S8 Ep53: Unpacking the Assassination Attempt on Donald Trump with Jacob Ware

[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised. Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics and intrigue.

[00:00:33] This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr. Hello everyone and welcome back to Secrets and Spies. On today's special episode I'm joined by Jacob Ware, who is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations focusing on domestic and international terrorism.

[00:00:50] Jacob helps unpack last weekend's assassination attempt on Donald Trump, placing it in the larger context of political violence in the United States and the ongoing threat to the presidential election. As always, a couple of housekeeping notes first.

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[00:01:49] Jacob Ware, welcome back to Secrets and Spies. It's good to have you with us. Wish it could have been under better circumstances this time around. You were on, of course, a couple of weeks ago with your colleague Bruce Hoffman to talk about your book on far-right terrorism.

[00:02:05] Today we're here for a little bit of a different issue to talk about an assassination attempt against Donald Trump that happened over the weekend. Before we get into it, just wanted to give a couple background notes.

[00:02:15] I'm sure this is familiar to a lot of listeners, especially inside the US, but just wanted to put it out here so we have it here for the record. On July 13th, which is last Saturday, Donald Trump held a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

[00:02:27] A few minutes into his speech, a 20-year-old man from nearby Bethel Park identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight rounds towards the stage from an AR-15 style rifle. One of those rounds grazed Trump's ear. He took cover and was shielded by a secret service detail.

[00:02:43] One supporter in the audience was killed and at least two more were injured. A secret service counter sniper team subsequently killed Crooks. Crooks' motives are still largely unknown as of this recording, which is Tuesday, July 16th. He didn't have much of a social media presence at all.

[00:02:58] On January 20th of 2021, so Biden's inauguration day, Crooks made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project. Later on Crooks' 18th birthday, he registered to vote as a Republican. Last night it was reported that the FBI, Laboratory in Quantico accessed his phone

[00:03:16] and didn't find anything that would indicate a political leaning or motive much either way. Regardless though, this is the first serious attempt on the life of a president, a former president or a major presidential candidate since John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan leaving Washington Hilton in 1981.

[00:03:35] So, Jacob, I know in a lot of your writing and commentary in the past couple months you've been sort of sounding the alarm bells about just this exact issue. So, I was wondering for your thoughts on the event itself and just how do you sort of see

[00:03:48] the moment that we're in right now? Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me, Matt. It's great to be back on the show. I do wish it was a little bit longer between episodes because the fact that they came

[00:03:59] so back-to-back means we are facing some real issues. So, but it's always an honor. So, thank you for having me. I think the way I'm thinking through this is it's kind of a mix of three different contextual

[00:04:14] points that I'll go through. And I think we'll make, we'll help me make the argument that this is not something that we should be surprised by. It is not something that we should be

[00:04:24] shocked as possible. So, the first context is over the past 10 to 15 years we have seen arise in domestic terrorism in the United States and abroad. Now, most of that violence has been far-right violence, white supremacist and anti-government extremist violence targeting places like

[00:04:43] Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, El Paso, Texas, Buffalo, New York, of course, the US Capitol on January 6th. That story of far-right violence rising over the past 10 to 15 years is the story of our book. And that's why we wrote

[00:04:57] that book. That's why we came on the show a couple of months ago. We've also seen left-wing violence in that time and you know, it's never been something that we've hidden away from, but certainly the levels have always been very different. That's the first point of context.

[00:05:10] The second is assassinations are on the rise around the world. And if you look at countries like the UK, Japan, Slovakia, Argentina, South Korea, Haiti, there has been a number of successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts over the past kind of even just three to four years.

[00:05:29] I'm not sure I can put a finger on that trend, but it's something that is clearly at play. Here in the US, data suggests that we are seeing record numbers of threats against public officials.

[00:05:40] And of course, we've seen that here as well in the past few years. I mean, January 6th was first and foremost an assassination attempt on a sitting vice president. We've seen threats against Nancy Pelosi and her husband, but we've also seen very prominent

[00:05:55] left-wing threats. Of course, in 2022 there was an attempt on Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh's life. I think the more serious incident though was the June 2017 shooting in a baseball practice of the Republican team for the national baseball game. So

[00:06:11] the left does seem to be engaged in this assassination space. The third context I think is important is threats to the 2024 election. People in my kind of position as Catholic Terrorism scholars, domestic terrorism scholars, we have been

[00:06:30] smashing the alarm over the past few months about various trends. I'm not quite sure any of us expected something this seismic, this catastrophic, but certainly all the warning signs have been there for violence in this election cycle. Those three contexts together,

[00:06:52] domestic terrorism rising, assassination plots rising and this 2024 election specter that's been hanging over us, all three of those things combined tell us I think we shouldn't at all be surprised that something like this could happen. What is surprising,

[00:07:04] what is absolutely shocking is the total spectacular catastrophic failure of the Secret Service and President Trump's detail in this case, how this was able to happen is truly beyond me. Yeah. Well, I guess there's something that I'm sure there'll be many investigations

[00:07:27] within the Secret Service, within DHS, within Congress that'll get to the bottom of this. I guess something that I've been circling here is this is an act of political violence, but I think it's important to keep in mind that those who commit political violence are not always

[00:07:46] motivated by politics in the obvious way that most observers would think they must be. On one hand, you have hardcore domestic terrorists like you would think of the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter or Anders Breivik. I'm sure there's other examples on the left that don't

[00:08:06] come to mind right away, for me at least, who let's say Thomas Crooks saw that he was saving the world from Donald Trump hypothetically. That's why he wanted to do this. You would think there

[00:08:20] would be a manifesto at this point that we would have found, but on the other hand, you have someone like John Hinckley Jr., who shot at Ronald Reagan because he thought he was going to impress Jody Foster. I was wondering if you could speak to the very different

[00:08:38] motives that one could have for doing this sort of thing and how it's not always like the avowed political assassin that we would think of? Yeah, it's a really good question and a really complicated issue. I think my prediction now

[00:08:52] is that this is going to be a problem moving forward. Obviously in the immediate aftermath, the assumption was that this was a far left extremist. There is exactly one piece of data to support that assumption and that is the nature of the target. That is the only,

[00:09:13] let me say it again, that's the only piece of evidence that we have to support the argument that this was a far left terrorist attack. We don't have any evidence that it's a far

[00:09:20] right terrorist attack. I mean, I don't put any stock into the fact that this person was a registered Republican. I don't put any stock in that at all because if this is a political extremist,

[00:09:31] he could support any kind of extreme and it might not be reflected in his political party. As we sit here approaching 72 hours since the incident, it is becoming increasingly clear to me, I think that we're not going to get an answer on that question.

[00:09:48] We all want the answer. We all want a simple answer because if you get a simple answer, you can make simple arguments about the cause and you can make simple suggestions about what the solution is. The extremists out there in our country will make simple judgments

[00:10:05] about who they should respond to, where they should launch their militant action. I don't think we're going to get that. I'm not sure there's a motive here. Obviously there's a personal motive. It might not be a political motive. That's not uncommon to your point.

[00:10:20] One of the things that Bruce and I write about extensively in our book and that I've looked at in other contexts, I've done some work on mass shootings in the US. I've done some work on incel

[00:10:32] violence in the US. Political violence or violence in our society, we seem to be seeing a rise in what you might call personal grievances, personal vulnerabilities, susceptibilities to radicalization and violence. Those can include youth, mental illness, histories of isolation, loneliness and

[00:10:50] bullying, history of violence in the home, substance abuse, all kinds of things, romantic frustrations. It seems like a number of those certainly were present in this case. Those might have contributed to the violence. In this individual's case, they might just not

[00:11:07] have contributed to his trajectory towards an ideology. That doesn't change the fact that it fits within the political violence space. It just changes the fact that we're not going to get a clear one-word or hyphenated answer on why. Yeah, I think that's something that we started

[00:11:26] need to prepare ourselves for that we may never fully know why this happened. I mean, there's instances of like the Sandy Hook or the Las Vegas shooters that you were years removed now and we still haven't quite answered the question why. I'm really glad you raised the

[00:11:41] Sandy Hook point because it's an example I haven't thought of, but it's very illustrative in this moment actually because what happened after Sandy Hook, if you remember, is we didn't get those answers and so you ended up with an information gap that got filled by conspiratorial wasteland.

[00:11:59] Of course, Alex Jones has now paid a really heavy price for playing a part in spreading those theories. That's happening again now. It happened straight away on Sunday night, conspiracy theories that it was staged, conspiracy theories about the identity of the

[00:12:15] perpetrator. Right, it was a BB gun, not a real rifle. It's a secret service inside job. This is due to DEI in the Secret Service. All kinds of conspiracy theories have emerged. Those will

[00:12:26] proliferate and those will become the dominant narrative for a lot of people if we don't close that information gap. The problem is we don't have the actual information to ourselves close

[00:12:36] that gap and so this is something we need to prepare for. Well, let's talk about that a bit more, the attempts to maybe fill that gap of what we don't know. What are you seeing in terms of the

[00:12:47] response from let's say like the more traditional elected political leadership versus the response of far-right groups that you talked about a lot in your book with Bruce, those more like chaos actors. How are you seeing the environment right now?

[00:13:08] Sure. First of all, I've been really encouraged by the narrative on the mainstream left. I think total condemnation without a however or a but. No but this is dot, dot, dot encouraged by a lot of the narrative on the political right as well.

[00:13:25] I think one narrative that's not ideal is the narrative spread by for example, the new vice presidential candidate JD Vaz that this is somehow due to democratic rhetoric. He pointed to a comment that Biden had made I think the day of or the day before

[00:13:44] the assassination attempt saying- I think it was a couple days before. Saying that we need to put Trump in the bullseye. Now, I don't like that phrasing and that shouldn't happen but I'm curious where JD Vance was when Trump said that Mitch McConnell had a death wish

[00:14:00] or said that chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had conducted an act that in the past was punishable by hanging by death. I'm curious where these individuals were when Elon Musk tweeted that the assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi was actually due to a homosexual

[00:14:22] twist between Paul Pelosi and this individual that had gone wrong. So there's a little bit of projection and I think some individuals on the mainstream right need to look a little bit internally to really think about why political violence has been so normalized, why dehumanization

[00:14:40] is so commonplace. I think they'll find that the causes of that are probably inside their own house rather than on the left. However, I think they've stayed clear from what I've seen of real conspiratorial

[00:14:53] thinking and that has been flourishing on the chaos merchant side of the far right. The Joker effect of this. Yeah. So I mean the prominent one is of course related to the Secret Service. Now

[00:15:08] I'm not supporting the conspiracy theories but I understand where they come from given that this is truly, truly a catastrophic failure on the part of the security detail and I've heard a lot in

[00:15:20] the media requests that I've done. I've been asked the question a lot. How could this happen? And my simple response is I'm not going to answer that question because that question will be answered in a congressional committee. That's the scale of the disastrous failure here.

[00:15:37] There are going to be hearings on this and committees. So that answer will come clear in the years to come but obviously again in that information gap people fill their own answers

[00:15:47] and those answers have been, it must be an inside job. It must be a hit ordered by the president. It must be because there are women in the Secret Service. That narrative has

[00:15:58] been spread by Elon Musk of course and so that seems to be the line they're going for. It has to be an inside job. It can't be, it can't have just happened because of the scale

[00:16:07] of the security failure. Right. It's that fear of admitting that sometimes crazy things just happen and the whole system breaks down like it has to be part of a broader plan or conspiracy or else it's not possible. And that's common in the aftermath of these acts of

[00:16:20] violence. It's common that we overlook the fact that people are human, people make mistakes. My kind of easy response to these conspiracy theories, I guess the whole I always poke is, I'm told, I mean I've read that there were 50,000 people at that rally. For you to effectively

[00:16:42] conduct a staged assassination attempt featuring blood and firearms and a Secret Service reaction in front of that many people would be an incredible operation. With live rounds. With live rounds with, and I'm just not sure how, why people think that the counter-intelligence

[00:17:01] like of that operation would be so good that nobody would have found out about it before or now. Like how great is the, I guess the Biden administrations or even the Trump campaigns counter-intelligence? Like how good are they keeping their secrets that nobody in this

[00:17:18] massive operation has let even one piece of evidence slip? That's usually how I try and poke these holes but obviously that's only somewhat effective. Also consider Crooks was asked to not return to his high school shooting club because he

[00:17:31] was such a bad shot that it was thought to be dangerous. So looking at this as some broader conspiracy that we would have that guy take a shot with live rounds at Trump. Unless it wasn't him, unless he's just the scapegoat.

[00:17:48] Yeah, we're sort of getting down the rabbit hole I guess here. One thing I wanted to ask you about though, the protective posture that the Secret Service has around the four principles in this race. So Biden, Harris of course they're the sitting president and vice president it's sort

[00:18:05] of a whole nother game for them and has been to begin with but the protective posture around Trump and now JD Vance will of course be bolstered a lot. It's hard for me to see how you would have

[00:18:17] this sort of catastrophic failure in the protective details around them happen again before November. However there are numerous down ballot candidates spread all across the country who don't receive Secret Service protection or really much any kind of

[00:18:32] protection at all apart from I don't know maybe some sort of a state police escort or if they're able to fund some sort of private security. How do you see the threat across the country for

[00:18:45] those candidates who aren't quite as big a deal, who don't receive a Secret Service protection? Well in the work that I've done on 2024 election violence that is that is the you're putting your kind of finger on the issue that is really challenging, really frightening.

[00:19:02] Counterterrorism analysts, I can't remember if I mentioned this on the last show but counterterrorism analysts look at threats usually as a factor or an equation of intense capability and opportunity. So let's break those three down. Part of the challenge with

[00:19:18] counterterrorism in the US is that capability is always ever present. It is not hard to get a weapon of terrorism in the United States and that was the case here in Pennsylvania.

[00:19:29] Intent I would argue is heightened and that's the story of my book, that's the story of the left-wing violence that we've seen. We have a higher intent of violence in the United States. The interesting thing about this case, the Trump assassination cases,

[00:19:42] that intent doesn't even need to be political. It appears that this is not a political act in itself so you don't even need the ideology to have the intent of violence. So intent is higher, capability is ever present but the thing that is really frightening,

[00:19:57] the real challenge and this is where your question comes in is the volume of opportunity to conduct an act. It is obviously campaigning on a massive scale is a problem. The conventions are really difficult to protect. You have Trump's court process

[00:20:15] which is going to be an X factor. As we get into the voting itself, you're going to have ballot locations, voting locations all over the country. You're going to have voting locations all over

[00:20:24] the country and then in the days after the election, the weeks after depending on how it ends, basically every political location, every politician becomes a possible target of the conspiracy theory as we saw on January 6th. And so from a defensive standpoint,

[00:20:41] you are dealing with an absolutely enormous volume of opportunity for violence that in my mind is basically impossible to defend against. So if somebody's got the intent to commit violence, they are going to have the opportunity and they're going to have the capability

[00:21:00] and I don't know how you protect at that widespread of a level. That's why in the aftermath of this incident, the narrative immediately has been or the counterterrorism recommendation immediately has been we need to turn the temperature down. We need to find some way of getting intent

[00:21:16] to violence down and politicians need to be driving that effort. I don't know if you would agree here but Saturday night for a little bit, I was seriously concerned that we were at the start of something

[00:21:29] very ugly and very dangerous. And we still are but in a way I've been kind of heartened with a few exceptions as to how kind of mature the response has been across the board. I don't know

[00:21:44] if you feel the same way. I do but I think it's been aided by two things. One is the luck that we have that the president did not get assassinated and I think the reason he didn't

[00:21:58] is luck exclusively and two is the fact that we didn't get more clarity on motive at an earlier point that could have been really disastrous. Two scenarios I'll give you. One is of course,

[00:22:12] if this is a far left extremist who's a true Biden supporter who's assassination president because he believes that he's a mortal threat to America. The other one is I mean imagine if this was a

[00:22:25] ISIS terrorist who'd come through the southern border. If either of those two scenarios happen, you are dealing with a major, major issue and we would have had multiple reaction attacks already, I think. It's because everybody's kind of yes, you're right, mature. Everybody's kind of feeling

[00:22:44] out what we're supposed to be doing here. The politicians have kind of said okay, stop, dial the temperature down. Let's be cool here. Let's relax. That has helped but I do think we were one or two little diversions off that path from a major problem and we might

[00:23:07] still be in that space. Well, let's talk about that. I mean so Donald Trump has always been seen as a messianic figure by a core group of his supporters, right? That he's sort of God's

[00:23:19] anointed leader to lead the United States. Now you have an event where but for a slight difference in the breeze at that moment, a few millimeters, if he hadn't turned his head in the direction that

[00:23:34] he turned it at that exact moment, it could have been, it would have been an incredibly different outcome. So now they have something on video that they can look to correct or not

[00:23:46] that is the hand of God saving this man. He is preordained destined to lead this country and that of course then, I don't know, does that then push them further down the kind of radicalization

[00:23:57] pipeline that in the event that Trump say loses in November that they are more likely to resort to violence in response? Possibly. I mean I think we would see a violent reaction either way

[00:24:08] if he loses. I'm not a religious person, Matt. So my counter-arguments to what you're saying tend to be very simplistic and I'm sure not very learned but nobody's yet explained to me why God got on the roof, how somebody else tragically lost their life. There's a lot of

[00:24:32] flaws in the theory that says that God redirected a bullet I think starting with the bullet was fired in the first place but I understand that I'm a little bit unsophisticated in that regard. Yeah, you and I are not the type of people that would see it in

[00:24:47] this way but plenty people do. Including prominent politicians by the way. I think Marco Rubio tweeted something to that effect so it's a narrative and that is the grip that he has.

[00:24:59] He has a messianic figure and I have to say that picture of him standing up, looking through the Secret Service with the American Flag in the background it is incredibly, incredibly powerful. I mean that picture will be hanging in the National Archives someday. Yeah.

[00:25:19] It is, that is quite an image and that will be the image that defines this, that might be the image that defines this political moment. Yeah, absolutely. You've done

[00:25:29] a lot of press in the past few days and of course I thank you for making time for our little outfit here. Is there anything in the commentary, in the questions you're getting, anything that's being missed that you think needs to be discussed? Goodness, what a great question.

[00:25:49] I would repeat something I said earlier. I do wish we, within this space that we're in where everybody's talking about bipartisanship and trying to dial the temperature down, I do wish we had a bit more sober and a bit more pointed conversation about how this all began.

[00:26:07] I saw a tweet the day of the attack from I think a right wing or a far right influencer on Twitter on X where they said, can we please stop talking about January 6th now? The narrative being,

[00:26:23] you made such a big deal of this and it was never a big deal and now we see what real political violence is. I would go the exact opposite way. I think we should be talking

[00:26:33] about January 6th much more because what happened on January 6th is you had a violent terrorist attack that targeted the US, the seat of our government and multiple assassination attempts on that day that were also pretty close to succeeding. And in the aftermath, you've had

[00:26:47] people convicted of felonies including seditious conspiracy, which has arguably the most serious charge in our country, right, intent to overthrow the government. And in the three and a half years since, the narrative about that day has been twisted on the far right to say that the individuals

[00:27:03] who committed those crimes are political prisoners, they're martyrs, they're heroes. Most recently, they were described by the former president as warriors. So not just admitting that they were violent but celebrating the violence, praising the violence, linizing the violence. We need to

[00:27:20] dial the temperature down. President Biden's comment about the bullseye was a poor comment. I'm particularly concerned about existential language, right? Both parties are trafficking freely in this narrative of if we don't win this election, there will never be another election.

[00:27:40] All of those things are dangerous but to really get to the bottom of this issue of violent rhetoric and division and polarization, we need to talk about the violent incidents that have already happened in this country and how figures within the MAGA movement have reacted to those

[00:28:00] incidents. I can tell you for a fact, Matt, and this is opinion but also professional analysis. I can tell you for a fact if the roles were reversed and an assassination attempt

[00:28:13] targeted Joe Biden and a bullet grazed his ear, the narrative on the right would not be we need to dial the rhetoric down. You would not have a video of President Trump saying dial the temperature

[00:28:24] down because of course, and this is not a counterfactual. We've been in this situation before when a violent attack was happening and his vice president was being threatened violently. He did not put a video down until he was forced to. So we need to have this conversation in

[00:28:40] a more sober way and really think about how do we push the people in that movement, the people who now realize very, very intimately what violence looks like when it targets you. Those are the people who need to have a really real reflection and introspection about the kind

[00:28:56] of country that they are contributing to creating. I want to ask you something because I even thought this Saturday night, I don't think it was in our discussion about your book at least that was recorded. I think this came up in sort of conversation between you and I

[00:29:10] beforehand that you had said something, as I recall, something to the effect of you predicting or at least sort of envisioning that someone within Donald Trump's circle would be attacked because they're not far enough to the right. Sort of almost like Mike Pence almost being attacked

[00:29:30] in the Capitol on January 6th. That would be a moment that sort of wakes up the rest of the right elected leaders within that space to go, oh, this is gone too far. The leopards are now sort of

[00:29:43] eating our faces and we need to dial it back. Of course, we don't know that that was Crooks' motivations in this instance. But do you read the kind of seriousness of the response that

[00:29:56] elected Republican officials have had to this? Is this maybe somewhat what you said to me, how you sort of envisioned it might go down? Does that make sense what I'm asking? It does. It's an opportunity, I think. It's an opportunity for that. So let me dial back and

[00:30:13] say yes, the assumption in the aftermath of what happened is that this was a far left attack. That was not necessarily my assumption because again, the data points to the fact that the

[00:30:23] violent far right is a far more serious threat than the violent far left, including against themselves. Including against themselves. So you look at January 6th, for example, that's primarily you look at

[00:30:34] Trump's speech at the White House at the ellipses. He says in his speech, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania and give the Republicans the courage, not the Democrats, give the Republicans the courage. It's an act against Republicans. And so I absolutely thought it was possible

[00:30:47] that this was somebody who was targeting him because he was insufficiently extreme. There are plenty of policies within the Trump orbit, gun policy, abortion policy, trade policy, where he is not particularly right wing, where he has quite moderate views. And on the gun issue,

[00:31:07] especially, I totally believed it was possible that somebody would target him based on that, based on his views on the gun policy, based on comments he recently made about bump stocks, for example. So we'll see what happens now. I mean, we'll see if this is a realization

[00:31:20] that they are contributing to this climate of division and polarization, and whether that kind of might encourage them to pump the brakes on this. I don't know. To give a couple of other

[00:31:33] examples of when this has happened, Jim, opponents of Jim Jordan in the Speak of the House race were targeted with violent threats. Nikki Haley requested Secret Service Protection based on violent threats. A prominent member of Congress who just resigned, a very prominent,

[00:31:50] very talented member of Congress just resigned. Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin based on threats to his family after he had voted against the impeachment of Majorca, so I'm not sure if they were related or not. But we have multiple, multiple incidents of Republicans in this country

[00:32:08] facing a deluge of violent threats. And there's nothing inherently protecting Trump from that. One area where he's deeply unpopular is among, or at least where he causes confusion is among neo-Nazis because Trump is basically, I think this is true,

[00:32:31] he's the most proximate US president to the Jewish community ever. He has Jewish family, his tortures Jewish. That is something that causes great controversy as well. So I absolutely believed in the media aftermath. This could be a far right extremist who's targeting him for his

[00:32:47] insufficiently extreme policies on something or because of some other factors. So we'll see if that proves to be the case now. January 6th should have been the case, right? When Mike Pence was targeted and other politicians on the right were barricaded in their offices facing

[00:33:05] a far right mob that was seeking them out, that should have been the moment where they said, we need to dial the temperature down. It wasn't. They went the other way. So I'm not sure.

[00:33:15] Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I know you have to go soon. So we should probably wrap this up. You've done, like I said earlier, you've done tons of press in the last couple of days.

[00:33:23] I was trying to frantically catch up on it this morning before I talk to you. I got to most of it, not all of it. So I'm sure there's probably some things that you've said that

[00:33:33] I've missed. We'll have links to a lot of that public stuff in the show notes and your social media there as well. Always a great follow. Jacob Ware, thanks for coming back on Secrets and Spies. It's always great to have you on. Of course. Anytime. Although, Matt,

[00:33:47] I hope next time let's leave it a bit longer in between because hopefully there's nothing to talk about. I know. Yeah. We'll have a retrospective. Remember when all this stuff was going on in the election and we got through it? Well, it's one thing I've

[00:34:00] said a couple of times is historians will answer this question whether this is the end of political violence in the 2024 cycle or whether it's the middle. It's not the beginning. We've already

[00:34:09] seen violent plots. It's not the beginning of the violence. Will it be the middle or will it be the end of political violence in the 2024 cycle? My suspicion is it's going to be closer

[00:34:18] to the middle than the end and we can sit down together in 2025 and see if that prediction is right. Hopefully it's wrong, but we will see. Yes, we shall see. We shall see. All right, my friend, thank you as always. Anytime. Thank you so much.

[00:35:07] Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.