SHOTS FIRED: Gunshots rang out yesterday at Donald Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida and the FBI said the former president was safe after what may have been a foiled assassination attempt.

  A man named Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was taken into custody and an AK-47 style rifle with a scope was recovered at the scene..

  It happened just over two months after Trump was nicked in the ear by a bullet from an attempted assassin.

  The NY Times has identified Routh as a man they interviewed in 2023 for an article about Americans volunteering to fight for Ukraine. Routh, who said he had no military experience, claimed he had traveled to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and wanted to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight there.

  The attempt was interrupted when Trump was about 400 yards away from the shooter. The local sheriff in West Palm Beach reported that a Secret Service agent advancing the golf course one hole ahead of Trump spotted a rifle barrel poking through a fence and opened fire. The Secret Service was uncertain whether the gunman ever fired a shot. The man left behind the rifle, two backpacks containing ceramic plates for a ballistic vest, and a GoPro camera attached to the fence.

  The potential assassin drove off in a car but was tracked down and stopped on Route 95 South. He was found quickly because a man saw him come out of the bushes and took a pictures of him and his car.

  Trump was reported to be shocked by this second incident but joking about it with supporters on the phone. Fox News host Sean Hannity said the former president bemoaned that he was about to shoot under par when he was hustled away.

BY THE NUMBERS: The Real Clear Politics average of polls this morning has Kamala Harris leading in four out of seven battleground states including Pennsylvania by a statistical hair. She’s ahead in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and as we said, Pennsylvania.

  The RCP average of national polls gives Harris an edge of 1.7 percent. On this day in 2020, Joe Biden was leading by 5.9 percent.

CATS AND DOGS: Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance yesterday on CNN refused to back away from false claims about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio. 

  “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance told host Dana Bash. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” 

  Bash replied, “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

Vance said, “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents.” 

  The city of Springfield says there’s no evidence of any of this. Nonetheless, Vance, Donald Trump, and Don Jr. are pushing it.  

  “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump said over the weekend about closures of schools and city hall in Springfield. He said, “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.” 

  The city notes on its website that 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants live in Clark County surrounding Springfield, and that Haitian immigrants are there legally as part of an immigration parole program.

  That didn’t stop Donald Trump Jr. from chiming in. “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average IQ — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” he told the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

THE WAR ROOM: The Israeli military admitted that three hostages were probably killed last November in an airstrike targeting a senior Hamas commander. 

  Results of the investigation also suggest that some senior Hamas officials surround themselves with hostages for insulation from Israeli strikes.

  The announcement fed demands by hostage advocates for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach a deal with Hamas for release of the remaining hostages.

LEAD TYPE: The Baltimore Sun fired its federal courts reporter Madeleine O’Neill citing comments she made internally criticizing management’s approach to news coverage under its new owners, including David Smith, chair of the right wing Sinclair Broadcasting. O’Neill had no union protection because she had been with the paper less than the probationary nine months.

  The Sun was once one of the great newspapers in America but it has been taken over by a Donald Trump idealogue and the editorial staff is unhappy. The Baltimore Brew reports that, “Last month, (Newspaper) Guild members held a lunchtime rally to protest the use of content they say does not meet journalistic standards – political news from Sinclair’s national desk in Virginia, lurid out-of-state crime stories generated by Sinclair television stations and other stories from its local flagship station, Fox45.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Mary McFadden, a fashion designer whose glittering pleated dresses featured touches of international design from such countries as China and Indonesia has died at age 85.  She had said that she wanted her dresses to fall “like liquid gold” down a woman’s body. McFadden’s personal look was as distinctive as her fashions. She wore her dark hair cut short with her face painted in Japanese Kabuki-style pale makeup. 

— Tito Jackson, a member of the Jackson 5 family band who performed with his brothers Jackie, Jermaine, Randy, Marlon, and Michael on such songs as “ABC” and “I’ll Be There,” has died at age 70. No cause was given. 

THE SPIN RACK: The battle for future control of Rupert Murdoch’s right wing media empire begins today in a Nevada courtroom. Murdoch wants to break the irrevocable trust that holds the business to ensure that his son Lachlan will be in charge.

BELOW THE FOLD: Donald Trump posted “I hate Taylor Swift’ after the pop star endorsed kamala Harris. As if he ever had a chance.

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