A Tip Sheet to Help Decipher American Politics

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Damien Cave, the Australia bureau chief.

I had just passed through metal detectors at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Monday when I heard one of the security guards tell a colleague that the man who tried to assassinate former President Trump was an “antifa extremist.” It was a baseless claim, drawn from social media posts that falsely identified an Italian sports journalist as the shooter.

And for me, it was a sharp reminder: Welcome to America, land of divisions, home to extreme polarization and factual challenges.

I’ve been here for the past three weeks, for vacation and meetings with sources and colleagues. Coming back to the United States from Australia is always a bit jarring — the pace of news and life seems faster; the shopping aisles have more forms of processed foods; and people’s voices seem louder (mine included).

This time, though, the experience has been especially overwhelming as the American presidential campaign hit a stretch of violence, discord and profound uncertainty. I can’t claim to have any special insight or ability to explain what’s going on — when I joked with a politics editor that I was confused, he quickly noted that I was not alone — but I figured it might be useful to share a few pieces of journalism, mostly but not exclusively from The Times, that could be useful in the search for understanding and context. This is not a comprehensive list, of course, but a short, somewhat arbitrary tip sheet for those who (like me) may feel a bit confounded by recent events.

Trump Shooting

Along with rank speculation and misinformation about the shooter’s motives, there has been a lot of news coverage about the shooting on Saturday of Mr. Trump. But for the most comprehensive look at what went wrong in terms of security, watch The Times’s video investigation, which uses video and careful analysis to explain what happened, minute-by-minute.

For analysis of what the shooting could mean for American politics, don’t miss this article by Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, who wrote that almost immediately after the shots were fired, “Fingers were pointed, conspiracy theories advanced and a country already bristling with animosity fractured even more.”