A gunman at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania was killed by the Secret Service on Saturday, 13 July.
Trump said later online that he had been “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part” of his ear, at about 6.15 pm.
President Biden spoke to Trump late on Saturday according to the White House.
Biden said in a broadcast "There's no place in America for this kind of violence," the president said. "It's sick. It's sick. That's one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. You cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this."
Thousands of Republicans will gather in Milwaukee on Monday for the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump and his soon-to-be-announced running mate are on course to officially be nominated by the party.
The Associated Press said the suspected shooter used an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle to carry out the attack, a US official said. He was killed by officers.
Americans own 46% of the world's civilian-owned firearms and US firearm ownership rates far exceed those of other high-income countries. Forty-six per cent of US households report owning at least one firearm, including 30% of Americans who say they personally own a firearm.
The New York Times says the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, lived in a relatively affluent suburb in the South Hills region of Pittsburgh, about an hour’s drive from the site of the rally. The neighbourhood where he grew up is “pretty firmly middle class, maybe upper-middle class,” Dan Grzybek, who represents the area on the county council, said in an interview on Sunday.
March 2020, Joe Biden: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” he said. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
In August 2023, the Associated Press reported that 77% of the public and 69% of Democrats said Biden was too old to be effective for four more years.
David Ignatius, foreign affairs columnist of The Washington Post, in September 2023 wrote “President Biden should not run again in 2024.”
He recently wrote, "Biden’s family has played a central role, especially his wife, Jill. When my column appeared last September, I was told by people who know the Bidens well that the president was angry but that the first lady was irate."
Living in the White House is a nice gig!
Biden says he wouldn't run for president "if I slow down," while offering assurances he can still "get the job done."
To reassure the American people, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Biden, if he would be willing to take a cognitive test and share the results with the American people?
He demurred and Kevin O’Connor, physician to the president, said in February that Biden underwent an “extremely detailed neurologic exam” during his annual physical that yielded “reassuring” results. He did not mention if any cognitive tests were involved.
The White House doctor is a personal friend of the president!!
The senator was 63 years old!!
George Stephanopoulos of ABC: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?
Bidon: "I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about. Look, George. Think of it this way. You've heard me say this before. I think the United States and the world is at an inflexion point when the things that happen in the next several years are gonna determine what the next six, seven decades are gonna be like."
Trump is ahead in 7 battleground states but not at big margins.
According to the FT "Another donor involved in the party for decades said the money was “in the process of drying up”. The person added: “Nine to one when I talk to other donors, they’re not planning on contributing . . . because they’re concerned about losing."
Either of the leading 2024 candidates would be the oldest occupant of the Oval Office ever by the end of his term, and neither seems eager to discuss the ramifications.
Democracy’s assassins have accomplices
On January 06, 2021, armed mobs, aided and abetted by President Trump, attacked Congress during its certification of presidential electoral votes, which was an unprecedented, and heretofore unimaginable, act of sedition.
From Election Day, Trump, criminally set out to rig the vote. He wanted Mike Pence, the vice president, to accept fake state electors. Pence refused and as the mob bayed for Pence to be hung, Trump called them patriots.
Trump never called any military leaders on Jan. 6, according to testimony from senior administration officials to the Jan. 6 Select Committee — a fact that the panel emphasised in its final report that concluded Trump was uniquely responsible for the violent Capitol attack by his supporters.
Rather, he was observing the riot on TV and calling allies in his quest to subvert the 2020 election, as outlined by committee witnesses and White House records.
"President Trump could have done this, of course, anytime after he learned of the violence at the Capitol. At 4:17 p.m., 187 minutes after finishing his speech (and even longer after the attack began), President Trump finally broadcast a video message in which he asked those attacking the Capitol to leave:
"I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace."
Republican Kevin McCarthy, later House Speaker, had called Jan. 6 the “saddest day” he ever had in Congress. He endorsed Trump as president and said he would consider joining his Cabinet.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said he would back whoever becomes the Republican Party nominee, despite a scathing speech at the time in which he called Trump’s actions “disgraceful” and said the rioters “had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.”
The AP "Asked about Trump’s second-term agenda, GOP (Republicans) lawmakers brushed off his admission that he would be a dictator on “day one.”
“He’s joking,” said Trump ally Byron Donalds, R-Fla.
“Just bravado,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. “There’s still checks and balances.”
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard and the authors of “The Tyranny of the Minority.”
Democracy’s Assassins Always Have Accomplices
"Democracy’s assassins always have accomplices among mainstream politicians in the halls of power. The greatest threat to our democracy comes not from demagogues like Mr. Trump or even from extremist followers like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 but rather from the ordinary politicians, many of them inside the Capitol that day, who protect and enable him.
The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new. It has confronted political leaders across the world for generations. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the Communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal. And in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and ’70s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.
...Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit him, even though many conceded that, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s words, the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. The acquittal allowed Mr. Trump to continue his political career despite his having tried to block the peaceful transfer of power.
Had he been convicted in the Senate, he would have been legally barred from running again for president. In other words, Republican senators had a clear opportunity to ensure that an openly antidemocratic figure would never again occupy the White House — and 43 of them, including Mr. McConnell, declined to take it."
Trump immunity
The 6 conservative members of the US Supreme Court ruled on July 1, 2024, that Donald Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions that were within his constitutional powers as president in a landmark decision recognizing for the first time any form of presidential immunity from prosecution.
The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — sharply criticized the majority’s opinion in scathing dissents. Sotomayor gave a dramatic speech as she read her dissent from the bench, sometimes shaking her head and gritting her teeth as she said the conservative majority wrongly insulated the US president as “a king above the law.”
The Heritage Foundation maps an authoritarian agenda for Trump
Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation think-tank and it extends to almost 900 pages.
Several people who worked in the Trump White House contributed to the project.
It recommended the sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and a whole lot more.
Democrats have highlighted Project 2025's more controversial proposals and called the document a blueprint for a second Trump term in office.
However, Trump and his campaign have denied or downplayed its influence.
Discussion
There is a schism in the United States and while the former President Trump is a flawed messenger, he is a key leader. The vice-president pick is J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, while his wife is Hindu.
Vance said in 2023: “We’re a country that is majority Christian, nominally, but not nearly majority Christian in terms of practice,” he said.
“We’re a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious democracy that’s heavily exposed to the economic forces of globalization. We have not yet figured out how to harmonize that with some basic sense of what it means to be an American in the 21st century. I happen to think that the Christian faith is a good way of helping provide an answer to that question.”
Pew Research Center in 2022 reported that Americans are divided about Christianity’s role in the country, and have diverse ideas about what it means to be a ‘Christian nation.’
Most adults (60%) say the founders of the United States originally intended for it to be a Christian nation. A third say the US is currently a Christian nation. And more than four-in-ten Americans (45%) say the country should be a Christian nation.
The US Constitution did not establish Christianity as an official religion. The Founding Fathers were influenced by the Enlightenment.
James Davison Hunter, an American sociologist and originator of the term "culture war" in his 1991 book 'Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.'
In his recently published 'Democracy and Solidarity' Hunter argues that the algorithmic imperatives of social media platforms have some responsibility for the brokenness of our national culture.
He said that regaining, robust durcharbeiten would likely require a fundamental reorganization of the technology space.
If that’s the case, tech policy might be an important component of cultural renewal — whether it’s as modest as limiting phones in classrooms or as ambitious as reforming some regulatory structures of the digital economy."
In the aftermath of the foiled assassination, President Biden said in an Oval Office address on Sunday that the nation needs to “lower the temperature in our politics” as he deplored the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
“We cannot, we must not go down this road in America,” he said, speaking in a prime-time speech to the nation. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalised.”
George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States on April 30, 1789, at Federal Hall in New York, then the nation's capital.
Four sitting Presidents have been assassinated: Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James A. Garfield(1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy(1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald).
Forty-five men have occupied the office of President. Biden is the 46 President.
Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) served as the 22nd and 24th President of the United States (March 4, 1885 – March 4, 1889, March 4, 1893 – March 4, 1897.)
Attempted Assinations (Politco)
Jan. 30, 1835: President Andrew Jackson at the Capitol, attempts to shoot the President;
Feb. 15, 1933: Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Miami;
Nov. 1, 1950: Puerto Rican nationalists try to kill President Harry Truman, who is temporarily residing at Blair House in Washington during White House renovations;
Dec. 11, 1960: Richard Paul Pavlick plans to crash into the car of President-elect John F. Kennedy and blow it up with dynamite:
Feb. 22, 1974: Samuel Byck hijacks a DC-9 to crash it into the White House to kill President Nixon;
Sept. 5, 1975: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a supporter of mass murderer Charles Manson, tries to shoot President Gerald Ford in Sacramento. Her gun misfires.
Sept. 22, 1975: Sara Jane Moore shoots at President Ford in San Francisco but misses;
March 30, 1981: John Hinckley Jr. shoots President Ronald Reagan as he exits the Hilton Hotel in Washington, seriously wounding the President;
1993: A plot to blow up President George H.W. Bush by car bomb is foiled in Kuwait;
Nov. 11, 2011: Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fires multiple shots at the White House, striking the building but not injuring any members of President Barack Obama’s family or anyone else.
Candidates for election
Theodore Roosevelt, presidential candidate in 1912 (he had already served two terms: 1901 to 1909);
Huey P. Long, 1935, a senator from Louisiana who was expected to run for president in 1936, was shot and killed at Louisiana’s State Capitol.;
Robert F. Kennedy, presidential candidate 1968;
George C. Wallace, presidential candidate in 1972;
Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate in 2024.
Jan. 6 Select Committee on Trump's unique refusal to transfer power
"Every President in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one. January 6, 2021 was the first time one American President refused his Constitutional duty to transfer power peacefully to the next.
In our work over the last 18 months, the Select Committee has recognized our obligation to do everything we can to ensure this never happens again.At the outset of our investigation, we recognized that tens of millions of Americans had been persuaded by President Trump that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by overwhelming fraud. We also knew this was flatly false, and that dozens of state and federal judges had addressed and resolved all manner of allegations about the election. Our legal system functioned as it should, but our President would not accept the outcome.
What most of the public did not know before our investigation is this: Donald Trump’s own campaign officials told him early on that his claims of fraud were false. Donald Trump’s senior Justice Department officials — each appointed by Donald Trump himself — investigated the allegations and told him repeatedly that his fraud claims were false. Donald Trump’s White House lawyers also told him his fraud claims were false. From the beginning, Donald Trump’s fraud allegations were concocted nonsense, designed to prey upon the patriotism of millions of men and women who love our country."
