Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees Tuesday, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed new details on a social media account believed to belong to Trump’s attempted assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.

In his opening remarks, Abbate said that the FBI has not yet determined Crooks’s motive, but investigators have discovered a social media account “believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019–2020 timeframe,” when Crooks would have been roughly 15–17 years old.

The activity of the account, which posted over 700 comments, Abbate said, “appear[s] to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and [is] described as extreme in nature.”

While stressing that investigators are still working to confirm that the account belonged to Crooks, Abbate said, “We believe it important to share and note it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset.”

If verified, the indications of Crooks’s political extremism would shed light on the would-be assassin’s yet obscure politics; Crooks made a $15 donation to a progressive organization in 2021 but was a registered Republican.

Donald Trump couldn’t come up with a single coherent explanation for why his supporters should also back J.D. Vance.

During an interview on Fox News Monday, host Laura Ingraham pushed Trump to explain his decision to tap Vance despite widespread criticism from Republicans, whom she readily dismissed as longing for “the days of open borders and perpetual war.”

“How do you expect to use him in this campaign, and what can you say to our viewers tonight to reassure them that this was an excellent pick?” Ingraham asked.

“Well, first of all, he’s got tremendous support, and he really does among a certain group of people—people that like families. He made a statement having to do with families,” Trump said. “He’s not against anything, but he loves family. It’s very important to him. He grew up in a very interesting family situation, and he feels family is good.”

INGRAHAM: What can you say to viewers to reassure them that JD Vance was an excellent pick?

TRUMP: He's got tremendous support, and he really does among a certain group of people -- people like like families. He made a statement having to do with families. pic.twitter.com/5XNOoi4oXn

So, that’s Trump’s main selling point to the public on Vance: He was an “excellent pick” because he “feels family is good.”

Setting aside the fact that it’s a canned answer, Trump purposefully presented a gross mischaracterization of Vance’s incendiary comments.

While pronatalism is at the core of many of Vance’s outlandish policy ideas, the Ohio senator is currently facing the most backlash for his claim that Democrats are all “childless cat ladies,” which is presumably the statement Trump was referring to in his answer.

Vance later doubled down on this comment, saying that Democrats had become “anti-family,” and “anti-children.”

CNN reported Monday that Vance has made multiple disparaging remarks about childless Americans in the past, calling Democrats without kids “childless sociopaths.” On a podcast in 2020, Vance said that America’s “leadership class” was “more sociopathic” than those with children, resulting in a “less mentally stable” country.

The reason Trump actually picked Vance has nothing to do with families at all: According to Trump’s advisers, Vance was picked to appeal to white men.

Yet another video of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has resurfaced, and unfortunately for him, he explicitly said in it that racism helped elect Donald Trump president.

Mother Jones reports that in February 2017, Vance gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics as part of a series called “America in the Trump Era” after his book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller.

Discussing the 2016 presidential election, journalist Alex Kotlowitz asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”

Vance gave an answer that seems surprising today.

“Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons,” Vance responded.

In a newly uncovered video from 2017, JD Vance says, "Some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons." He goes on to say that the alt-right and Steve Bannon—but not Trump—helped make the 2016 election "hyper-racialized." pic.twitter.com/pPlJ7uNW5h

Vance couched his answer by saying he didn’t think racism was the main motivator for Trump voters, but jobs were. But he did say that the 2016 election was “hyper-racialized,” and he blamed conservative extremists.

“The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like Richard Spencer and the alt-right,” Vance said. “It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty........

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