Hello from the breakfast room of an aggressively bland mid-range hotel somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard. I passed on some suspiciously neon eggs in favor of a bowl of Corn Flakes and a limp cinnamon roll.

For obvious reasons, I’m not able to get specific about where the Ruiz campaign is spending the weekend. Members of the press who are traveling with Ruiz (and, I think, Grantham) have been asked not to post on socials for the next few days, because there’s evidence that suggests Wednesday’s attack was made possible in part by location metadata embedded in a couple of photos posted to Twitter. The other reporters — including, surprisingly, the guys from Red State Report and The Blaze — and I are currently in something of a standoff with Ruiz’s team, which has requested we allow them to “scan” our devices for a “security check.” I’m not exactly falling all over myself to hand over my electronics to the people who already force me to take a pregnancy test to cross state lines.

I was headed pretty much straight for the blasts when the bombs went off. Ruiz’s campaign motorcade is famously unsubtle — none of the classic, brooding authority of a snaking line of black SUVs. “Rudy’s Ryde” is a red, white, and blue custom job (remember his hearse?), and it was parked on a public street alongside a couple of “decoys” that I guess nobody thought would basically be a giant “place IEDs here” sign. The things are practically visible from space.

The explosion happened during breakfast, when Ruiz was hosting one of those classic average-folks-in-the-diner confabs. The guys from the Post and the Times still can’t get enough of the idea of Rudy the Revival President as “just a regular guy” story (but let’s be honest, they ate up this angle even before the president was resurrected). But I’ve heard Ruiz’s canned answers (“Not on Rudy Ruiz’s time, and not on Rudy Ruiz’s dime!”) dozens of times by now, so I headed outside hoping to find something more organic than the Ruiz campaign’s carefully curated selection of regular Joe-Schmoes.

A small crowd of Rud Boyz had gathered around Ruiz’s trucks, which were parked about a hundred yards down the little main street. It looked to me like they were negotiating with the security team to try to get closer to the vehicles, I assume to get some high-cred selfies for PatriotWire. It’s lucky they didn’t succeed, or things would have turned tragic instead of merely terrifying.

I thought I’d interview the guys for some local color. I was about a block away when I heard a series of three or four loud pops and bumps, and a cloud of fire and smoke filled the street. I couldn’t see a thing for probably ten or twenty seconds, though I could hear a pealing chorus of screams just fine. A couple of secret service officers emerged, coughing, from the blast area covered in grey dust and muck, and immediately moved into action mode, corralling bystanders into the middle of the street — away from buildings and vehicles that might, I guess, have been harboring more explosives. Thankfully, that was the end of it.

I’m still pretty jumpy. I’m not usually prone to headaches, but I’ve had to gulp down a few ibuprofen before bed the last few nights. And for some reason I’m having nightmares about car dealerships? Being trapped inside, chased, knowing there’s a bomb about to go off and I can’t defuse it. (Cars, sure, but why dealerships? Who knows how the human mind works.)

Three days later, we still don’t have any real answers about who was behind the attack, or if the cops know, they’re not telling. Law enforcement officials have only released the barest details, and local police tell me that Homeland Security has iced them out of the investigation entirely, which seems pretty par for the course. We know there were three separate devices, all placed under or very near Ruiz’s motorcade, timed to go off simultaneously. One of the devices failed to fully trigger (probably why you can see the truck in my photo above, rather than a pile of burnt metal). It’s impossible to know whether the devices were poorly scheduled — whether they were meant to explode while Ruiz was in one of the vehicles — or if this was more of a shock-and-scare or send-a-message thing.

The obvious suspects are fringe members of the #FreezeRuiz movement, which if you read Henry Vane’s latest Atlantic piece, you know is growing more fractious by the day. But I’m not ready to rule out either an inside job or a false flag-type operation from the pro-Ruiz side. I hope that doesn’t make me as bad as some of the conspiracy theorists online, but I’ve spent a lot of time with the Team Ruiz side of things over the last several months, and they are willing to do whatever it takes.

On PatriotWire, Ruiz issued a statement vowing to “hunt down and kill the freedom-haters,” while Grantham’s office released a somewhat more tempered call to “use the full force of the law” to “ensure another inappropriate attack on democracy is unthinkable.”

Makes you wonder what an “appropriate” attack on democracy looks like.

What Else I’m Reading Right Now:

• “Texas school faces trial after punishment of Black student over his hair” (NBC News)
• “FedEx Express announces national service disruption due to severe weather” (Action News 5)
• “Police Arrest Teen Said to Be Linked to Hundreds of Swatting Attacks” (Wired)
• “Texas attorney general requests transgender youths’ patient records from Georgia clinic” (Texas Tribune)

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