The story of the week is the continued fallout over Sunday's attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in West Palm Beach, Florida—the second near-assassination of the 45th president in a span of roughly two months. That this has now happened again ought to thoroughly shock and appall what remains of the collective American political conscience. Let us be as clear as possible: This is not OK. It is abominable. Indeed, the day this sort of behavior becomes normalized in our societal bloodstream—and Americans begin brushing off attempted assassinations of their political rivals as if this sort of thing is no different than any other routine political fare—is the day that America becomes a full-fledged banana republic. Perhaps we are already there.

We need accountability, and we need accountability now. To wit: How the hell did the U.S. Secret Service allow this to happen yet again—especially at a venue, Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach, that the 45th president is known to frequent when he is in town? And perhaps above all, will Democrats and their corporate media enablers finally—finally—look in the mirror and tone down the rhetoric a bit? I won't be holding my breath for it. The truth is this fractured nation desperately needs some great unifying statesmen to rise up once again. As President Abraham Lincoln so eloquently concluded in his stirring Second Inaugural Address, just over a month before his tragic assassination: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in [and] to bind up the nation's wounds." Would that we might see another Lincoln emerge in our own time today.

Another story I am tracking is the astonishing operation that Israel's Mossad executed on Tuesday, which saw 4,000–5,000 pagers in Hezbollah jihadists' pockets simultaneously detonate. It is one of the most remarkable spy agency operations in recent global memory—a successful operation that will likely still be studied decades from now by spooks across the globe. The blunt reality, as I posted on X, is that Mossad desperately needed something huge like this to try to regain its once-formidable reputation after all the manifest security failures of October 7, 2023. The number of Hezbollah fatalities was reportedly 12, with hundreds more jihadists currently in critical condition. But specific numbers aside, make no mistake about it: Israel sent a clear message, and Hezbollah—whose jihadists are now disproportionately eunuchs—received that message. We will see how it affects the raging war on Israel's northern front, where tens of thousands of civilians sadly remain displaced.

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Our highlighted Newsweek op-eds from the past week include selections from Robert Greenway, Clare Morell, Bjorn Lomborg, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, and Jonathan Tobin.

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