After Butler, Trump Was a Changed Man

How he sees the threats to his life

Jul 15, 2026

President Donald Trump may be posting and talking about the fresh assassination threat he faces from Iran — but in private, according to those closest to him, he rarely brings it up.
Trump is still affected in his own way by the near-constant threats he faces as president, from both domestic and foreign actors. He has long taken a fatalistic view of his life — an outlook that’s only deepened since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, just over two years ago, and subsequent attempts to harm him or his circle.
The threat to Trump’s life from Tehran, which dates back to his 2020 authorization of the drone strike that killed Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, spilled into public view in Turkey earlier this month. Amid an unraveling ceasefire with Iran, Trump mused that he is its “Number One target” and ultimately ditched his new Air Force One, reportedly due to security concerns about the aircraft’s defensive capabilities.
Behind closed doors, however, Trump shows a different, almost wry side as he considers his safety. More than a half-dozen aides and lawmakers close to him confirmed to Semafor that he doesn’t dwell seriously on assassination risks — but when it does come up, he’s known to “joke about it,” one White House official said.
“He says it privately a lot, too: ‘Nobody told me how dangerous it is to be president, and if they had told me, I probably wouldn’t have run.’ And he makes comments like that in jest, but there’s a reality behind that,” the official told Semafor.
That reality came through during the UFC fight on the South Lawn in June, where podcaster Joe Rogan served as commentator. Rogan later recounted on his podcast that he joked to Trump about the possibility of a terrorist attack at the event, and quoted Trump’s reply as: “We gotta go somehow!”
Eight people were later indicted for an alleged plot targeting the fight.
It was the latest in an ever-present series of personal perils that have followed Trump through his 2024 campaign to the White House, from a gunman at his Florida golf course to an attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year.
Those threats have animated plans to beef up security in the renovated White House, sometimes disrupted his travel, and remained top of mind for many of his closest allies on the second anniversary of the Pennsylvania shooting this week.
“That’s why Secret Service is on alert the way they are. That’s why when you go to the White House, it’s a very tough situation,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio. “They’ve tried three different times to kill him.”
Trump has repeatedly pressed his case for an expanded White House ballroom with massive security fortifications. But his aides insisted the dangers play no role in his policymaking decisions, even as the US bombards Iran.
“In all the Situation Room meetings I’ve been in, or all the Iran policy meetings I’ve been in, I’ve never heard him say, ‘We need to do this because they want to kill me,’” the White House official said. “He’s never based his policy decisions off of it, but it is something he acknowledges and it’s true. I mean, they’re not shy about it.”
Trump is acutely focused on perfecting his personal environment, whether that’s in Washington, DC, or on the presidential plane that flies him around the world. The need for security precautions can clearly frustrate him at times — as it did in Turkey, where concerns from the Secret Service forced him to switch planes from his Qatar-gifted new model to an older one, according to The New York Times.
Trump denied that the plane swap was made because of security concerns, though days later his Department of Justice subpoenaed the four reporters who wrote about his new plane.
“I don’t think it made him happy when they made the airplane change,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Semafor. “They didn’t just do that because they didn’t like the color of the seats. There was a reason.”

Graham Platner’s Very Online Undoing

The New Yorker:

Last week, Graham Platner announced his withdrawal from Maine’s race for U.S. Senate as any self-proclaimed regular person might: by recording a front-facing video with his smartphone and posting it to social media. He held the phone close enough to his face that you could make out the shallow lines on his forehead, the flecks of white in his mostly auburn beard. Two days earlier, Jenny Racicot, a woman who once dated Platner, had alleged, in an interview with Politico, that he had showed up drunk at her house, in late 2021, and raped her. Staring sternly into his phone camera, with a verdant, sun-streaked treescape behind him, Platner explained that he was suspending his campaign not because he’d done what he had been accused of—he insisted that it was not “an admission of guilt”—but because the baseless “attacks” against him were aiming “to take everything away from us,” namely the inroads his campaign had made for progressive politics in the state of Maine. He claimed, not for the first time, that he’d never harbored a “desire to run for office,” that he and his wife were “regular people” who had not been “looking for this experience.” He implored us, the viewers of his video, to consider what we would do if “large forces were working against you personally to accuse you of the worst thing that a person could do, and it was not remotely true.” Would we keep fighting in the face of such a “brutal political reality”?
Since entering Maine’s Democratic Senate race, last August, Platner has cast himself as a “random guy” with zero political ambition. He was living a quiet life as an oyster farmer in the small Down East town of Sullivan, when two political consultants and Democratic Socialists of America organizers—Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan—reportedly showed up at his door and asked him if he’d be interested in running for U.S. Senate. Morris Katz, a top political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, also became involved, telling Platner, per the Times, that he was a potential “historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution” if he accepted the challenge and ran for office. Apparently, they’d seen a video of him on the internet talking about Norwegian salmon and knew he was “the one.”
Platner’s skepticism of the pitch only made him more closely resemble Plato’s ideal philosopher-king: the reluctant leader who had to be persuaded to take power for the good of the people. Platner suspected that the “corporate media system” and the “political establishment” would not welcome him—a kettlebell-swinging, gun-toting, callous-handed combat veteran and manual laborer—but he eventually decided to risk personal disparagement if it meant advancing the progressive platform he so vigorously championed: enacting universal health care, taxing billionaires, lowering housing costs. That establishment Democrats didn’t accept him made his candidacy even more appealing. A man of the people, a working-class hero, a diamond in the rough unearthed by political operatives riding the high of Mamdani’s rise—the narrative, in and of itself, was a winning strategy.
In Maine, where I live, Platner generated swift and feverish support, the type of political enthusiasm that’s impossible to manufacture. Genuine excitement fomented among my milieu of twenty- and thirtysomethings—we finally had a guy we could throw our weight behind and organize around, someone who embodied the sort of uncompromising leftist politics that, just months before, had appeared unlikely to take hold in a state whose voters had elected Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, to the U.S. Senate for five consecutive terms. Like much of New England, Maine has an independent-minded, anti-establishment electorate, with third-party candidates, Tea Party Republicans, and mildly progressive Democrats all achieving statewide electoral success over the past few decades. On the surface, Platner’s politics seemed like a non-starter for a Maine Senate candidate, and a prohibitive obstacle when courting the state’s rural, right-leaning voters. But his anti-establishment attitude and antagonistic relationship to power made his message resonate among unexpected populations, including the northern working-class demographics that have increasingly moved away from Democratic candidates in recent elections. Platner is fluent in the language of “freedom,” a word that goes a long way in Maine. (I grew up across the border, in New Hampshire, where the state motto, “Live Free or Die,” is a jingoistic, oft-evoked rallying cry.) The brand of freedom he presented, however, was not the libertarian ideal of uninhibited personal sovereignty but a more collective vision rooted in economic security, “the freedom to live lives with dignity and fulfillment, the freedom to not be ripped off by a for-profit health-care system, the freedom to have a roof over our heads that we own,” as he put it.
Platner’s national profile grew when clips from his early town halls began circulating on social media. These short-form videos captured him as a hoop-earring-wearing populist with sun-worn skin and a roll-neck sweater, a guy next door who expressed the requisite anger about the country’s mass-deportation crisis and the genocide in Gaza. He is a theatrical, gravitational speaker, with a facility for channelling anger and discontent into forceful, emotionally rich rhetoric. His specific policy plans could be opaque, but his pathos was distinctive, his convictions bone-deep. (He’s said he viewed his campaign as a continuance of Bernie Sanders’s Presidential bids, in that it centered on “movement politics” and orchestrated “power through organizing.”) Unlike Mamdani, whom Platner has often been lazily compared to, and who wielded social media to novel and wildly fruitful ends, Platner is not as much of a digital native, and is a far less polished poster. During his campaign, he seemed most drawn to the front-facing-video format, whose intimacy mirrored his rustic persona and allowed him to provide confessional-style, improvisational-seeming direct addresses to his base. Whereas Mamdani’s social-media content appeared engineered by zippy creative directors and frequently crossed over into the realm of content-creation accounts and influencer TikToks, Platner’s campaign tailored his social posts to a more targeted audience: people who, like him, didn’t use the platforms for brand-building but as a way to share unvarnished ideas and interests, to “connect,” in the more originalist conception of the apps.
Platner’s lack of digital savviness had a dark side, of course. His old Reddit posts surfaced several months after he launched his campaign. The archive was mostly military-focussed—comments that discussed firearms and the intricacies of platoon life—but scattered throughout were homophobic comments and offensive slurs. His political outlook could be discerned from these posts, many of which seemed derived from left-wing political podcasts like “The Majority Report” and “Chapo Trap House.” Platner went on to film a video in which, positioned in front of a stack of empty lobster traps, he apologized for his insensitive language, claiming that it came from an “alienated” and “isolated” post-military temperament. These were intended as “stupid joke comments,” he said, designed to “get a rise out of people on the internet.” Even when, some time later, his account on the live-chatting platform Kik came to light, in which he reportedly sexted with women while married, the divulgence appeared more depressing than disqualifying—surely Platner could not have envisioned, in his past life as a “regular person” and a “random guy,” that a picture of him wrapped in a towel from the waist down would be plastered across the home pages of major media outlets.
These scandals—along with the revelation that Platner had drunkenly got a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, apparently thinking it was a standard skull-and-crossbones insignia—certainly dampened his otherwise surging momentum. But they also perversely deepened his veneer of authenticity. (In a video posted to Instagram, Platner apologized for the tattoo while standing in front of a barn, his sleeves rolled up and his hands tucked into his pockets.) When trying to explain these controversies, he characterized himself as a flawed man with a complicated past, someone who suffered from P.T.S.D. and stubborn masculine conditioning but who was doing the work and walking the righteous path toward redemption. He’d married, gone to therapy, and started a new career as an oysterman. Besides, part of his appeal relied on his craggy imperfections, his aesthetic and ethical opposition to his buttoned-up political contemporaries. Even when the Times published, several days before the June primary, the stories of three women who had dated Platner and claimed that he displayed “unsettling” and “aggressive” behavior at various points in their relationships, his campaign still managed not to crater. He apologized for past mistakes and poor behavior but denied claims of physical altercations or intimidations. He labelled one of his accusers a “politically motivated” Republican antagonist. Other women who had dated Platner offered their support for his character. He won the Democratic primary in a landslide.

Finding America By Leaving D.C.

Daily Wire:

I started my first Saturday in my new hometown in rural Tennessee on a mission to explore it and take in all of the small-town charm. But first – coffee. What I came to find was that the town had no Starbucks, no Target, no long list of well-known restaurants. It would be a 40-minute round-trip drive just to get my iced shaken espresso. And that’s when it hit: I have officially left my comfortable Washington, D.C. orbit.
But you know what? That’s fine; I need to stiffen my weak citified spine.
What wasn’t fine was what I found out next. My new town had just been rocked by a massive local government corruption scandal. The mayor and two others were indicted on theft of funds, with the investigation claiming a whopping $450k was misused. The officials deny guilt, but the town reports a severe financial crisis. For a town this size, the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars can be a death knell.
For decades, this small town has run on manufacturing and farming. One of those hollowed-out regions, this area was dealt a massive gut punch by Chinese tire imports and the 2009 Obama tariffs. And now, soybean farmers are affected by the Trump tariffs. Suffice it to say, it’s no stranger to economic volatility, whether at the local or federal level.
And as a result, the city announced this year that the town’s annual Soybean Festival would be canceled due to the financial crisis.
In the Washington, D.C. world I’ve observed, if a budget is blown in Congress, that’s usually a challenge to bloat it even more. But in small-town America, residents live within the confines of their town budgets. It has a direct impact. And for this town, that means foregoing the four-decade-long bright spot that unites families and the whole community, the Soybean Festival. For urbanites, it may sound trivial, but small town fairs are massive cultural and economic drivers, and this one is no different. It’s not only a morale booster, but something folks plan for all year long. And that’s why when the announcement came down, the community said, “Enough.”
In a plot twist that can only be found in films like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” one local man has rallied a groundswell of community support to bring the Festival back to life. Not by demanding they spend money they don’t have, but by organizing different people from all over the town and organizing organic fundraising. It may have started with one resident willing to make the first phone call, but it only worked because dozens of others answered it. Their grassroots festival will be a fraction of the grandeur of festivals before, but locals don’t care. As one person posted, “You do not even know how much it means to me and my family that y’all are trying keep Soybean alive. Now I can possibly bring my children to enjoy the same atmosphere.”
It struck me, I’ve been lamenting and making a list in my mind of how disconnected I am to all of the civic activity in the District, yet here I am confronted with democracy in action, and I’m missing it. As they say here in Tennessee, when something is right in front of your face: “if it was a snake — it would’ve bit me.”
For those of us who work in and around D.C., it’s easy to think that important American affairs are captured in that one region…but are they? As we speak, Congress is in a stalemate over 2027 funding, struggling to agree on topline spending totals. In fact, they haven’t passed an on-time bipartisan funding agreement in seven years.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of this tiny downtown, watching citizens come together, organize, and save their town. These people aren’t all best friends; I see them verbally duke it out on Facebook a lot. But they are all pausing whatever disagreements they have to come together for the common good. They don’t all make the Congressional salary of $174k, but they are pooling whatever money they can to create a functional budget for this modest grassroots fair.
Watching my new town rally around the Soybean Festival reminded me why “It’s a Wonderful Life” is such a heartwarming story. We remember George Bailey as the hero, but the film’s real lesson isn’t about one extraordinary man. It’s about an ordinary town. Bedford Falls survives because its people decide it is worth saving.

✍️ Feature

The Spectator: Death of a Looksmaxxer

🌍 Foreign

🏛️ Domestic

📰 Media

💻 Tech

🏈 Sports

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

🪶 Quote

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”

― Stefan Zweig

The Transom

Ready for more?