Was that social media post of Donald Trump playing golf after getting shot accurate? We fact-checked it
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The claim: Image shows Trump playing golf after an assassination attempt
A July 14 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows former President Donald Trump behind the wheel of a golf cart.
“Imagine getting shot at 7pm and still making your 9am tee time,” reads text above the image.
The post was liked more than 40,000 times in four days. Similar posts appeared on X, formerly Twitter, including one from conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza.
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Our rating: False
The image does not show Trump playing golf after the assassination attempt. It was taken in 2022 at one of Trump’s golf courses in Virginia.
Image shows Trump at Virginia golf in 2022
Trump traveled to his residence at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, after surviving a July 13 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, according to multiple news reports.
But the image in the Instagram post doesn’t show the former president on a golf course the next day. Instead, it dates to Sept. 12, 2022, when an Associated Press photographer captured the image of Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
There are no credible news reports of Trump playing golf the day after the assassination attempt. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from USA Today.
Trump wasn’t at his golf club for long. He was there for the first half of July 14, the day after the shooting, before he left to attend the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He made his first public appearance since the shooting at the convention on July 15. He has since appeared at each night of the convention with a bandage over his right ear, which was injured in the assassination attempt.
Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination for president on July 18.
USA Today reached out to social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Reuters also debunked the claim.
Our fact-check sources:
The Wall Street Journal, July 15, Trump Returns to New Jersey as Planned
CBS News, July 14, Trump recovering in New Jersey after assassination attempt
ABC News (YouTube), July 14, Donald Trump arrives in New Jersey after assassination attempt
Associated Press, Sept. 12, 2022, Justice Dept. OK with 1 Trump pick for Mar-a-Lago arbiter
USA TODAY, July 14, Donald Trump travels to Milwaukee after shocking attack, prepares to tap a running mate and claim nomination
USA TODAY is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, which requires a demonstrated commitment to nonpartisanship, fairness and transparency. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Meta. Golfweek is part of the USA Today Network.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Was that social media post of Donald Trump playing golf after getting shot accurate? We fact-checked it
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Why Some of the Loudest Cheers for Trump Are Coming From Silicon Valley
Story by Lauren Hirsch, Michael J. de la Merced and Sarah Kessler
• 3h • 9 min read
Correction: July 21, 2024
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the chair of the F.T.C. She is Lina Khan, not Lina Kahn.
How did the Democrats lose Silicon Valley? Or did they?
If you read the headlines this week about Elon Musk, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and other influential figures in technology moving to support former President Trump’s re-election, it appeared a sea change had taken place in Silicon Valley, long considered a Democrat hotbed.
The loudest donors in Silicon Valley are promoting Trump at a time when the tech world as a whole is ascending in Washington, with billionaires using their ballooning wealth and media foothold to exert influence. Their voices are made all the more prominent amid the conspicuous neutrality of Big Tech leaders like the Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai and the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, who are possibly afraid of invoking Trump’s ire and employee backlash.
It wasn’t always this way. But big technology’s relationship with government, once symbiotic, attracted new scrutiny from Silicon Valley’s libertarian masses after social media companies tamped down on misinformation, drawing accusations that they were ceding to an overstepping government.
For some, the infractions were more personal. Musk was brushed off by President Biden over his anti-union stance and excluded from an electric vehicle event at the White House in 2021. Now Musk, who has voted for Democrats in the past and has said he created Tesla to help one of Biden’s biggest ambitions, preventing climate change, has become among the party’s biggest detractors.
Then there are issues in California, like rising taxes and a crime wave in San Francisco; the anti-woke movement; and regulatory battles over antitrust, crypto, and artificial intelligence that have high stakes in Silicon Valley.
The question now is whether Silicon Valley’s Trump boosters are heralding a larger shift in the tech world, or if they’re merely demonstrating that their voices are more powerful in politics than ever.
Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic views run deep. Peter Thiel and David Sacks, two of Trump’s biggest supporters in tech, co-authored “The Diversity Myth” in 1995, arguing against “the extreme focus on racism.” At the time it was a fringe view in politics, and tech was a relatively small industry.
But the Republican Party now reflects some of the tech industry’s long-held libertarian views, making fighting “woke equity” a pillar of its politics, while Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, have pushed for laws promoting diversity.
At the same time, tech’s influence in politics has skyrocketed. While Thiel’s $1.6 million check to Trump drew headlines in 2016, it looks like chump change compared to Musk’s recently reported pledge to donate $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC. Venture capitalists have built up huge followings on podcasts, newsletters and on X, which is owned by Musk.
Tech is tired of being cast as the villain. As founders became billionaires, the industry became, in its view, a punching bag for regulators. Senator Elizabeth Warren has led a charge against cryptocurrency. Biden’s top antitrust enforcers — Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice — have zeroed in on tech acquisitions, limiting venture capital firms’ ability to sell a company.
But at the Republican National Convention this week, Wall Street, not technology, was the target of choice.
Jason Calacanis, who hosts a popular podcast with fellow Trump supporters and start-up investors Chamath Palihapitiya, Sacks and David Friedberg, wrote in a post on X during the convention: “The truth is, the left has dug into an anti-entrepreneur and anti-tech position for over a decade, while the GOP has positioned Trump 2.0 to be pro-innovation and pro-founder.”
Crypto is chief on the agenda. The crypto industry has already spent millions attacking Representative Katie Porter of California, a crypto critic, and in tight elections in Ohio and Montana. It’s expected to spend millions more on the presidential race. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose venture capital firm has bet big on crypto, told employees this week the Biden administration has “basically subverted rule of law to attack crypto industry,” as they disclosed plans to put their money behind Trump. (The venture capitalist Mark Cuban has speculated investors might see a further benefit in supporting Trump’s likely inflationary agenda.)
“Their mortal enemy is Gary Gensler at the S.E.C.,” said Boris Feldman, the head of the technology, media and telecom practice at the law firm Freshfields, referring to the chair of the securities regulator. “If you’re a billionaire, what is it to you to give $100 million if you think that will save your business?”
They don’t see risk in publicly backing Trump. While Biden has spoken harshly about “corporate greed,” Trump has a history of lashing out at specific companies. Many of Trump’s loudest supporters in tech, including Musk, endorsed him after he survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally, which seemed an immediate boon for his campaign.
“If they have taken such a large, huge public stance against Biden at this point, they obviously think one of two things is true, maybe both,” Julie Samuels, chief executive of TechNYC, a nonprofit industry group, told DealBook. “One, there’s literally no chance he can win. Or number two, even if he wins, it can’t get any worse for them than it is right now.”
The bigger picture of Silicon Valley looks less red. The vast majority of tech companies’ rank and file, as well as power brokers, still vote Democrat. A poll by The Information, a technology focused publication, found a majority of its readers plan to vote for Biden. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s co-founder, is one of Biden’s most influential supporters. Mark Pincus, the former C.E.O. of Zynga, said this week he originally supported Biden in this election because he “thought that a second Trump presidency is risky.” He noted, among other things, Trump “has been oddly positive about dictators like Vladimir Putin.” (Pincus, who bemoaned the Democrats’ progressive policies, also urged Biden to move aside for another Democratic candidate.)
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures who hosted a fundraiser for Biden in May, told DealBook that he thinks the perception of Silicon Valley’s politics has been skewed by a handful of people whose calculus is: “‘anyone supporting crypto,’ ‘less regulation makes me more money,’ and ‘Trump opinions can be bought.’”
“VC’s who have a large megaphone should not be confused as representing all of Silicon Valley,” Khosla said. — Lauren Hirsch
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Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination. Trump was formally nominated at the party’s national convention, a week after surviving an assassination attempt. His former rivals formally endorsed him at the convention in Milwaukee and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, delivered a speech that demonstrated his commitment to a similarly nationalist approach to the economy and business.
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A return to form for investment banking
Deal makers have been promising for some time that their business was poised to recover. Results from Wall Street giants’ most recent quarter suggests that may finally be happening.
Five of the biggest investment banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, reported $8.25 billion in investment banking fees for the second quarter, according to data compiled by LSEG. That’s the highest level for those companies since March 2022.
Bank of America said that investment banking fees for the quarter were up 29 percent year-on-year.
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What is D.E.I. without the ‘E’?
SHRM — also known as the Society for Human Resource Management — announced last week it would drop the “E” from the acronym it uses to describe its D.E.I. practices, and ever since, its chief executive’s phone has been ringing nonstop. “We’ve heard from both sides, and I would be absolutely dishonest if I didn’t say we had people who felt very passionately,” said Johnny C. Taylor, leader of the trade organization for H.R. executives. A LinkedIn post announcing the change has accumulated almost 1,000 comments.
The “E” in D.E.I. stands for “equity.” SHRM will now instead use the acronym “I&D,” which stands for inclusion and diversity. Many pegged the change as part of a recent retreat from D.E.I. programs amid a backlash and legal threats from the anti-woke movement. But Taylor says that’s not the case.
Instead, he says the word “equity” has become a distraction. “What we are hearing from people, employers and employees alike, is that the ‘E,’ when you go in to have a conversation, for an hour, 45 minutes, there’s a debate, about legality: What does it mean? Is it fair? And it’s a de-railer,” he said, adding, “the work can’t get done.”
D.E.I. hasn’t always been the standard acronym. SHRM spoke about its “diversity” programs before adding the E in the 2010s, Taylor said. Alida Miranda-Wolff, the founder and C.E.O. of a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging consulting firm called Ethos, said many organizations added the “E” to their acronyms around this time. “Social movements were growing in 2016, 2017, 2018, and this led to a lot of employee activism saying we can’t really achieve diversity and inclusion in organizations if we don’t address the systemic inequities that exist in the world,” she said.
“Equity” typically refers to steps employers take to level the playing field. Miranda-Wolff argues that’s a vital part of making workplaces more inclusive: “Equity requires discipline practices around things like, ‘am I auditing and making sure that people are not being paid differently because of who they are?’” she said. “So eliminating equity actually eliminates quite a bit of accountability.”
But can changing the acronym create a more productive conversation? That’s Taylor’s hope. He said that D.E.I. programs haven’t worked and need a rethink. “You can’t just keep doing the same thing,” he said.
Anne Chow, the former chief executive of AT&T Business, is the author of an upcoming book called “Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion.” She says she chose to focus on inclusivity specifically because her definition of the term, as a leadership capability, is bigger than it is often interpreted in D.E.I., where the discussion revolves largely around issues of gender and race.
At the same time, she said the arguments swirling around “equity” aren’t necessarily a good reason to avoid the “E” in D.E.I.: “With change and transformation comes, by definition, discomfort,” she said.
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Elon Musk reportedly plans to donate around $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Elon Musk reportedly plans to donate around $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC. © Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
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