stretched too thin in a politically polarized nation where many people have ready access to guns.

“Thank God the president’s OK,” President Joe Biden said Monday to reporters. “One thing I want to make clear: The service needs more help.”

Biden declined to provide additional details about the agency’s needs but urged Congress to consider increasing the agency’s funding and allowing it to hire more staff.

Secret Service agents’ quick actions likely prevented Sunday’s incident in Florida from escalating, law-enforcement officials said. Authorities quickly detained Ryan Wesley Routh and charged him Monday with two gun-related crimes at a federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Fla.

But the latest potential attempt on Trump’s life happened before the agency, Congress, and other oversight bodies had completed their assessment of the security breakdowns ahead of the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania. In that incident, a gunman armed with an AR-style weapon climbed atop an unmonitored roof and fired several shots at a campaign rally, killing one attendee and injuring others, including Trump.

Multiple federal investigations are underway into the July 13 attack, including a 60-day “mission assurance” review by the Secret Service, an independent investigation ordered by Biden and the Department of Homeland Security that is expected to conclude in early October, as well as probes by Congress and the DHS Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog.

The Secret Service plans to launch another mission assurance review of Sunday’s attack, though it has not yet published the findings of its July 13 internal review, said agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

The Washington Post reported last week that the internal review had confirmed security failures that led to the July assassination attempt, including that the service never directed local police to secure the roof of the building used by the gunman. Agency officials said they increased equipment and personnel for Trump and other protectees — more than 40 officials and their family members — in response to the attack.

In contrast, the Secret Service won praise for its handling of Sunday’s incident.

A sharp-eyed agent scouting ahead as Trump golfed at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach spotted a gun barrel poking through a tree-shaded chain-link fence and opened fire, giving the team accompanying the former president time to rush him to safety.

Rep. Bill Keating, a Democrat from Massachusetts who investigated the government’s failure to prevent the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, said in an interview Monday that Congress and others should increase the Secret Service’s resources and beef up its policies and procedures to allow it to more quickly identify and neutralize threats.

He said officials should consider surging resources to protectees such as Trump based on the threat levels they are facing, and not on whether they are a sitting president or only a candidate for office. He said lawmakers also should consider jettisoning some of the agency’s nonprotective duties, such as investigating some financial crimes.

“The index for increased violence is clearly going up,” Keating said.

He said Congress should urgently examine the agency’s needs and resources, as well as its organizational structure.

“With two instances so close together, we may not be as fortunate in the future,” he said.

The second attack on Trump occurred just as the Secret Service is preparing for one of its most challenging events, the United Nations General Assembly, which draws scores of world leaders to New York, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

And the presidential campaign is in full swing, with under two months to go before the November elections. Trump is expected to meet Monday with the acting director of the Secret Service. On Monday night, Trump is scheduled to unveil a new cryptocurrency business. Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union that has not endorsed a presidential candidate.

Multiple Democratic members of Congress have called for increasing Secret Service funding in the weeks since the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life.

“We have a heightened threat environment … We have a current president, we have a former president running, we have a vice president who’s a presidential candidate, and we have all their families, and that’s not even to mention all the vice-presidential candidates,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a member of the bipartisan House committee investigating the July 13 assassination attempt, said on Fox News on Monday. “The Secret Service told us very clearly last week that they are redlined. They are working overtime, over time — double overtime. These folks are burning out, they need new resources. We need to get them help so that they can do the job that the Americans, people expect them to do.”

But House Republicans have consistently stymied additional funding for the Secret Service over the past year as a right-wing bloc of the GOP conference has rebelled against funding bills they’ve argued have bent to Democratic priorities.

“President Trump needs the most coverage of anyone,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday on Fox & Friends. “We are demanding in the House that he have every asset available, and we will make more available, if necessary.”

“I don’t think it’s a funding issue,” Johnson added.

Instead, the House GOP has focused its criticisms on DHS, slamming the agency for delaying the release of an inspector general report related to its failures ahead of and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. If the report had been released earlier, Republicans have argued, it could have provided insight into Secret Service deficiencies before the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa.

Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) is one of the few House Republicans who has publicly suggested that Secret Service might require more funding. Although he did not specify how much money might be required, he co-authored a bill with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) that calls for the Secret Service to increase the number of agents protecting presidential candidates and allows for the appropriation of money “necessary to carry out” the change.

House Republicans face a key decision on Secret Service funding this month. In recent weeks, the White House Office of Management and Budget urged lawmakers to ensure the protective agency has enough money to secure National Special Security Events such as the presidential inauguration and protect Trump and Harris for the remainder of the election. Congress must approve a government funding bill by Oct. 1 to avert a government shutdown.

Carol D. Leonnig and Lori Rozsa contributed to this report.

Soon after Donald Trump became president, authorities tried to warn him about the risks posed by golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads. Secret Service agents came armed with unusual evidence: not suspect profiles or spent bullet casings, but simple photographs taken by news crews of him golfing at his private club in Sterling, Va.

They reasoned that if photographers with long-range lenses could get the president in their sights while he golfed, so too could potential gunmen, according to former U.S. officials involved in the discussions who, like most others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

But Trump insisted that his clubs were safe and that he wanted to keep golfing, the former officials said. These preferences posed problems for his protection that former Trump aides, Secret Service officials and security experts said have only intensified in the years since he left the White House, as his security detail shrank and agents no longer maintained as extensive a perimeter guarding his movements. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The problems became gravely apparent on Sunday when a gunman pushed a semiautomatic rifle through the bushes at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what authorities are investigating as a possible effort to assassinate the former president — the second attempt on his life in as many months.

Trump was unharmed. In a post on social media, he thanked Secret Service and law enforcement. “It was certainly an interesting day!” he wrote. “THE JOB DONE WAS ABSOLUTELY OUTSTANDING.”

On Monday, Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe led a walk-through of the incident site, where the suspected gunman, Ryan Wesley Routh, was able to get a weapon within 500 yards of the former president. Rowe stressed in a news conference that the agency’s methods had worked in averting catastrophe: “The protective methodologies of the Secret Service were effective yesterday.”

He also emphasized that Trump’s outing had been unplanned, forcing authorities to work on the fly.

“The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there,” Rowe said. “It was not on his official schedule.”

The episode adds to pressure on the Secret Service, which has been under scrutiny since a gunman gained a clear sightline to Trump at his July rally in Butler, Pa., firing several shots that grazed the former president’s ear. The rally shooting two months ago reflected what lawmakers and Secret Service leadership have described as a major security failure — poor planning, an unsecured roof that constituted an obvious risk and a breakdown in communication between federal and local authorities.

Secret Service leaders are already probing if any of those factors contributed to a gunman’s ability to once again get within striking distance of the Republican nominee for president. President Joe Biden on Monday urged Congress to consider increasing the agency’s funding, and the agency promised a new investigation.

The incident in West Palm Beach was in many ways a more predictable debacle. Indeed, Trump aides and Secret Service agents have long worried about his possible exposure while golfing. The issue, they say, is twofold. He selects locations to golf — his own clubs — that are particularly difficult to secure. And then he follows a highly predictable routine on any given weekend.

“People are saying, ‘How did [Routh] know he’d be there?’” said a former senior U.S. official. “Well, if you were looking for Trump on a Sunday afternoon, I can tell you where he’d be. Whatever golf course of his that was closest to where he was.”

Bill Gage, a former agent, said Routh probably didn’t need to do “very sophisticated surveillance.”

“He just had to sit and wait for Trump to arrive,” he said. “You don’t have to do a lot of guessing to know where he is going to be and that gives a bad guy time to prepare,” he said.

A criminal complaint filed Monday alleges that a cellphone used by Routh appeared to have been in the vicinity of the course for nearly 12 hours before he was spotted by a Secret Service agent, suggesting Routh may indeed have simply waited for Trump to appear.

Trump pitches and putts at his own private clubs, elite enclaves that are nevertheless open to some members of the public and their guests. The courses are located in heavily trafficked communities. And while they’re surrounded by some fencing, the greens lack hardened perimeters. The result is a security nightmare for the Secret Service and their partners in local law enforcement, especially without the added staff and tools devoted protecting the sitting president.

“At this level that he’s at right now, he’s not the sitting president,” the Palm Beach County sheriff, Ric L. Bradshaw, told reporters on Sunday. “If he was, we would have had the entire golf course surrounded. But because he’s not, security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible.”

Bradshaw said Routh was in an area of the shrubbery that allowed him to see two holes simultaneously — thereby eyeing both Trump and the agents moving one hole ahead of him in an elaborate protocol perfected over the years. Current and former agents said a countersniper team typically travels one hole ahead of Trump to scope out potential risks. Another countersniper team travels a hole behind to make sure there is no danger lurking in his wake as he moves forward on the fairway, protecting what’s called the “6 o’clock position.”

A countersniper agent, a counter assault agent and some of the members of his regular detail travel alongside Trump, who typically drives his own golf cart. Trump likes to play quickly and drive alone, even if friends or aides join him for a few holes, according to people who have accompanied him on the links.

The part of the course where Trump was playing at the time, Bradshaw added, is adjacent to both Summit Boulevard and S. Congress Avenue, busy thoroughfares near Palm Beach International Airport.

During Trump’s presidency, his golf outings were a constant source of consternation, according to former officials. Secret Service agents knew they wouldn’t be able to dissuade him from golfing, one former official said, so they asked him, mostly without success, to instead change his routine — at least to avoid going to the same club at the same time every week.

Trump’s practices differed from those of Barack Obama, who golfed frequently as president but usually at a course on the grounds of the military’s Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County or, while vacationing in Hawaii, on bases there. Such courses are insulated from public roadways, and anyone on the links would have undergone rigorous screening. Even high-ranking military officials were turned away if their tee times conflicted with a presidential outing, said Gage, the former agent, who worked protection for some of Obama’s golf trips at Andrews and in Hawaii.

Still, authorities have gone to great lengths to keep Trump safe while golfing. Agents kept a wider perimeter around him when he was president, establishing checkpoints at his clubs and trying to limit foot traffic around him, according to a former senior official.

Some of those practices have fallen by the wayside in recent years, according to club guests. People who have played at Trump’s club in West Palm Beach said they were surprised they weren’t screened more extensively or kept away from the former president. One person who played last year said he wasn’t asked any questions or subject to a bag search. After he finished his round, this person said, he walked into the clubhouse and took a corner table near where Trump later came to dine.

Trump’s security was bolstered following the July 13 shooting in Butler. The size of the Secret Service team protecting him on the links on Sunday was similar to the resources provided when he was president. A drone was in use Sunday to give agents an overview of the course, countersurveillance agents were deployed to survey the area and protective intelligence agents were on hand to assess possible risks, according to a Secret Service official briefed on the security plan.

The former president has expressed appreciation for the stepped-up security, which includes armed men of his golfing patrons, but has sometimes shown flashes of annoyance about the spectacle, said people who have been with him.

“People are coming to play golf,” he recently told an associate. “They don’t want to see that.”

Trump is hardly the first president to golf, or to come into the crosshairs of people who want to do harm.

William McKinley made the first presidential putt in 1897, but it was William Howard Taft who was arguably the first golfing president, bringing enthusiasm for the sport to the White House about a decade later.

The security challenges posed by the pastime became especially apparent in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower, a golfing fanatic, occupied the White House. He had three favorite courses, according to the 2014 book “Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts — From FDR to Obama.” They were the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga.; the Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Md.; and the Cherry Hills Country Club near Denver A special cabin was built for Eisenhower at the Augusta club, with basement quarters for the Secret Service.

Two of Eisenhower’s hobbies bothered the Secret Service: putting as well as painting on the South Lawn of the White House, where the lighting was best. The president kept golfing but moved his painting indoors.

Three decades later, fear that golfing made presidents soft targets intensified when an armed man barreled through the gates of Augusta National while Ronald Reagan was playing the 16th hole. The intruder, Charles R. Harris, took five hostages and demanded to speak with Reagan. After the crisis, Reagan gave up golfing except for at the private course on the grounds of the Sunnylands Estate, owned at the time by his friends Walter and Leonore Annenberg, according to a 2005 book by a former longtime Secret Service agent, Joseph Petro.

“He said that he was giving up golf purposely because he was concerned about putting other people at unnecessary risk,” Petro wrote in the book, “Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service.”

Tucked into a fascinating article about partisanship and names in America, The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam and Lenny Bronner included a chart that captures a remarkable divide: the split in party identity by gender among younger Americans.

The chart, using voter registration data from the firm L2, looked like the one below. At left is the distribution of party identification among women by age (young to older as you move left to right). At right, the same data for men. (The percentages reflect the portion of the total electorate represented by that age and gender.)

Americans under 30 are more likely to be registered independents or third party than to be Democrats or Republicans — but that’s because of young men. Young women are about as likely to be registered as Democrats as to be independents. Neither group is terribly likely to be registered as Republican.

One reason for this was captured in a new analysis published last week by Gallup: Young people are more likely to agree with liberal positions than they used to be, but young women have shifted the most to the left.

To measure this, Gallup compared views on an array of issue questions from polling conducted from 2008 to 2016 — let’s call this the Barack Obama era — with the same questions asked from 2017 to 2024, which we’ll call the Donald Trump era. Among respondents ages 30 and up in both eras, the shifts to the left were about the same. Women were slightly more likely to hold stronger liberal positions than men, illustrated on the graph below by the individual issues (identified with letters) appearing above the diagonal line.

On some issues, like “think use of marijuana should be legal,” both men and women became more liberal to the same extent, so the (J) representing that question appears right on the line. On other issues, like (K) (“the federal government is responsible for ensuring healthcare coverage”), women shifted to the left by a larger amount, so it appears well above the diagonal line. On only one issue did both men and women move away from the liberal position: (W), the U.S. is spending too much on defense.

Now compare that with the difference between men and women under 30. In. nearly every case, the issues appear well above the diagonal line — meaning that young women shifted much more to the left than did young men.

There are exceptions, you’ll notice. But the correlation in the shift between older women and older men is far stronger than the correlation between younger women and younger men.

In fact, younger women also shifted to the left relative to older women. The correlation between older women and younger men is stronger than the correlation between older women and younger women.

Comparing women ages 18 to 29 in the 2008 to 2016 era means we’re comparing a different set of women in that age range more recently. A 21-year-old woman in 2008 was 30 in 2017. So this is not necessarily a shift in personal views, but instead in generational ones.

In her analysis of the Gallup data, the New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller points to the likely role Trump played in this shift, including his attacks on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. A number of other factors probably contributed, like the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter. The biggest movement among younger women, though, was on environmental issues.

What’s striking is that shift was so disproportionately among women, as other data have also shown. Men, young and old, moved to the left on the measures Gallup considered, but in correlation with one another. Women didn’t.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election was seen as the advent of a new, more liberal and more diverse American electorate. Trump’s 2016 election was heavily a reaction to that shift, a response to the ways in which America was changing.

Young American women, the Gallup data suggests, manifested the change about which Republicans were so concerned.

The big question in the 2024 election is increasingly not just who will take office come Jan. 20, 2025, but also what kind of ugly scenes will be visited on the country before we ever reach that point.

That specter looms larger and larger amid a series of ominous signs.

One obvious such sign is what may have been the second assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in nine weeks on Sunday. But compounding the problem are the increasingly coarse and partisan reactions to violence and threats of violence; the significant embrace of potentially justified political violence and vast conspiracy theories; a rise in threats; and the increasingly shameless and tolerated promotion of misinformation and bigoted views on social media.

And it’s often the right raising the temperature.

Reactions from Republicans to the latest threat to Trump’s life, at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., were foreboding.

After slowly warming to the idea of blaming the political left for the assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July — despite scant evidence — Trump on Monday wasted little time assigning blame similarly for the latest threat.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump claimed to Fox News about Ryan Wesley Routh, the man who has been arrested and charged after he allegedly shrouded himself in the bushes near the golf course with a rifle as Trump played golf. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at …” (The suspect allegedly fled without firing.)

This echoes previous Republican suggestions linking the July assassination attempt to Democrats having called Trump a “threat to democracy” and a danger to the country.

Trump said that Democrats, in fact, “are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.” He added: “It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”

There is no evidence that Routh was spurred by Democrats’ rhetoric, just as there is no evidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspect in the Pennsylvania shooting, was back in July. Crooks was a registered Republican who left little in the way of a paper trail about his motivations before his death; Routh is apparently a former Trump voter who embraced both Democrats and Republicans who challenged Trump in recent years.

Democrats have also largely backed off the “threat to democracy” rhetoric over the past two months. Trump, in turn, has stepped up such rhetoric against them.

There is plenty to learn about both cases. But Trump is signaling to his supporters that Democrats have effectively played a hand in possibly trying to get him killed — twice — after previously suggesting that the FBI sought to assassinate him. And he continues to use precisely the kind of rhetoric that he himself casts as inciting. His supporters, meanwhile, leap to blame the left; Elon Musk late Sunday night even noted that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” before deleting the post. Many high-profile Trump allies and congressional Republicans quickly linked Sunday’s events to Democrats’ rhetoric, as well.

The tense political debate comes after plenty of other markers of a political tinderbox.

While Republicans have cried foul about Democrats’ rhetoric, it wasn’t that long ago that they and their allies greeted an attack on a prominent Democrat with jokes and ridiculous conspiracy theories. Republicans and conservative commentators frequently joked about the late 2022 attack at former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) house that left her husband, Paul Pelosi, with severe injuries. They even suggested, based on bogus evidence, that it was a gay lovers’ tryst gone wrong. Trump made light of the situation as recently as this month, quipping that the wall around the Pelosis’ house “didn’t help too much with the problem she had.”

Such conspiracy theories have increasingly found voices not just in extreme activists and social media users but Republican officeholders and prominent commentators. In recent days, many of them have pointed to thinly constructed theories about last week’s debate between GOP presidential nominee Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris being rigged.

The scene Sunday also came as Trump and his allies have zeroed in on a debunked and dehumanizing conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. They have doubled down despite the lack of evidence and the city facing a series of reported threats made against city hall, schools, colleges and hospitals. The mayor said the threats have included “hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community,” while a college cited two threats that “were targeted toward members of the Haitian community.” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said Monday that none of 33 threats were legitimate and that “many” of them came from overseas.

Threats have become commonplace in our politics, as The Washington Post documented earlier this year. Republican lawmakers critical of Trump have increasingly cited the role of threats from Trump allies in their colleagues’ voting and retirement decisions. The last House speaker election a year ago was marred by threats from people apparently trying to influence the outcome.

Election officials have also warned about potential violence as Trump cues up yet another series of stolen-election claims — less than four years after his supporters cited such claims while attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump now casts those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot as political prisoners, absolving them of blame in a way that Trump’s supporters have warmed to. And ever since Jan. 6, Trump has increasingly sent suggestive signals about political violence, often predicting his supporters would rise up in defense of him.

Data continues to show a remarkable degree of tolerance for potential political violence, especially on the right. Last week, a Public Religion Research Institute poll showed nearly 3 in 10 Republicans and 1 in 10 Democrats agreed that, because things have gotten off track, “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

The poll also found that about a quarter of Republicans agreed that if Trump isn’t declared the winner of the 2024 election, he should “do whatever it takes to assume his rightful place as president.”

Whether any of it will ultimately lead to unrest or tragedy remains to be seen. But the country has experienced that before, with ugly scenes begetting more ugliness. The resilience of the democracy has been put to the test over the past two elections. There’s every reason to believe that’s going to be the case again in 2024.

Former president Donald Trump on Monday blamed the “rhetoric” of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the potential assassination attempt he faced Sunday.

“[The suspected gunman] believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said in a Fox News interview published Monday morning. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.

The former president echoed the claims again Monday afternoon on his Truth Social platform, writing: “The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”

Harris and Biden have routinely portrayed Trump as a threat to democracy because of his refusal to accept the 2020 election results and his role in stoking rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election.

Trump’s claims come the day he was scheduled to host a virtual address on Spaces, X’s live audio platform, from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. on the launch of “World Liberty Financial,” a cryptocurrency platform. The former president is also expected to appear on Fox News’s “Hannity” at 9 p.m. Eastern time. The appearances are the first public event Trump has done since the possible assassination attempt at his golf course on Sunday.

Police arrested Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old man, on Sunday after he pointed a rifle through a fence around a golf course where Trump was playing, authorities said. The FBI is investigating the episode as an apparent assassination attempt. Trump, who survived an assassination attempt this summer in Pennsylvania, was not harmed in the Florida incident.

Authorities have not said Routh shot at Trump on the golf course. They have said a Secret Service agent opened fire on Routh after seeing his rifle poking through the fence.

Routh’s social media activity quickly came under scrutiny. He reportedly wrote on X that “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot” in the November election, a refrain Biden and Harris have used on the campaign trail. Routh also had expressed past support for Trump, suggesting he backed him in 2016 but became disillusioned with him.

Biden and Harris said Sunday that they were relieved Trump was safe and condemned any kind of political violence. Biden, talking to reporters Monday morning outside the White House, said “thank God” Trump was okay and urged “more help” for the Secret Service.

On X, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. described having conversations with his young children about the second attempt on Trump life.

“No person should ever have to do this in America or anywhere else and yet I had to have that conversation five times again yesterday,” he said.

After Trump criticized Biden and Harris online and on Fox News, some of his critics noted that he has long spread hateful rhetoric against his political opponents. In a post shared on X, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who was part of a now-defunct House select committee tasked with investigating the deadly Jan. 6 riot, pointed to Trump’s political rhetoric as a source of tension.

“Look violent rhetoric is wrong, and has no place,” Kinzinger wrote. “But MAGA pretending they didn’t light this fire is gaslighting to the 100th power. Since Trump showed up our politics has gone to crap.”

“Literally just accused a group of people of eating our pets,” Kinzinger added, a reference to Trump’s baseless claims that Haitian migrants are eating their neighbors’ cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on X also shared a response to Donald Trump Jr.’s post asking if he has apologized to the grandchildren of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former House speaker, after he posted a tweet mocking the attack on Pelosi’s husband’s life.

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who is also now a Trump critic, said in an X post that two things can be true at the same time: “1. This potential assassination attempt on Donald Trump is horrible and should be strongly condemned by ALL of us.” and “2. There is no politician in America today who spews as much hate or incites as much violence with reckless/dangerous rhetoric as Donald Trump does.”