To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in America, Christopher Rufo is considered part of it. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the tony midtown think tank that holds black-tie galas; he recently enjoyed a polite sit-down interview with Ezra Klein on Klein’s massively popular New York Times podcast; and he has over 120,000 subscribers on Substack, a publishing platform whose owners have celebrated Rufo as one of their “best” political writers who readers can “trust.” 

Trump Asserts (Without Evidence, of Course) That the Biden Administration Tried to Murder Him

One thing I would not have expected President Donald J. Trump to be spending his time on with just weeks to go until Election Day is creating new conspiracy theories about Tom Crooks, who shot at him in the summer of 2024 from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania. But here we are.

The president yesterday asserted on Truth Social that Butler “was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed.”

That the assassination attempt was the work of Trump’s political enemies is a baseless claim that the White House has leaned into for some time. In early January, the White House published a revisionist history of Jan. 6 that, TPM’s Hunter Walker noted at the time, included the following line: “Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him … President Trump emerges triumphant.”

The website suggested, without any shred of evidence, that what happened in Butler was the work of the “Deep State” — the catch-all term for any government bureaucrat who might be behaving in a disfavored way, from slowing deregulation to, apparently, plotting a presidential candidate’s murder.

But Trump himself blaming it directly on a “Democrat Plot” takes the claim to another level. He then went on to castigate former FBI Director Chris Wray, claiming materials about the assassination were “missing, altered, corrupted or gone” and declaring Wray should “pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt.”

It’s unclear what Trump is gesturing toward here, if anything. The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” was provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.

Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.

FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Among the few things we do know about Crooks, in fact, was that his desire to create a spectacle appeared nonpartisan. He went to the gun range a lot, and didn’t talk very much. He googled the dates of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He researched school shooters, and Lee Harvey Oswald, to whom he is now often compared.

“Neither Oswald nor Crooks were the kind of people who make history, not like Kennedy and Trump,” wrote Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, around Butler’s second anniversary. “But somehow, these two losers found a way to write their names into the fabric of American lore. Something greater had to be at work. There had to be a conspiracy — who was behind it and why would have to be filled in later.”

A significant portion — 24% — of Americans now believe Butler was staged, polls suggest. An additional 32% don’t know what to think. These conspiracy theorists, however, tend not to believe it was the work of Democrats. Rather, they think it was a plot orchestrated by Trump himself.

Bigotry and Corruption

As Republican senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents or opted not to run again, some reporters at news outlets that cover Capitol Hill closely rubbed their hands together, predicting that now Trump would really have a problem on his hands. The results have been … underwhelming. Honestly kind of lame. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) red lines are confusing, shifting, and often meaningless. Same — but even more so — for Bill Cassidy (R-LA). John Cornyn (R-TX) too.

But, despite the lack of a substantive shift in GOP legislating, it has been interesting to see these senators critique their own party with insiders’ knowledge.

• Here’s John Cornyn, speaking to veteran Hill reporter Igor Bobic about racist tweets by Texas candidate Bo French and all the Nazi staffers in the GOP: “I think too many people are tolerating conduct that in the past would have been disqualifying when it comes to politics, and what’s happened, I think people’s sort of public standards have eroded to where a lot of things that, like I said, that would not have been tolerated before, or normalized.”
• He continues: “Some of the anti-Semitism, some of the bigotry like Bo French’s comments, and some of the corruption, and I think those are those are the death knell for a political party.” Sounds right! Except for the “death knell” part — plenty of political movements worldwide (and through U.S. history) have built their ascendancy on hate.
• Josh Kovensky has a look at the imbroglio around French’s racist and anti-immigrant posts, which is somewhat confusing, as he’s been doing this for months. More broadly, the Texas GOP has built its midterm strategy around fear-mongering about Indian-Americans and Muslim immigrants.

Chickpea fries? Yes! Panisses are an irresistible snack famously served in the Provence region of France. Similar to regular fries, they’re crisp and golden on the outside, but with pillowy-soft interiors that remind me of creamy polenta.

Nutritionally, they’re superior to regular fries, offering a hearty source of protein, fiber and monounsaturated fat. Like French fries, they need to be sufficiently salted to be seriously amazing. I love them with a creamy dipping sauce, like my Creamy Basil Sauce.

Like its cousins, socca and farinata, panisses are made with the simplest of ingredients: chickpea flour, water, olive oil, and salt and pepper. I worked hard on this recipe and developed two different methods for making panisses—traditional pan-fried and baked. You’ll find the full rundown and a short instructional video below.

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Are you familiar with socca? If not, please let me introduce you! It’s basically a rich, savory and salted chickpea flour pancake cooked in piping hot olive oil. The edges are crispy and chewy, the insides are flaky and tender, and the bottom is lacy and golden. It is just so good. You’ll have to try it.

Socca is a street food popular in Nice, France, with origins dating back centuries (it’s closely related to Italian farinata). I had the chance to try the real deal on our honeymoon, and I’m obsessed with this homemade version.

To make socca, you’ll need a bag of chickpea flour (I like to use Bob’s Red Mill, which is available in well-stocked grocery stores). You probably have the remaining ingredients already—olive oil, water, salt, pepper and cumin. That’s it! You’ll find step-by-step photos and a brief cooking video below, followed by the recipe.

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The post Socca appeared first on Cookie and Kate.

Welcome to the cake that has terrified me the most. You see, I have two favorite cakes. The first is my Strawberry Summer Stack Cake, the layered strawberry, cream, and butter cake version of the Strawberry Summer Cake in Smitten Kitchen Keepers. The second is the Opera Cake (Gâteau Opéra), a stacked and striped dessert with thin almond cake layers soaked in espresso syrup, chocolate ganache, and a rich espresso buttercream. The difference between the first cake and the second is that the second recipe was never going to happen.

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It’s Bastille Day—and also Euro Summer week here at Food52—so we’re leaning all the way in with a roundup of our favorite French recipes to help you fête like you're picnicking beneath the Eiffel Tower (or at least pretending to at your dining table).

From classics Julia Child would definitely approve of (hi, beef bourguignon and crème brûlée) to a few breezier, “lazy girl” picks that rely on good butter, flaky pastry, and fresh herbs, this lineup has something for every level of ambition. There’s plenty of cheese, a generous amount of wine, and more than one dish with an egg on top—just as the French intended.

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Dinner in Paris generally starts at 8 pm, especially in restaurants, and I get ravenously hungry between lunch and dinner.

Parisians do dine rather late – often not until 9:30 pm or later, and that’s an awfully long stretch. So French people visit their local pâtisserie for an afternoon snack, known as le goûter, although nowadays Parisians often call it le snack.

Le snack is often nothing more than a buttery financier or a tender madeleine. At home, French children at home are often given a split piece of baguette with a bar of dark chocolate tucked inside to keep them happy until dinner.

But my snack of choice is invariably les chouquettes: Cream puffs covered with crunchy nuggets of sugar, then baked until golden-brown. The eggy, pillowy puffs are piled uneventfully behind the counter and sold in crisp little paper sacks, each one holding about 100 grams, or about 10. I found that engaging the counter person in a few words of niceties will often mean that before the ends of the bag are twisted shut, an extra puff will be tossed in as a little gift for l’américain.

Nothing is easier to make than chouquettes and you can bake them right with ingredients you likely already have on hand. The only thing you’ll need to find is pearl sugar, which gives the puffs their signature crunch. Some tell me you can buy it at Ikea stores, or you can find it at King Arthur or on Amazon. If you have sugar cubes, you can crush those up into rough chunks and use those, although they’re not quite the same. And if you’re like me, and like chocolate, you could press some chocolate chips into a few of the puffs before baking.

This is one of my favorite of all French snacks and I can polish away a whole bag, or tray, in no time. These are best made and eaten right away, or later the same day – if they last that long!

You might be asking yourself, Deb, why are you publishing a lemon tart recipe when the greatest lemon tart of all time already exists on your site? Okay, I’m embellishing a little, but I do really love the whole lemon tart and its sister recipe, the whole lemon bars in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook every bit as much as you — the simplicity, the complexity, the surprise of it all.

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A dozen years ago I shared my mother-in-law’s recipe for apple sharlotka (which family just calls “apple thing”), a lightly sweetened apple dessert that’s as much a thick crêpe as it is a cake. It’s got a short ingredient list and is the kind of thing you make on a whim. It’s so rustic and simple, I honestly didn’t expect it to cause a ruckus — it’s not apple pie, crumb cake, or even my mom’s doorstop of an apple cake — but you surprised me. It has over 1000 comments and I’ve seen variations on it all over the internet. So where does this come in? I think of this as Sharlotka 2.0: Fancy Pants Edition.

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