For the Washington Post, David Ignatius spoke to former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin about his decision to resign from Congress in April. “The story turns on a gruesome moment the night of Dec. 30, 2023, in Gallagher’s hometown of Green Bay,” Ignatius wrote. “The local sheriff had received an anonymous call claiming that Gallagher had been shot in the face and that his wife and two young daughters, 3 and 1, had been taken hostage. A SWAT team arrived at the house to find Gallagher and his family safe. His anguished wife, Anne, somehow had the presence of mind to ask the SWAT team to take their shoes off before they searched the home. But for the young couple, trying to build a family in the town where they were born and raised, the cruel hoax was a deeply upsetting event. For Gallagher, it proved to be a breaking point. … ‘I signed up for this, but my family didn’t,’ he told me in one of a series of interviews. ‘That was a moment when we felt we needed to make a change and take a step back from politics.’”

TMD