Donald Trump’s tough-guy shtick plays well on Fox News, so he leaned into it during an appearance on the late-night talk show “Gutfeld!” on Wednesday.

Host Greg Gutfeld brought up Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket. Trump, the Republican nominee, quickly disparaged Walz as “strange.” And then he told a story aimed at presenting Walz as weak and himself as strong — though with a notable unintended consequence.

“You know, he called up years ago,” Trump began, referring to Walz. The governor’s mansion in Minnesota was surrounded by protesters, Trump said, and Walz was seeking help.

“‘My house is being surrounded by people with American flags,’” Trump claimed Walz said. “I said, ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ He said, ‘I think they’re going to attack me.’”

Gutfeld guffawed.

“But this was during the riots and everything,” Trump continued. “They were MAGA people, you know, they like the American flag, all right? And they also had Trump [flags].”

Walz, Trump said, asked Trump to tell people that he was their friend. So Trump got on Twitter.

“I put out a statement: ‘He’s a good man, the governor. He’s on our side. I don’t, I didn’t know him, but I didn’t want him to get hurt,’” Trump said. “And everybody put down their flags and they left.”

He later added, “It was sort of a beautiful thing in a lot of ways.”

On the surface, this story doesn’t make sense, as it didn’t when Trump told it (also on Fox News) soon after Harris picked Walz. For example: There were pro-Trump protesters at the governor’s mansion in Minnesota in the midst of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests?

Trump did mention Walz in one tweet at the time — the infamous one in which he warned, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” His mention of Walz was simply that “the Military was with him all the way.”

As it happens, Walz described his end of this exchange to reporters from Politico in 2021. As the governor describes it, he called the White House not at the time of the BLM protests but in April 2020, when protests against coronavirus restrictions — egged on by Trump — were targeting a number of Midwestern governors.

A protest targeting Walz was planned for April 17. Fox News provided predictably supportive coverage to the effort that morning.

“In Minnesota,” reporter Mike Tobin reported, “the demonstrators didn’t even wait for their own planned protest. An organization had planned the protest for today at noon but they got in front of the governor’s residence in St. Paul yesterday. They referenced things like President Trump’s statement that ‘the cure cannot be worse than the disease.’”

Tobin noted that the name of the group running the protest was “Liberate Minnesota.” Two minutes after the segment aired, Trump — a notoriously avid viewer of that channel — posted a message on Twitter: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA.”

Speaking to the Politico reporters, Walz identified this message as one that “brought armed people to my house.” He called the White House to try to understand what “liberate Minnesota” was asking of him, but he didn’t get a response.

“Just to be very candid, the rhetoric that the president engaged in, and then was amplified by others, changed the whole dynamic, especially in a state like Minnesota where I could be out by myself without folks around and it would be fine,” Walz said in 2021. “That was a little different at that point in time.”

It is fair to be a bit more confident in Walz’s recollection of events closer to when they occurred and at a point when he wasn’t running for higher office than it is to rely upon Trump’s presentation on Fox News seven weeks before the presidential election. It’s worth noting, though, that there was another time that pro-Trump protesters gathered at the Minnesota governor’s mansion: on Jan. 6, 2021.

That day, of course, Trump was in Washington. He’d stoked the anger of his base repeatedly in the weeks after the 2020 presidential contest, telling them that the election had been stolen (it hadn’t been) and that there were mechanisms by which he could retain the presidency (there weren’t). It was his rhetoric about the pandemic turned to the maximum volume: repeated presentations of how he wanted the world to be that his base accepted as factual — and actionable.

Trump repeatedly encouraged the Jan. 6 protest, just as he encouraged the protest in Minnesota. But when those protesters surrounded the Capitol, breaking windows to gain entry and disrupting the counting of electoral votes, Trump sat on his hands. Various people around him encouraged him or his staff to weigh in, to offer the sort of message that he claims rapidly dissipated the crowd in Minnesota. But for hours he simply watched events unfold on TV. He released a video calling for protesters to disband — and praising them — at 4:17 p.m., 126 minutes after the first window was broken.

If we take Trump at his word in the “Gutfeld!” conversation, he had seen how, in May 2020, his words encouraged protesters to threaten a Democratic official and he had seen how he could quickly dispel that threat. If this is true, if this is how Trump understood his power to work, it casts the Capitol riot in much darker terms. He should have known both how people would respond to his calls to action and requests to stand down.

Even if Trump’s anecdote isn’t true, which seems likely, the first part holds. He almost certainly saw a news report crediting his rhetoric with bringing protests to the doorstep of the Minnesota governor and then further stoked that anger. Walz says he called the White House seeking clarity on what he was supposed to be doing — and Trump never responded. The tension wasn’t defused on the president’s end.

When Trump claims to have been an innocent observer on Jan. 6, as when he claimed falsely during the debate that he “had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech,” it’s worth bearing all of this in mind. He’d seen what his rhetoric could do and he claims that he had the power to do more.

Yet when it comes to the Capitol riot, he insists that he was powerless against forces out of his control.

Democrats pushed again this week to spotlight Republican’s unpopular positions on reproductive rights, slamming Senate Republicans for voting Tuesday to block a bill to expand access to in vitro fertilization and accusing former president Donald Trump of putting women’s lives at risk.

The Senate vote aimed to remind voters two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that Trump appointed the justices who backed that decision, that congressional Republicans could seek to ban abortion nationwide, and that even non-abortion procedures such as IVF could be at risk.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called Republicans’ opposition to the bill “extreme, dangerous, and wrong” in a statement after the vote failed. “Our administration will always fight to protect reproductive freedoms, which must include access to IVF.’

Earlier in the day, Harris blamed Trump for the death of a woman in Georgia who died from an infection after failing to receive a timely abortion at a hospital in the state that has banned it, according to an investigation by ProPublica. “This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement, casting the death as a consequence of Trump’s actions.

As the election enters its final weeks, Democrats are seizing on IVF and abortion in races up and down the ballot, as more voters consistently side with Democrats over Republicans on both issues and the GOP struggles to find a consistent — and credible — message.

Republicans, who said they would vote against the Senate bill because it is a federal overreach, have nonetheless insisted they are largely supportive of IVF. Every Republican senator signed a letter saying they support IVF, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is up for reelection this fall, introduced a separate bill that would punish states that ban IVF by withholding Medicaid funds from them.

Still, Democrats in close races up and down the ballot are seeking to tie Republicans to both abortion bans and an Alabama court’s decision to thrust IVF into legal jeopardy. Both procedures are supported by a majority of Americans.

The approach has put Republicans on defense, particularly Trump, who has said he wouldn’t sign a bill banning abortion nationwide and has called for states to choose abortion limits for themselves, after calling himself the “most pro-life president” during his first term. Trump has recently said on the campaign trail that he is a “leader in fertilization” and would mandate free IVF procedures.

But Republicans again blocked the bill, called the Right to IVF Act, after previously blocking it in June, when only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted with Democrats to allow debate on it. The bill would mandate insurance coverage for the procedure and guarantee a federal right to access.

“Three months ago, nearly every Senate Republican voted against protecting IVF in this chamber,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer said on the floor Tuesday. “It was astounding to watch them with a straight face … claim that of course they cared about supporting families, of course they supported IVF. Just not enough to actually vote to protect it.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not return a request for comment on where Trump stood on the Senate IVF bill. Democrats slammed him for his silence.

“He can send out a tweet right now and get all my Republican colleagues to vote for this,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a combat-wounded veteran who conceived her two daughters using IVF.

Republicans dismissed the bill as a political “show vote” that had no chance of becoming law. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, accused Schumer of creating “a political wedge issue just because it’s an election year.”

“Everybody knows the outcome of this, and I think it would be in everybody’s best interest if we actually were doing the things that people expect us to be doing here,” he said, mentioning appropriations bills as one example.

The vote failed to reach the 60 votes needed to proceed, with just two Republicans crossing the aisle to support it. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who was campaigning in Michigan on Tuesday, did not vote.

Harris’s campaign has spent more than $22 million on ads since early August that reference abortion rights, according to data from the firm AdImpact. Before that, President Joe Biden spent $12.6 million between March and July on ads referencing abortion rights.

Some Republicans in swing districts are starting to run ads portraying themselves in favor of IVF and abortion rights — or at least not opposed to them. In a campaign ad released last week, Republican candidate Matt Gunderson looks directly into the camera as he labels himself “pro-choice.”

“On a woman’s right to choose, I’m pro-choice,” says Gunderson, who is running to unseat Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in California. “I believe abortion should be safe, legal and rare.”

At least four vulnerable House Republicans have either called themselves “pro-choice” or vowed to oppose a national abortion ban in recent ads, interviews or op-eds. At least three House Republicans have released campaign ads or texts saying they support IVF. And one Republican Senate candidate, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, is running ads saying he would vote to codify Roe v. Wade.

In a call with reporters hosted by the Harris campaign before the vote, speakers predicted the vote would demonstrate Trump and Vance are not as supportive of IVF as they claim to be. Vance voted against proceeding to the legislation in June.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) scoffed at Trump’s recent proposal to require free IVF access, saying there is “no way in the world that I believe that Donald Trump is serious about this.”

“This is a guy who is trapped in his own decisions to rip away abortion services and reproductive freedom,” Stabenow said. “He’s scrambling. That’s what he always does.’

Mariana Alfaro and Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.

“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

— David Muir, ABC News moderator at the presidential debate, Sept. 10

“MASSIVE NEWS! The Department of Justice just released brand new Crime Data showing I was absolutely and completely right at the Debate. In fact, the Data is even worse than we could have ever imagined. Compared to 2020, Violent Crime is up nearly 40 percent, Rape is up 42 percent, Aggravated Assaults are up 55 percent, Violent Crime with a weapon is up 56 percent, Violent Attacks on strangers are up 61 percent, Car Theft is up 42 percent, and the most serious forms of Violent Crime are up 55 percent. Our Cities are UNDER SIEGE. And this does not include the Migrant Crime and Migrant Rape spree that has overtaken our Cities in recent months. Kamala Crime is destroying America, and gangs are taking over!”

— Former President Donald Trump, in a post on social media, Sept. 12

When Muir fact-checked Trump during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump dismissed FBI crime figures. “They were defrauding statements,” he said. “They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.” Then, two days later, he claimed that a new Justice Department report, the 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), showed he was right.

In our debate fact check, we noted that Trump relies on NCVS data, but given the new report, the dispute over the numbers seems worthy of a deeper dive. This is a good example of how politicians highlight government reports — and cherry-pick from them — to shape their rhetoric.

The Facts

All crime data has its limitations. The FBI issues the Uniform Crime Report based on crimes reported by police departments. But because the FBI in recent years changed the way it collects data, not all police departments participate. The 2022 report included crimes reported to 80 percent of the nation’s law enforcement agencies by the public.

Contrary to what Trump said at the debate, that may not be much of a problem. The crime rates reported by the FBI would only be affected if crime in the missing cities were significantly higher or lower — and there is little evidence that’s the case. “It’s only relevant if it would shift the averages,” said Ernesto Lopez, senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice, a research institute. “We could have half of the cities missing. It doesn’t matter if they don’t shift the data.”

The FBI has not released full 2023 data yet, but a June quarterly report showed violent crime decreasing 15 percent year over year. That was the report cited by Muir.

The Council on Criminal Justice examines monthly crime rates for 12 violent, property and drug offenses in 39 American cities that have consistently reported monthly data over the past six years. In July, it reported steep declines in homicide and most other violent crimes back to levels that predated the pandemic.

At the same time, many crimes are not reported by the police. Arrest rates have fallen, and fewer people even bother to report crimes. Victims tell the Justice Department they only report about 45 percent of violent crime and 30 percent of property crime.

The victimization report attempts to fill in that gap by surveying Americans on crime they have experienced. Households are selected to be a representative sample of the United States, and for 3 ½ years they are interviewed in person every six months about whether the household had been a victim of crime since the last contact.

But the NCVS has its own drawbacks. Since homicide victims cannot be interviewed, the report does not include homicide — and many criminologists say murder rates are the best indicator of violent crime. The survey does not interview people who are homeless or in institutions such as prisons, jails and nursing homes; it also does not include crimes against people younger than 12.

All of Trump’s figures in his post compare crime rates, as listed in the victimization survey, in 2023 with rates in 2020. That’s the last year of his presidency, so in ordinary circumstances that might make sense. But this is a survey — and during the pandemic it was more difficult for researchers to conduct it. Normal field operations were suspended after March 2020 and people had to be interviewed by phone for most of the year, so criminologists urge caution with the figures.

The reports, when issued, measure crime rates over a 17-month period, so they cover more than the year of the report. For instance, the 2020 report covered July 1, 2019, to Nov. 30, 2020, and the 2021 report covered July 1, 2020 to Nov. 30, 2021. Two reports — 2020 and 2021 — thus were affected by covid.

Like any survey, the NCVS is an estimate and has a margin of error. For instance, the reported crime rate of 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 had a 95 percent confidence level of being between 14.84 to 17.94. The margin of error increases even more in subcategories such as sexual assault and auto theft

Moreover, with so many people sheltering in place, fewer people in 2020 were likely to be robbed, raped or violently attacked by a stranger. After the George Floyd murder in May 2020, violence erupted in many cities and homicides sharply increased. Trump, as he campaigned for reelection that year, frequently highlighted the increase in homicides and shootings in “blue” cities such as New York. But that kind of problem would be reflected in the FBI reports, not the NCVS.

“It’s problematic to use 2020/2021 (the pandemic) as a baseline from which to judge current crime rates. Covid profoundly changed daily life in a variety of ways that impacted crime,” said Jillian Turanovic, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an expert on crime victimization, in an email. “With social distancing restrictions, more people stayed home during the day and were not out in crowded public spaces. As a result, rates for several opportunity-based, instrumental crimes decreased in 2020 and 2021 — crimes such as robbery, burglary, and theft. However, Covid was also a stressful and traumatic time that coincided with increases in particular forms of interpersonal violence and homicide in several major U.S. cities.”

Turanovic added, however, that “the NCVS data remain the best and most reliable national source of victimization data that we have at our disposal — especially on crimes not reported to the police.”

Still, for at least two key reasons — both related to the pandemic — 2020 is a not a good year to use as a baseline. Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant, says he simply ignores the 2020 and 2021 NCVS data because those years were too hard to survey.

Look what happens when we examine the NCVS categories highlighted by Trump but use 2019 as a baseline for comparison with 2023, using the rates of crime per 1,000 people.

• Violent crime: 7 percent increase (vs. Trump’s 40 percent)
• Rape/sexual assault: no increase (vs. 42 percent)
• Aggravated assault: 22 percent increase (vs. 55 percent)
• Violent crime with a weapon: 33 percent increase (vs. 56 percent)
• Violent attacks on strangers: 41 percent increase (vs. 61 percent)
• Car theft: 56 percent increase (vs. 42 percent)
• Serious form of violent crime: 19 percent increase (vs. 55 percent)

The overall rate for violent crime (22.5 crimes per 1,000 people in 2023 vs. 21.0 in 2019) is not statistically different from 2019 to 2023, said Kevin M. Scott, the acting director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in a statement. Except for rape, we see an increase in violent crime in the subcategories, where the margin of error is higher, though not nearly as much as Trump claims in all but car theft.

But even this is cherry-picking, as crime trends need to be observed over longer periods of time. If you look at overall trends over the last 10 years, the rate of violent crime has basically remained steady, within the margin of error of the survey. And overall, violent crime rates are much lower than the 1990s.

As Turanovic put it: “While there are some minor discrepancies in trends between the NCVS and FBI data when looking narrowly from one year to the next, in my view, the data sources are still telling a similar story: both tell us (1) that the nation’s violent crime rate is substantially lower than it was in the 1990s, (2) that violent crime rates (based on most recent data) are largely on par with where they have been over the past decade, and (3) that there is no evidence that violent crime rates are ‘soaring,’ or as Trump said in the debate, ‘through the roof.’ Even at their recent peak in 2020, homicide rates in most cities were still half of what they were 25 years ago.”

One problem with both the FBI report and the victimization survey is that it takes a long time for the data to be collected and published. Asher’s organization has created what it calls a Real-Time Crime Index that collects data from about 300 police agencies covering a quarter of the U.S. population, including 29 of the 30 biggest cities. The data are displayed as a 12-month rolling sum.

From 2018 through June of this year, the index shows violent crime is flat. Homicides spiked in 2020 and peaked in 2021 but are now coming back down. Rapes have fallen slightly. Aggravated assaults also spiked in 2020 but have since dropped. Motor vehicle thefts soared in 2021 but have started to show a decline this year.

The Bottom Line

Be wary when politicians cite crime statistics. There is no perfect metric, as there are flaws in both the FBI report (not all crimes are reported) and the victimization survey (it’s an estimate with a margin of error). Dating crime data from 2020, as Trump does, is especially problematic because the pandemic makes it difficult to trust the data that was collected.

But there’s no debate over this fact: Violent crime today remains much lower than it was in the 1990s.

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When Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris last Tuesday night, the news threatened to eclipse analysis of the debate between the vice president and former president Donald Trump. Whatever its ultimate impact, the megastar’s announcement puts renewed focus on the potential power of younger voters in the 2024 election — and the divergent paths of men and women.

Celebrity endorsements generally mean little in presidential politics. But at least one data point hints at the possibility that Swift might be an exception. In the 24 hours after her endorsement, in which she implored her followers to register to vote, 405,999 people visited the website vote.gov, a repository of information about how to register that is administered by the General Services Administration in collaboration with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, according to a report by CBS News. On a typical day, about 30,000 people visit the site.

Swift’s endorsement certainly caught Trump’s attention. On Sunday, he posted on his Truth Social account, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” His campaign has been working to appeal to younger men to support him. But what political value he saw in that posting is not clear.

Younger voters have played an increasingly bigger role in recent elections and could again in November. In 2020, the turnout rate among those between ages 18 and 29 topped 50 percent, according to the U.S. Elections Project, which was higher than in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected.

President Joe Biden won 61 percent of their votes, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. In 2016, turnout among younger voters was about 11 percentage points lower, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, won 58 percent of their votes.

What has been striking is the growing separation between younger women, who have become more liberal and are strongly Democratic in their leanings, and younger men, who also hold generally liberal views but have been defecting from the Democrats. For Harris and for Trump, that presents opportunities and potential problems.

Swift’s support for Harris coincided with a new report from the Gallup organization highlighting the leftward shift in the attitudes of women between the ages of 18 and 29. They not only identify as liberal in higher percentages than in past years, but they also hold significantly more liberal positions on many key issues, most prominently abortion, the environment, gun laws and racial relations, according to the report.

The Gallup study focused on three time periods: 2001-2007, when George W. Bush was president; 2008-2016, mostly during Obama’s presidency; and 2017-2024, when both Trump and Biden have been in the White House.

Across four different groups — younger women, younger men, older women and older men — women ages 18-29 “stick out as just shifting much further left than all of those groups,” said Lydia Saad, Gallup’s director of U.S. social research. “So they are very clearly unique in this sort of evolution in their views.”

In the period between 2001 and 2007, 28 percent of younger women identified themselves as liberal. That rose to 32 percent in the 2008-2016 period, then to 40 percent over the past eight years. Among younger men, the percentage identifying as liberal has been relatively flat: 25 percent in the first period, 27 percent in the middle period and 25 percent most recently.

Women over 30 who identify as liberal have risen from 20 percent at the beginning of this century to 27 percent most recently. Men over 30 have been least likely to identify as liberal, rising from 16 percent in the first time period to 20 percent since 2017.

Women with college degrees identify as more liberal than do women without college degrees, but the study showed that the percentage-point increase in those identifying as liberal was almost identical for both.

The Gallup study reviewed positions on two dozen issues and found that, on five, all having to do with the environment, abortion and gun laws, “the percentage of younger women holding the liberal position has increased by more than 15 points.”

“This isn’t just about being more attracted to that [liberal] label,” Saad said, “but they’ve actually become much more liberal on a variety of issues. … This isn’t just a superficial label issue; this is a significant shift in their political worldview.”

For example, during the Trump-Biden period, the percentage who attributed global warming to human activity jumped 20 points, after remaining steady during the Obama years. They are more likely (by 18 points) to say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, during a period when the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.

Younger women also have registered significantly greater concern about racial relations during the past eight years, compared with the 2008-2016 period, jumping 24 percentage points.

Younger men have also become more liberal in their positions on these issues, but by lesser percentages.

Saad said she and her colleagues have no objective answer as to why the shift has become more notable in recent years. The report cites events and factors that could help to explain it, including repeated mass shootings, the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, Trump’s presidency and even the emergence of younger female political figures, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The Gallup report highlights that younger men have resisted the liberal label, even as they have taken more liberal positions on issues. That squares with the findings of the Harvard Youth Poll, conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, which have shown younger men disassociating from the Democratic Party. (Full disclosure: I hold a part-time appointment at the IOP.)

“The gender gap is expanding significantly among younger people,” said John Della Volpe, the IOP’s director of polling.

Pew released a survey last week that showed Harris and Trump each with 49 percent support. Among men ages 18-29, she had a 20-point advantage (58 percent to 38 percent). Among women of the same age, her margin was 32 points (65 percent to 33 percent).

The poll that Della Volpe and students conducted this past spring showed that, among men between the ages of 18 and 24, 28 percent identified as Democrats, 31 percent as Republicans and 39 percent as independents. Among women of the same age, 43 percent identified as Democrats, 18 percent as Republicans and 36 percent as independents.

He said the biggest shift away from the Democrats has been among younger African Americans, with significant movement also among young Hispanic men. The difference between those 18 to 24 and men ages 25 to 29 is also striking. Among the older group, 38 percent call themselves Democrats and 25 percent Republicans, with 36 percent considering themselves independent.

Della Volpe said he thinks this youngest group of male voters may see Trump differently than those just a few years older, as perhaps less threatening. Also, he said, social media and algorithms could be a factor, leading them “to pretty far-right content” that has had an influence on their views.

Della Volpe said that, if the Harris hopes to be successful in rebuilding the Obama coalition, she needs to address the youth gender gap, especially among the youngest group of voters.

Could the Swift endorsement help? He said that Harris is near her ceiling among younger women but that there might be some additional votes she can get. But he said Swift has a platform and an appeal to which younger men might also respond. “When it comes to public policy, they don’t have significant disagreements with her,” he said.

Biden was struggling to attract younger voters, including younger Black voters, with Trump trying to cut into the Democrats’ typical margins. Harris has begun to put that coalition back together but has more work to do. However good the reviews of her debate performance were, she was graded lower for answering questions about her own vision and policies. “She’s a very new candidate to all of us,” Della Volpe said. “Especially younger voters.”

Less than two weeks after an assassin’s bullet hit Donald Trump in the ear this summer, he was held backstage at a Nashville event for more than an hour because of a potential security threat.

A man had evaded security and disappeared into the crowd without being checked. There was a lengthy Secret Service search to review video, interview those he was seen with and learn why he had broken procedures. Advisers discussed whether Trump should go onstage, as a crowd of 20,000 people waited in the large auditorium. Should they cancel the event? But if they canceled the first large event after the shooting, what signal would that send?

Eventually the all-clear was given, and the event went off without a hitch.

“Former President Trump’s remarks were delayed at the 2024 Bitcoin conference in Nashville Tennessee while two credentialed and screened individuals were removed from the premises for not following proper entry protocols,” Secret Service spokeswoman Melissa McKenzie said in a statement Tuesday about the incident, which has not previously been reported. “It was determined that there was no protective interest with these individuals and there was never a threat to the former president.”

But the delay was emblematic of a growing burden that the alarming threats to Trump’s life have become for him and his campaign — a burden that has caused a grim mood on the campaign, especially after a second assassination attempt Sunday at his West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course.

Once a freewheeling former president who largely moved as he pleased, Trump has over the course of this year been increasingly constrained by the growing security precautions that surround him. He has survived what law enforcement has described as two assassination attempts, had his campaign emails hacked by alleged agents of the Iranian government and been the subject of a stream of threats from Iranian officials who are seeking revenge for his decision to kill Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

As a result, almost every aspect of his campaign has faced new restrictions — and drastically more security. Events have taken far longer to plan because of limited resources. Bulletproof glass now boxes him in at outdoor events. Campaign officials have been warned by the government about the possibility of poisoning threats that could target the former president. His team has gotten nervous about drones targeting him at golf courses and at outdoor venues after hearing briefings from the Secret Service. He has been warned of the perils of playing golf, with some of his courses now off limits.

New screening sites have taken over a parking lot near Mar-a-Lago, his Florida social club, as the nearby roads have been repeatedly closed to through traffic, causing concern among local officials about gridlock, emergency response times and potentially restricting the ability of members to make use of his club.

Additional sharpshooters at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey have also frustrated Trump, because he fears their presence will scare off paying members.

“It has interfered with the way we’d like to campaign but it hasn’t caused us not to campaign,” one top adviser said.

This account of the expanding security network surrounding Trump is based on interviews with aides, advisers, law enforcement officials and others familiar with the matter, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details.

Multiple campaign staffers have been told in recent weeks they have been a target of hackers. Staffers now use email sparingly, two advisers said. The campaign has provided mental health services since the Butler, Pa., shooting that wounded Trump in July, campaign advisers said.

Other top advisers to Trump have received death threats themselves, according to people familiar with the matter. Briefings by the FBI and Secret Service have become more frequent, they say, and campaign staff have been juggling their workload with requests for interviews from the multiple federal investigations of the Secret Service’s performance in Butler.

“We live in a military combat zone,” one Trump adviser said, describing the security apparatus now around Trump.

“There is constant chatter about Iran,” another campaign official said.

A spokeswoman for the campaign declined to comment and pointed to a post by Trump on his Truth Social website decrying Democrats for their rhetoric against him.

“Following the events of July 13 and at the direction of President Biden, the U.S. Secret Service has elevated the protective posture for all our protectees and bolstered our protective details as appropriate in order to ensure the highest levels of safety and security for those we protect,” McKenzie said.

Earlier this year, after beeping noises were found in the office, staffers grew concerned and called 911. The building was evacuated, as they thought they might be listening devices. Instead, they were part of a prank — chirping devices bought on Amazon, according to the West Palm Beach Police Department. But they caused hours of alarm, showing how concerned people are.

Trump, who has lived with federal personal protection since 2015, has said he has been surprised by the peril he now faces.

“Look, being president’s a dangerous job. It’s much more dangerous than a racecar driver, than anything. It’s probably the most dangerous profession if you think about it. Just go up and down the list,” he said during an Aug. 27 podcast interview with Phil McGraw. “ … I never realized how dangerous.”

David Urban, a longtime informal adviser, said the tension is natural after two apparent assassination attempts — and is exacerbated with a politician like Trump.

“There is an innate tension between campaigning and being 100 percent secure. Secret Service wants to wrap him in bubble wrap and put him on the shelf,” Durban said. “That’s what they want to do, that is their job. Their job is to keep him safe. He loves people. People love him. He’s a gregarious guy and he likes being out amongst people. He likes pressing the flesh.”

Trump has sought to go forward with his schedule, but campaign officials say it has been more difficult to plan events because of security limitations since the shooting in July. “There are certain places we just don’t want to go yet,” one of those people said. Trump himself wants to return to Butler for a cinematic rally near the end of the election.

The latest alleged attempt on Trump’s life, while he golfed Sunday at one of his golf clubs in West Palm Beach, has led to additional restrictions, as Congress debates an emergency funding request to provide additional federal protection for candidates through the November election.

Interim Secret Service Director Ron Rowe told Trump after the Sunday potential assassination that he should not play golf at some of his courses, which are not safe. Trump later joked with his team that he would take up bowling, according to people familiar with the situation.

Trump also asked for more resources and was told that he is already given a presidential-level detail, the people said. Trump argued that President Joe Biden faced less of a threat than he did, a person familiar with the conversation said.

A spokeswoman for the Secret Service declined to comment on the conversation.

After Secret Service agents found a man on Sunday in a tree line with a rifle, Trump was held for more than an hour because the agency needed to sweep his homes and make sure no one was there.

In late August, Trump cut short a news media interview because he had been warned by law enforcement against standing near the border outside his motorcade. Local authorities arrested a southern Arizona man that day on charges of making a death threat against Trump on social media.

“Can I tell you something? We’re in danger standing here talking, so let’s not talk any longer,” he told a reporter for News Nation after answering a couple of questions. “They don’t want me standing here. They don’t want you standing here.”

For much of the first three years after his presidency, Trump was seemingly less concerned about his safety, and security matters were handled largely in the background. He had built his political brand by entertaining massive crowds, appearing at outdoor rallies, UFC fights and college football games, often wading through throngs of adoring fans.

Bags and pockets were sometimes checked by security teams, and traffic passed without incident by Mar-a-Lago when he was there. In his off hours, he would mill about with guests, praising the shrimp and lobsters as he wandered the ballroom. The carefree attitude prompted one friend to encourage Trump to have Secret Service agents closer to his table, this person said, but Trump did not want that.

“I went to his club dozens of times and I was never wanded,” one person who knows Trump well said, referring to checks for weapons.

But those days are gone. The Town of Palm Beach now has a portion of its site dedicated to updating residents on road closures around Mar-a-Lago when Trump is in town. Residents and service providers are allowed to pass within the closure area with identification. The opening schedule for a nearby drawbridge is also adjusted depending on U.S. Coast Guard instructions. His clubs are now screening people.

“All procedures are continuously evaluated and changes may occur when necessary,” the town warns residents.

Trump has made macabre jokes about his new reality. He told a friend earlier this year that he would beat Biden, his opponent at the time, as long as he could stay alive.

Weeks after the Butler attack, at an August briefing for reporters in West Palm Beach, a campaign official reflected on the grim environment in response to a question about how Trump was handling the attack on his life.

“Truly a black swan election, a black swan election,” the official said. “My guess is we haven’t seen the end of it.”

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been on the defensive for more than a week after repeating baseless claims that immigrants living in a small Ohio city were stealing and eating local animals. His efforts to pivot the story into one that’s politically advantageous are clumsy, in part because the reality is so stark: Vance, someone attuned to the right’s online conversations, was quick to amplify the anti-immigrant rumors circulating among supporters of Donald Trump. Threats against people and facilities in the city of Springfield followed.

One way in which the Republican vice-presidential nominee has consistently attempted to rationalize his claims is by leveraging his position as the state’s junior senator.

“Why have I talked about some of the things that I have been talking about?” Vance said in response to a question posed on CNN on Sunday. “Let me just say this: My constituents have brought approximately a dozen separate concerns to me. Ten of them are verifiable and confirmable, and a couple of them I talk about because my constituents are telling me firsthand that they’re seeing these things.”

It should not escape notice that there is a difference between “verifiable” and “verified,” between “confirmable” and “confirmed.”

The implication is that he is privy to nonpublic information that informs his views. You can see how this is useful: He can claim that he knows more than his interlocutor. But there’s no reason to think he does, in large part because the evidence he presents so often takes the form of unsubstantiated — and later debunked — rumors circulating on the internet.

Consider his initial social media post about the rumors centered on Springfield. It came the morning of Sept. 9, as the right-wing conversation was giddily promoting unsourced or misconstrued snippets aimed at suggesting that immigrants from Haiti were stealing pet cats and hunting local geese.

Vance noted that he’d raised the issue of housing in Springfield a few months earlier. Then, he wrote: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

There were no such “reports” beyond the claims circulating on the internet. One was a fourth-hand report on Facebook of a stolen cat that was no more than a rumor. Another focused on a photo of a random Black man in a different city. A third looped in a story about an American woman eating a cat in a different part of the state. But notice what Vance doesn’t offer: evidence that he’d heard reports from actual constituents.

Never mind that those constituent reports would themselves be worth some skepticism. Rumors about immigrants stealing pets — a long-standing racist and anti-immigrant trope — were already circulating, leading to things like that Facebook post or comments presented at public meetings (clips of which also made the rounds). At the outset, though, Vance didn’t point to constituent concerns at all. Just internet stuff.

As it turns out, his office soon knew better. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that a Vance staffer called Springfield’s city manager to see if the rumors had any basis in fact. The manager said they didn’t, as did the police that same day. Vance did not retract his claim.

On CNN, he pointed to other purported evidence in lieu of the “verifiable” information he’d gotten from constituents.

“I was told … by the American media that it was baseless that migrants were capturing the geese from the local park pond and eating them,” he said. “And yet there are 911 calls from well before this ever became a viral sensation of people complaining about that exact thing happening.”

The county had denied days prior that there was evidence of this happening, as had the state Department of Natural Resources. The report Vance cited was elevated by a right-wing, pro-Trump site that was part of an effort to backfill Vance’s (and later Trump’s) claims of eaten animals with whatever evidence was available.

In another Sunday interview on NBC, Vance again insisted that his source was his constituents.

“I’m not repeating them because I invented them out of thin air,” he said. “I’m repeating them because my constituents are saying these things are happening, which is —”

NBC’s Kristen Welker interjected to note that there was no evidence to support his claims.

“Yesterday,” Vance continued, “a video came out of a migrant 30 miles away eating a cat. Clearly, these rumors are out there because constituents are seeing it with their own eyes and some of them are talking about it.”

Well, no. That rumor was out there because right-wing activist Christopher Rufo offered a bounty for evidence that Vance’s and Trump’s claims were true, yielding a shaky video of something being cooked on a grill in the city of Dayton. City officials once again denied the suggestions being made by Rufo and Vance.

The Wall Street Journal’s report on the rumors in Springfield also included consideration of another bit of evidence presented by Vance.

“A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors,” the report from Kris Maher, Valerie Bauerlein and Tawnell D. Hobbs read. “But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later — found safe in her own basement.”

Kilgore told the reporters that she’d apologized to her neighbors for the allegation.

Early Tuesday afternoon, just such a police report had been promoted by a social media account run by the Heritage Foundation, the group that put together the compendium of policy recommendations titled “Project 2025.” Dated in late August — after rumors about pet-eating had begun to swirl in the community — the details comport with Kilgore’s complaint. The Heritage post, at least, noted that the allegations in the police report were unverified.

The pattern is consistent: Vance insists that his public concerns are driven by what he hears from constituents, but the evidence that the concerns are valid relies on misinformation or unverified reports circulating within the right-wing conversational bubble.