Today is Father’s Day. I’m spending it in Canada with my two children who are rising juniors in high school; tomorrow we’ll do a university visit, then spend a couple of days with my parents, then do another university visit, then head back to the U.S.

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, a gunman posing as a police officer entered the home of Melissa Wortman, the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Minnesota House (which was split 67-67 between the two parties, with the Republican leader currently serving as Speaker under a power-sharing arrangement), and assassinated her and her husband. The gunman then went to the home of a prominent Minnesota Senate Democrat, John Hoffman, and shot both him and his wife several times, although both survived.

The suspected assassin, a 57-year-old white male, spent the rest of the weekend at large but reportedly was captured after sunset tonight, with the first reports breaking I was sitting down to write this post. By Saturday morning authorities knew who they were looking for and had found his abandoned vehicle, with a long list of other Minnesota Democratic political targets, and a number of fliers for No Kings Day events. In response, Minnesota authorities cancelled all No Kings Day events in the state, although tens of thousands of people showed up anyways in St. Paul at the Capitol.

More broadly, the No Kings Day protests throughout the country were a success yesterday. Organizers claim total attendance of 5 million, which is probably an exaggeration, but it’s believable that it hit a million. Most major cities had turnout in the high five figures, and there were many gatherings in smaller communities. Oak Park, the Chicago suburb where my older kids live, had about 1,800 people turn out even though it overlapped with the much larger rally going on in downtown Chicago.

Trump’s military parade went off later in the day, although bad weather interfered with some of the plans, and attendance appeared to be extremely underwhelming. That didn’t stop Trump’s chief propagandist, Steven Cheung, from claiming that 250,000 had attended the parade; the real number may be as little as a tenth of that.

In other news, late last week the 2nd Circuit formally refused Trump’s request to have an en banc rehearing of his appeal of the verdict in the Carroll II trial, the one from 2023 where E. Jean Carroll was awarded $5 million in damages. Trump’s appeals in the Carroll I trial, the one from early 2024 where Carroll was awarded a further $83.3 million in damages, continue with the 2nd Circuit scheduled to hear oral arguments on June 24th.