On pretty much a daily basis, I am amazed that Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people on the planet. That’s because, on pretty much a daily basis, Musk says or does something that is either dumb, or offensive, or insulting, or just plain uncool — which might be the most derogatory thing you can say about him since he fancies himself as really cool.

A few days ago, he made an awfully crude joke about Taylor Swift.

That was creepy and cringy.

But what he did Sunday night was dangerous.

In the aftermath of what is believed to have been an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, a user on X tweeted, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”

Musk, who owns X, replied, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” He then included a “person thinking” emoji.

According to CNBC’s Rebecca Picciotto and Lora Kolodny, “Within an hour, Musk’s tweet had been viewed by at least 1.3 million users, while over 3,000 users had reposted it and at least 18,000 users had liked it.” Later, it had nearly 30 million views. Musk has 198.7 million followers.

Musk left up the post for nine hours before deleting it.

Then he posted at 2:58 a.m. Monday morning, “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”

Wait, people laughed at that? Who laughed at that?

Then, two minutes later, Musk tweeted, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Or maybe, Elon, assassination jokes aren’t all that funny — especially when the nation is completely on edge and the people you tweeted about — Kamala Harris and Joe Biden — have had death threats.

The White House said Monday that Musk’s first post was “irresponsible.”

Maybe Musk should’ve just deleted his original tweet and then said, “Hey, I took down my last post because it was an insensitive and incredibly thoughtless thing to say. I am sorry.”

But only someone really smart would do that.

Aftermath of the latest assassination attempt

What strange times we live in. For the past week, residents in Springfield, Ohio, have been threatened with bombings and other violence after continued false claims from the right, including Trump running mate JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants are eating pets there. Then Sunday, Trump appears to have been the target of a second assassination attempt in two months.

The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote, “And so it goes in 2024. In the space of less than a week, the once and possibly future commander in chief was both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era. Bomb threats and attempted assassinations now have become part of the landscape, shocking and horrific, yet not so much that they have forced any real national reckoning.”

Baker added, “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.”

And yet Trump told Fox News Digital on Monday that the “rhetoric” of Harris and Biden is to be blamed for him being “shot at.”

An unlikely source

Ryan Wesley Routh takes part in a rally in central Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man suspected of plotting to assassinate Trump on Sunday, is not completely unknown to the media. In fact, he has shown up multiple times in stories regarding the war in Ukraine.

The New York Times’ Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote that he had interviewed Routh last year for an article about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine.

Gibbons-Neff wrote, “My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He was in Washington, D.C., he said, and had planned for a two-hour meeting with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It’s unclear if that meeting ever happened.)”

Gibbons-Neff added, “By the time I got off the phone with Mr. Routh some minutes later, it was clear he was in way over his head. He talked of buying off corrupt officials, forging passports and doing whatever it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, but he had no real way to accomplish his goals. At one point he mentioned arranging a U.S. military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees willing to fight. I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but the tone in Mr. Routh’s voice said otherwise. He was going to back Ukraine’s war effort, no matter what. Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell off the map again. Until Sunday.”

Meanwhile, Routh also was in touch with CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams about the same topic — the war in Ukraine.

In a CBS News report, Williams said she believes she talked to Routh once by phone and that they texted “frequently.” Williams said Routh put her touch with those fighting in Ukraine. Williams added that he seemed “naive” about his ability to help the Ukrainian war effort. She said she had not heard from him since last November, when he told her he was in Hawaii.

There’s more.

Routh also was interviewed by Semafor in March 2023.

Semafor’s Tanya Lukyanova and Ben Smith wrote Sunday night, “When Semafor talked to him, Routh was one of a wave of American volunteers in Ukraine, the self-appointed director of a group he’d started called the International Volunteer Center. He was, even by the standards of that frantic moment, a bit over the top, a Ukrainian involved in the effort told us at the time. But he was also, they said, authentically involved in the efforts to bring in foreign troops, and we quoted him in a story about the Afghan fighters.”

Lukyanova and Smith wrote, “Routh was not the focus of our 2023 story, and we spoke with him for less than half an hour.”

(Semafor noted that Lukyanova interviewed Routh while she was a journalist at Semafor. She’s now a reporter for The Free Press.)

What’s curious is how Routh kept showing up as a source for various news outlets.

Taking a stand

Over the past four years, candidates running for office all over the country have cast doubt on the integrity of elections. Many have taken their cues from former President Donald Trump, who continues to put forth baseless and false claims about rigged elections.

One newspaper’s editorial board had enough.

The Sun Sentinel in South Florida recently refused to endorse a candidate for office, in part, because of that candidate’s claims of fraudulent elections. Not only did the editorial board endorse the other candidate, it published a lengthy explanation, which included why it refused to even run a questionnaire sent in by the candidate, which it said was full of “myths and falsehoods.”

And get this, the office in question was supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County!

In a scathing piece, the Sun Sentinel editorial board wrote:

For the first time, the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board will not publish online a questionnaire submitted by a candidate. It was submitted by Jeff Buongiorno, an elections conspiracy theorist and the Republican candidate for supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County.

Buongiorno’s questionnaire is replete with myths and falsehoods. He doubts the reliability of Florida election results because, he said, they cannot be “manually verified.” Voting tabulation machines are tested frequently and results are audited, then certified by a canvassing board usually chaired by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Buongiorno claims without evidence that “public trust in our elections has eroded to new lows,” when any mistrust is largely due to Donald Trump’s continued lie that he won the 2020 election. Election results in Florida are extremely reliable.

Buongiorno actively works to undermine public faith in voting by mail. Citing a group called Defend Florida, he claimed in his questionnaire that 20% of Florida’s mail ballots in 2020 were cast by “phantom” voters who were dead or who voted from phony addresses.

Really? More than 11 million Floridians voted in 2020, so 20% of that would be more than 2.2 million people. Such claims are recklessly irresponsible and seek only to undermine faith in honest elections. We wish to publish all candidate questionnaires, but as a trusted media source, we cannot knowingly publish these falsehoods. We are endorsing Wendy Sartory Link for Palm Beach County supervisor of elections.

A gutsy and completely appropriate stance by the Sun Sentinel editorial board.

Steve Bousquet, the opinion editor and columnist for the Sun Sentinel who helped make the decision to not run Buongiorno’s questionnaire, told me in an email, “We received two letters to the editor from readers on our decision, one strongly supportive and one highly critical. One reader said that the media has a responsibility not to perpetuate disinformation, and the other said our decision was ‘insane’ and readers can make up their own minds.”

Later, by phone, Bousquet told me that in its endorsement of Buongiorno’s opponent, the Sun Sentinel website did include a 40-minute or so video interview with Buongiorno in which he repeats many of the false or misleading claims from his questionnaire. Bousquet said that he was aware the news organization would be accused of censorship for not printing Buongiorno’s comments.

“But,” Bousquet said, “we can’t be a transmission belt for blatant misinformation.”

Powerful piece

Be sure to take some time to check out this important but disturbing story. From NBC News’ Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe and Susan Carroll: “Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas.”

The story says, “In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.”

The story adds, “… about 2,350 … unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Among these, more than 830 bodies were selected by the center for dissection and study. After the medical school and other groups were finished, the bodies were cremated and, in most cases, interred at area cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had families who were looking for them.”

In addition, here are “5 things to know about NBC News’ investigation into unclaimed bodies used for research in Texas.”

The NBC story came after a 10-month investigation. The story was originally pitched and developed by Carroll, whose byline is on the story. Carroll, who was NBC News’ senior enterprise editor, died suddenly earlier this year.

Schuppe tweeted, “Susy developed the idea, and did a lot of the work on it. When she died earlier this year, we kept going, determined to honor her legacy.”

Schuppe and Hixenbaugh also worked on NBC’s “Lost Rites” project, which investigated America’s failed death notification system.

Media tidbits

• Hey! Poynter is launching a podcast and it’ll be hosted by … me. “The Poynter Report Podcast,” kind of an offshoot of this newsletter, will debut next Monday with a new episode coming out every two weeks. The first guest is NPR television critic and media analyst Eric Deggans. I’ll write more about this before the launch, but here’s what my colleague Barbara Allen wrote: “Poynter launches new media industry podcast hosted by The Poynter Report’s Tom Jones.”
• For only the second time in the magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president: “Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health and the Environment.”
• Harris will sit down for an interview this afternoon in Philadelphia with the National Association of Black Journalists. Poynter’s PolitiFact will provide real-time fact-checking.
• “CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent Martha Teichner with “Pete Wells dishes on life as New York Times restaurant critic.”
• The Associated Press’ David Bauder with “Connie Chung launched a generation of Asian American girls named Connie. She had no idea.”
• Anchor Lester Holt is scheduled to interview the four Polaris Dawn astronauts on this evening’s “NBC Nightly News.”
• The Washington Post’s Michael Brice-Saddler with “Plans unveiled for National Mall memorial for slain journalists.”

Hot type

• ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana with “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.”
• Those of you old enough will remember that back in 1975, then-President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a span of a mere 17 days. Both would-be assassins were women, including Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. The Los Angeles looked back in “Before Trump, President Ford survived 2 assassination attempts in 3 weeks in California.”

More resources for journalists

• Got a story you’d like to write for Poynter? Email pitch@poynter.org with your idea, approximate timeline and word count.
• Understand critical aspects of the swiftly evolving AI landscape at Level Up.
• Immigration Matters: a tip sheet with resources and story ideas.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

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