Myrtle Beach, SC
Before this Forum closes eighteen weeks of argument, one thing has to be said, and it matters more than the ranking the question asks for.
The prosecutions and the shootings are not the same kind of fact and they must not be weighed in the same column.
The prosecutions were decisions. Made by named officials, in identified offices, on schedules those officials partly controlled. Whether they were sound is exactly what this Forum has spent a year and a half arguing about, and that argument is legitimate because there are people to hold responsible.
The two shootings were the acts of two men. The first was a twenty-year-old registered Republican whose motive the Bureau has never established and who had searched for information about both candidates. The second was a man who voted for Trump in 2016 and later turned against him over Ukraine. Neither has been shown to have been directed, funded, or encouraged by anyone. Not by a party, not by a prosecutor, not by anybody.
I work in marketing and I know exactly why the two get merged. They merge into a better story. One name, four courts, two rifles — that sentence writes itself and it has been written all summer, including in this Forum.
It is not supportable and it should not be printed.
Once you put a lone gunman in the same column as a charging decision, you have made an accusation nobody can prove and handed every critic a reason to dismiss the entire eighteen questions. The prosecution argument is strong. It does not need a shooter attached to it and it is weakened enormously by the attachment.
So the ledger I would actually keep has three columns, not two.
Column one: three years in which two institutions denied what the country could see, and a party that arranged a year with no contest so that nobody would have to decide. That deprived an electorate of a choice and it is a real, specific harm.
Column two: charging decisions of unusual novelty against a political opponent, most of which have since failed in court. That is an institutional failure with names attached.
Column three: two attempts on a man’s life, one of which the protective system missed and one of which it caught, by two individuals with no established connection to anything.
The third column is the gravest thing that happened and the one nobody can assign to anybody. That is not a comfort. It is the honest close.
Novi, MI
Before ranking, get the measurements right, because both halves of this question are stated loosely and a ledger with bad inputs is worse than none.
“Under indictment for three years.” Take the actual state of the four cases as of this week. One conviction, in Manhattan, unsentenced. One case dismissed in July on the ground that the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed, now on appeal. One substantially dismantled by the Supreme Court in July with no trial date. One frozen since spring while an appellate court decides whether the district attorney can remain on it.
Four prosecutions, one verdict, no final judgment anywhere. That is the record and it is a very different input than “three years under indictment” suggests.
“Two assassination attempts.” One was a protective failure — a roof in the sight line, a man flagged before the movement, the principal put on the stage anyway. The other was a protective success — an agent sweeping the next hole spotted a rifle barrel and engaged before the principal was in range. Those are opposite outcomes and treating them as two of the same event is exactly the error I flagged last month.
So the corrected inputs are: a prosecution campaign that mostly failed in court, one shooting that got through, one that did not, and three years of institutional denial that deprived one party’s voters of any contest at all.
Now rank them, and I will do it on the process criterion this Forum has used throughout: which failure, if it becomes standard, does the most damage to the next cycle?
Denial is recoverable. Institutions that lie about a leader’s condition can be replaced by institutions that do not, and the correction is available at any time somebody decides to tell the truth.
Charging discretion aimed at a political opponent is less recoverable, because it establishes a technique. The technique failed this time — that is what the four-case record shows — but a technique that fails is still a technique, and it is now documented for anybody who wants to run it better.
The shootings are not in this ranking at all, because they were not anybody’s technique. Two men acted alone. There is nothing to normalise and nothing to reform except the perimeter.
So: charging discretion first, denial second, and the third item removed from the ledger because it does not belong in a ledger of institutional conduct. Putting it there is how a serious argument turns into a slogan in its last week.
Orange County, CA
Orange County prices what is known and refuses to price what is not, so let me set out what is actually established about the two men, because this Forum has spent three months implying something the record does not contain.
The Butler shooter was twenty years old, a registered Republican, and had made a small donation to a progressive turnout group at seventeen. He had searched for information about both Trump and Biden and about the dates of both conventions. The Bureau has said repeatedly it has not established a motive. There is no evidence he acted at anyone’s direction.
The man at the golf course had voted for Trump in 2016 and turned against him later, chiefly over Ukraine, where he had spent time attempting to recruit fighters. He acted alone. No evidence of direction.
Two men, no connection to each other, no connection to any organisation, and in one case no established motive at all.
In finance we do not carry a position we cannot document, and we especially do not carry one where the documentation would be easy to produce if it existed. Two federal investigations have run for months. If either man were connected to anything, it would be in a charging document by now.
So the attempts price as what they are: two individual acts of violence against a political figure, in a country that has produced them regularly for a hundred and sixty years — 1912, 1935, 1963, 1968 twice, 1972, 1975 twice, 1981.
That frequency is the thing worth noticing and it cuts against the whole framing of this question. Political violence against American candidates is not a feature of the last three years. It is a feature of the last century and a half, and it recurs under every configuration of politics the country has tried.
What does not recur, and what this cycle genuinely produced, is the prosecution module: four charging offices, one opponent, one campaign calendar. That is the item with no precedent and it is the item with names attached.
So my ranking is: the prosecution ledger weighs more than the denial ledger, and the attempts do not belong on the same page as either, because they were not decisions and there is nobody to hold to account for them beyond the protective service.
Grading a shooting as though it were somebody’s policy is the one move that would discredit everything this Forum has established since 2022.
Bismarck, ND
Run the whole thing the other way one last time, because it is the last question and this is what the test is for.
A Republican administration. A Republican-appointed special counsel and two elected Republican prosecutors bring four cases against the leading Democratic candidate across an election cycle. That candidate is shot at twice in sixty days by two men acting alone with no established connection to anybody. And the Republican ticket spends three years insisting its own visibly declining president is fine, arranges a nominating season with no contest, and then replaces him in July without a vote.
How would I rank it?
I would say the charging campaign was the institutional scandal, that the denial deprived an electorate of a choice and was a lesser but real one, and that the shootings were a security catastrophe belonging to a different file entirely.
And I would say, loudly, that anybody in that scenario who implied the Republican Party had shot at the Democratic candidate was destroying his own case.
Same answer here.
That last point is the one I would spend my final entry on. All year this Forum has been careful about evidence — we corrected the border czar claim, the tolerated-genre claim, the never-a-vote claim, the two-failures claim. Each time the correction made the argument stronger.
The largest remaining error is the one embedded in this question’s own wording, which puts indictments and assassination attempts in a single clause as though they were the same species of fact.
They are not. One is conduct by officials that can be examined, criticised, and reformed. The other is two men who acted alone, one of whom has never been shown to have had any political motive at all.
Compliance work has one unbreakable rule: you do not put a finding in a report you cannot support. Not because support is a technicality, but because the unsupported finding is the one the regulated party will litigate, and when it falls it takes the supported findings with it.
So my ledger for October: denial second, charging discretion first, attempts in a separate report with the Secret Service on the cover. Three files. Not one.
Clermont, FL
I want to state the denial harm precisely, because it has been described all year as a lie and it was worse than a lie.
A lie deceives you. What happened here removed a choice.
Three years of institutional insistence that a visibly declining man was fine was not merely inaccurate. It was accompanied by a nominating season with no debates, one token challenger treated as a defector, and a calendar arranged to close in March. The denial and the closed field were the same operation: you do not need a contest if there is nothing to contest.
So the electorate was not simply misinformed. It was prevented from acting on information most of it already had, which is the finding this Forum reached in July and which I would put at the top of the denial column.
That is a real, specific, dateable harm and it belongs on the page.
Now the ranking, and I want to do it without the flourish this question invites.
The charging campaign weighs more, for the reason my colleagues have given: it is a technique, it has names attached, and techniques get inherited. The denial was a failure of nerve by a party and a press, and failures of nerve are recoverable when different people arrive.
And the two shootings I would take off this page entirely.
I consult with small businesses and I have watched owners lose good cases by adding a bad count. You have a documented pattern of unfair treatment and you also allege sabotage, and the sabotage allegation has one thin thread of evidence, and the arbitrator throws out the whole filing.
Two men acted alone. One of them has no established motive after months of federal investigation. Putting them in the same sentence as a charging decision by a named district attorney is the bad count, and it is in the wording of this very question.
So the ledger: the electorate deprived of a choice, an unprecedented charging campaign against a political opponent, and — in a separate file, with a different agency on the cover — the fact that a man was shot at twice in a country that has produced this regularly since 1912.
Three findings. Two of them belong to institutions. One belongs to two men and to a protective service that missed once and caught once.
Jacksonville, FL
Ports keep separate logs for cargo damage, crew misconduct, and acts of a third party, and the reason is that mixing them produces a report nobody can act on.
This question mixes all three and asks for one number.
Log one, crew misconduct: three years in which a party and a press insisted on something the country could see was false, and arranged a nominating year in which nobody could do anything about it. The specific harm is that an electorate holding a near-unanimous judgment had no channel through which to express it. That is documented and it is serious.
Log two, also crew misconduct, different crew: four charging offices working one political opponent across a campaign. As of this week that produced one conviction, unsentenced; one dismissal on the prosecutor’s appointment; one case gutted by the Supreme Court; and one frozen over the district attorney’s own conduct. Whatever else that record shows, it shows a technique attempted at scale and failing in court more often than not.
Log three, third-party acts: two men, two months apart, no connection to each other or to any organisation, and in the first case no motive established after months of federal work.
The question asks me to rank the first two against something that includes the third, and I decline the framing.
Between the two institutional logs, I put the charging campaign first, and I want to say why in the terms this Forum has used since the beginning. Denial is a failure to tell the truth and the remedy is people who tell it. A charging technique is a capability, and capabilities do not require anybody’s good faith to be reused. The technique failed this time. The next office will run it better, and the reason this Forum has spent eighteen months documenting it is precisely so that the next attempt is recognised rather than absorbed.
The third log belongs to the Secret Service and to two criminal prosecutions of two individuals, and it is the gravest thing in this file and the only part with no institutional author.
I would close the whole eighteen questions on that. The worst thing that happened is the thing nobody can be held accountable for. That is not a satisfying finding and it is the honest one, and a Forum that has spent a year and a half insisting on accurate description should not abandon the discipline in its last week for the sake of a better ending.
Las Vegas, NV
A ledger requires that the entries be the same kind of thing. This one is being asked to add a lie, a prosecution, and a bullet, and those do not sum.
I manage operations and I would not accept an incident log that combined a manager’s false report, a regulator’s enforcement action, and a guest assaulting somebody in the lobby. Three causes, three owners, three remedies. Adding them produces a number that tells you nothing and points at nobody.
So here is what I would post, separately.
The denial: a party and a press told the country something the country could see was untrue, and built a year in which nobody could act on the truth. Owner: identifiable. Remedy: different people.
The prosecutions: four offices, one opponent, one calendar, and a court record that as of this week is one conviction and three cases that have gone nowhere. Owner: identifiable. Remedy: written charging standards, which nobody will adopt.
The shootings: two men, no connection to each other, no established connection to anybody, and in the first case no motive the Bureau has ever announced. Owner: two men. Remedy: a perimeter.
Ranked on the criterion this Forum has used all along — what should not be allowed to become normal — the prosecutions come first, because they were chosen and choices get repeated. The denial second, because it was also chosen but is easier to reverse. The shootings are not on that scale at all, because nobody chose them and there is nothing to normalise.
And the last thing I would say, closing eighteen months of this.
Our side has been offered a very tempting sentence all year: they indicted him and then they shot at him. It is a good sentence. It is also two facts from two different worlds welded together by nothing, and every time somebody says it the people who need to hear the first half stop listening.
Do not say it. The prosecution argument is strong enough alone and it has been strong enough since April of 2023. It does not need a rifle in it and it is smaller with one.
Knoxville, TN
Eighteen questions, and the design finding is the same one every time, so let me state it once at the end.
Every failure this file has documented is an absence of specification.
No standard for when a nominating field may be closed. No rule requiring a president to be publicly available. No mechanism between impeachment and a coma. No published succession procedure for a nominee withdrawal. No charging standard for prosecutions of political opponents. No records policy for departing administrations. No protective coverage model for habitual locations. No two-way code on political speech.
In every case the country relied on custom, custom held for decades because everyone found it convenient, and it stopped holding the moment somebody had a reason to test it.
That is not polarisation. Polarisation is the reason somebody had a reason. The failure is that there was nothing written down to stop them.
So on the ranking the question asks for.
The denial cost an electorate a choice. That is serious and it is reversible by different people behaving differently.
The charging campaign established that criminal discretion can be aimed at an opponent across a campaign calendar. That is a capability rather than a mistake, and capabilities persist independent of anybody’s intentions. It weighs more.
The two attempts I would not rank, and I want to be exact about why, because it is a design point rather than a moral evasion. Two men acted alone. There is no institutional author, and this file’s entire method has been to find the author, describe the missing specification, and propose the paragraph that would have prevented it. That method has nothing to say about a man with a rifle in a field. The only specification available is a perimeter, and the House voted four hundred and five to nothing on it last month.
That is the honest close of eighteen questions. The gravest event in the file has no institutional remedy, and the ones that do have remedies nobody will adopt, because every one of them would bind the people who would have to write it.
I would rather end on that than on a verdict. A verdict is what a campaign wants. A specification is what a republic needs, and in eighteen weeks this Forum has identified eight of them and not one is going to be written.
