Weekly Review

Former president Donald Trump was injured in what appeared to be a botched assassination attempt during his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania; as shots fired in his direction, Trump clutched his ear in a rictus of pain before diving to the floor, where a Secret Service detail swarmed and dogpiled him, shielding his form until the gunman, atop a nearby roof, was spotted and liquidated.^{1 2 3} Rising from his prone position on the stage, Trump, his right ear bloodied, posed with upraised fist for the benefit of his onlookers, and was soon escorted from the scene where his hit-man manqué, apparently an epigone of a firearm-enthusiast YouTuber, would have made a martyr of him.^{4 5} Amid the brouhaha, an attendee of the rally was caught in the shooter’s line of fire and killed.⁶ “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening,” Trump noted on the social-media platform Truth Social, boasting of his astuteness and eventually claiming divine intervention, if not divine right, as the saving grace that had permitted him to survive the ordeal: “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” he wrote.^{7 8} In spite of the attack, Trump kept his appointment to appear at the Republican National Convention some 48 hours later in Milwaukee, where he announced JD Vance as his vice presidential pick.^{9 10}

Nineteen Democratic members of Congress requested that President Biden withdraw his name from the presidential race, the most recent addition to their number joining the call for him to bow out after Biden’s remarks at this year’s NATO summit, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin, an avowed opponent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was absent but at which he was nonetheless introduced to a bemused crowd, some of whom gasped at the misidentification; “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin,” said Biden as he ceded an onstage podium to Putin’s political rival the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is not Putin.^{11 12 13 14} The American president later corrected himself; “It’s a mistake…. We can forget some mistakes, I think so,” said Zelenskyy of the gaffe days later; “We can all have a slip of the tongue,” offered French President Emmanuel Macron in turn; Biden was in “really good form,” opined the newly minted British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.^{15 16 17} “They’ve been hammering me because I sometimes confuse names. I say that’s Charlie instead of Bill,” complained Biden a fortnight after acquitting himself in an address for not speaking “as smoothly as I used to.”^{18 19} “I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if she was not qualified to be president,” the president went on to say, in a statement seemingly referring to the sitting Vice President Kamala Harris, who joins him on the incumbent ticket, without correcting himself, to the apparent dismay of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, whose winces were captured on camera; recent polling suggests that Harris is the most viable candidate to replace a would-be two-term Oval Office occupant in Biden, whom polls disfavor, and that among registered voters she would fare better against Donald Trump.^{20 21 22}

He is a “very disloyal backstabber; third-rate movie actor,” said Trump of the actor George Clooney, who penned an appeal, in the New York Times, for Biden to step down from the race; “Clooney’s no Clark Gable,” Trump said, explaining in an email that he would “gladly accept [Clooney’s] endorsement IF he pledges to change his ways” as a “proud member of the Hate-America Hollywood Elite.”^{23 24} Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, pulled faces to pass the time while waiting for Biden’s arrival to a NATO summit event, screwing her lip, contorting her features, and rolling her eyes on camera, but then smilingly accepted Biden’s outstretched hand.²⁵ A Colorado resident was plagued with a case of the bubonic plague; in that same state, paltry luck for poultry workers resulted in five cases of bird flu.^{26 27} Houstonians affected by the landfall of Hurricane Beryl found success relying on the Whataburger app’s listing of branch closures for information on local power outages as their city’s energy supplier failed to issue them timely updates.²⁸ The skeletal remains of an arthritic stegosaurus went up for auction; the dinosaur’s genus is herbivorous, though this did not stop the animal from being nicknamed “Apex.”²⁹ The rap group Cypress Hill performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, in a real-life fulfillment of an event fabricated for a visual gag on The Simpsons some 28 years ago; the event marks at least the 16th time that one of the TV show’s predictions has come to fruition.³⁰ —Lake Micah