U.S. President Joe Biden says “we can’t, we must not go down” the road of political violence in America after Saturday’s attempted assassination of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
In a prime-time national address Sunday, Biden said political passions can run high but “we must never descend into violence.”
Biden said earlier in the day that he had ordered a review of how a young man carrying an AR-15-style rifle managed to get close enough to shoot from a rooftop at Trump, who as a former president has lifetime protection by the U.S. Secret Service, a unit of the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Biden later used the formal setting of the White House Oval Office to address Americans, asking them to lower the political temperature and remember they are neighbours.
“We can’t allow this violence to be normalized. The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down,” he said. “We all have a responsibility to do this.”
“In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box. Now that’s how we do it. At the ballot box. Not with bullets,” Biden said in a speech that was about six minutes long, and carried live by major news networks and the conservative channel Fox News.
Biden garbled a few words and phrases in his address, a regular occurrence for the president, but one in the spotlight after his faltering June 27 debate performance.
Biden’s warning to the electorate came hours after FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said agents have seen increasingly violent rhetoric online since the attack at the Trump rally.
Earlier in the day, the president said he has also directed the U.S. Secret Service to review all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee.
Hours later, Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, the Secret Service’s co-ordinator for the convention, said the weekend attack against Trump did not prompt any changes to the agency’s security plan for the event and that officials “are fully prepared.”
On Sunday Trump travelled to Milwaukee, where Republicans will formally make him their presidential nominee later this week.
“I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and The Republican National Convention, by two days, but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else. Therefore, I will be leaving for Milwaukee, as scheduled,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site on Sunday.
Trump, 78, was holding a campaign rally Saturday in Butler, Pa. – one of the states expected to be most competitive in the Nov. 5 election – when shots rang out, hitting his right ear and streaking his face with blood. His campaign said he was doing well and appeared to have suffered no major injury besides a wound on his upper right ear.
Trudeau says he spoke with Trump on Sunday after shooting, condemned political violence
The FBI identified Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., as the suspect in what it called an attempted assassination. FBI officials said on Sunday that the shooter acted alone.
Secret Service agents fatally shot the suspect, the agency said, after he opened fire from the roof of a building about 140 metres from the stage where Trump was speaking.
The FBI said it had yet to identify an ideology linked to the suspect or any indications of mental health issues or found any threatening language on the suspect’s social media accounts.
Crooks, 20, was a registered Republican, according to state voter records, and had made a $15 donation to a Democratic political action committee at the age of 17. At the time of the shooting he was employed as a dietary aide at a nursing home. The Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center said Crooks “performed his job without concern and his background check was clean.”
The gun – an AR-style 556 rifle – had been legally bought, the FBI officials said, adding that the FBI believed it had been purchased by the suspect’s father. The officials said “a suspicious device” was found in the suspect’s vehicle, which was inspected by bomb technicians and rendered safe.
A man identified as Thomas Crooks posed for his 2020 high-school yearbook photo in a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of the busts of the former presidents carved into Mount Rushmore.
Bill Ranft, a resident of Bethel Park, Pa., who lives near Mr. Crooks’s home, said when he heard that Crooks had been identified as the shooter, he immediately checked his daughter’s yearbooks from her time at Bethel Park High School.
In 2020, he was photographed in the grey Mount Rushmore T-shirt, which also displays an American flag. Crooks is not listed as being a member of any clubs or teams in the yearbook.
Mary Ellen Priselac, a resident of Bethel Park whose home is just outside the blockade, said that she had heard on Saturday night that the shooter was from her community, but didn’t know how close. “But we had no idea it was our street. This is very close to home, literally and figuratively.”
An area around Crooks’s home, encompassing several streets, has been blockaded by emergency officials and the local fire department. Crooks’s home sits at the bottom of shallow valley in suburban Bethel Park, which is on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
Authorities identified a rally attendee who was shot and killed as Corey Comperatore, 50, of Sarver, Pa. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told reporters the man was killed when he dove on top of his family to protect them from the hail of bullets.
“Corey was an avid supporter of the former president, and was so excited to be there last night with him in the community,” Shapiro said, adding, “Political disagreements can never, ever be addressed through violence.”
Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were praying for the family of Comperatore.
“He was protecting his family from the bullets,” Biden said. “God love him.”
Pennsylvania State Police on Sunday identified the two people wounded in the shooting, both of whom were listed in stable condition. They are 57-year-old David Dutch, of New Kensington, Pa., and 74-year-old James Copenhaver, of Moon Township, Pa.
Donald Trump was rushed off stage after what appeared to be gun shots rang out during a speech in Pennsylvania. In footage from the rally, Trump can be seen clutching suddenly at the right side of his face as security responds to the incident.
Biden also said he’d had a “short but good conversation” with Trump in the hours after the shootings and that he was “sincerely grateful” that the former president is “doing well and recovering.”
Trump, who has called for national resilience since the shooting, posted on his social media account after Biden’s remarks, “UNITE AMERICA!”
Actually achieving unity will be far more challenging, especially in the midst of a bitter presidential campaign. Biden’s team is grappling with how to calibrate the path forward after the weekend attack on the very person he is trying to defeat in November’s election.
Biden, who has set out to brand Trump as a dire threat to democracy and the nation’s very founding principles, put a temporary pause on such political messaging. Shortly after Saturday night’s attack, Biden’s reelection campaign froze “all outbound communications” and was working to pull down its television ads.
While mass shootings at schools, nightclubs and other public places are a regular feature of American life, the attack was the first shooting of a U.S. president or major party presidential candidate since the 1981 attempted assassination of Republican President Ronald Reagan.
From Roosevelt to the Donald Trump rally shooting, gun culture has always been a central, violent theme of America’s political climate
In 2011, Democratic then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded in an attack on a gathering of constituents in Arizona. Republican U.S. Representative Steve Scalise was also badly wounded in a politically motivated 2017 attack on a group of Republican representatives practicing for a charity baseball game.
Giffords later founded a leading gun control organization, Scalise has remained a stalwart defender of gun rights.
Americans fear rising political violence, recent Reuters/Ipsos polling shows, with two out of three respondents to a May survey saying they worried violence could follow the election.
Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn his election defeat, fueled by his false claims that his loss was the result of widespread fraud. About 140 police officers were injured in the violence, four riot participants died that day, one police officer who responded died the following day and four responding officers later died by suicide.
Some of Trump’s Republican allies said they believed the attack was politically motivated.
“It’s one side that is going after Donald Trump in a way to demonize him personally,” said Scalise, the No. 2 House Republican. “The left seems to have targeted Donald Trump as a person.”
The Secret Service in a statement denied accusations by some Trump supporters that it had rejected campaign requests for additional security.
“The assertion that a member of the former President’s security team requested additional security resources that the U.S. Secret Service or the Department of Homeland Security rebuffed is absolutely false,” Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement. “In fact, recently the U.S. Secret Service added protective resources and capabilities to the former President’s security detail.”
Trump began the year facing multiple legal worries, including four separate criminal prosecutions.
He was found guilty in late May of trying to cover up hush money payments to a p*rn star. But the other three prosecutions he faces – including two for his attempts to overturn his defeat – have been ground to a halt by various factors, including a Supreme Court decision this month that found him to be partly immune to prosecution.
Trump contends, without evidence, that all four prosecutions have been orchestrated by Biden to try to prevent him from returning to power.
Biden postponed a planned trip to Texas on Monday, where he was to speak on the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library. An NBC News interview between Biden and anchor Lester Holt will now occur at the White House, instead of in Texas, as initially planned.
Biden’s campaign said that, after the NBC interview airs on Monday night, it and the Democratic National Committee “will continue drawing the contrast” with Trump over the course of the GOP convention – even though it remains unclear when ads would resume.
Biden also still plans to make a planned trip to Las Vegas, which will include a campaign event on Wednesday. Vice-President Kamala Harris nonetheless postponed her planned campaign trip to Florida on Tuesday, where she had been set to meet with Republican women voters.
With reports from The Globe and Mail’s Robyn Doolittle in Bethel Park, Pa., and The Associated Press.
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