Dutch is a longtime Trump supporter, along with other members of his family, Veri-Grazier said. She saw a photo of his brother before leaving on Saturday, wearing a flag blouse and sunglasses. He seemed “delighted. ” she says. Today he is hospitalized with pain in his liver and ribs, and he is awaiting further surgery, she said. “He exercised his rights and went to the rally, and he didn’t deserve any of this,” she said.
“The doctor at the hospital said he’d never noticed anything like it, he called it a miracle,” said Trump, who wore a wide, loose white bandage covering his right ear. His team insisted that no photographs be taken.
“I’m supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump said. “I’m supposed to be dead. “
… “Luckily or by God, a lot of other people say it’s because of God I’m still here,” he said.
Trump explained that before Saturday night he had finished the speech he planned to give later this week at the Republican convention. “Basically, I gave a speech that was incredibly heartbreaking,” he said. “It was brutal, good, hard. [Last night] I threw it away. I think it would be bad if I got up and started ranting about how terrible, corrupt, and corrupt everyone is, even if it’s true. If it hadn’t been like that, we would have had a pretty well-crafted and incredibly tough speech. Now we have a more unifying discourse.
Trump did not want to say that a new speech had been written in its entirety, although parts of it had already been written, hours after the assassination attempt. The concept is to reframe the intense conflicts that Trump involved in his years in domestic politics. “I’ve been fighting an organization of other people who, in my opinion, were very bad for a long time, and they’re fighting me, and we put up a very smart fight,” Trump said. “We had a very tough speech and last night I dismissed it. I said I can’t say those things after what I’ve been through. “
“A lot of other people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump said. “They’re right and I’m not dead. You usually have to die to have an iconic image. “
One user who spoke with Trump in the past 12 hours said he felt almost “spiritual” on stage, “and that’s definitely not general for him. “
“He thinks he’s won a gift from Dios. No he can,” the user claimed.
The user said Trump told his team they needed “unity” at the conference. The conference is now more about their courage and resilience, the user said. “They need the speakers to minimize the sound, not increase it. “
We know that a Secret Service sniper must have had a transparent view of the ceiling, because gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was shot dead seconds after opening fire on Trump. But why has this sniper ignored Crooks until now? One credible explanation is that the Secret Service (which is completely separate from the FBI) assumed the killer was a police sniper, a member of his security team.
This causes serious communication failures. When it comes to making plans for occasions like this, I would expect the police and Secret Service groups to not only get together and introduce themselves, but also describe in detail their express duties. They have been able to recognize each other through sight. They also double-checked each level of the rally, making sure they knew who everyone was and what they were doing. It’s just basic.
The investigation will also have to focus on the aftermath of the shooting. Former President Trump was placed on the ground, with reinforced barriers: those signs, painted with slogans, are made of galvanized steel. When his Secret Service team began to take him to their vehicle, they protected him with their bodies. But it appears from the news video that the message “the shooter has fallen” was sent and at that moment, Trump was able to turn toward the crowd, punch the air and shout his defiance. … At the time, the Secret Service had no way of knowing if the shooter was acting alone. It is possible that other shooters had simply been present. . . .
The audio also appears to capture Trump asking for his shoes as he is carried to his car, and his bodyguards comply with that request. He opposes any protocol. The protection squad has only one task: to protect its man. They are his human shield. If necessary, they can tie him up and transport him by car, but they never endanger his life by looking for his shoes.
“The condition I’m going through saved my life,” Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told the doctor, Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, by phone hours after an assassination attempt.
Mr. Trump was referring to a chart featuring immigration statistics on a screen to his right at his rally in a field in Butler County, Pa. He had turned to point to it and describe what was on the screen when shots rang out.
“He said, ‘Border Patrol saved my life,'” Dr. Jackson said in an interview Sunday. “’I’m looking through this Border Patrol graphic. ‘ He said, ‘If I hadn’t pointed to that graph and turned my head to look at it, that bullet would have hit me right in the head. ‘ ‘ »
In separate social media posts, Corey Comperatore’s family mourned his loss.
“The Palestinian Authority’s Trump demonstration claimed the life of my brother, Corey Comperatore,” Dawn Comperatore Schafer posted on Facebook. “Hatred of a man has the life we enjoy the most. “
“He was a hero to his daughters. His wife and daughters have experienced the unthinkable and unimaginable. My little brother just turned 50 and he still has a long way to live. Hate has no limits and love has no limits. Please pray for my sister, my in-laws, my nieces, my mother, my sister, me and her nieces and nephews because it sounds like a terrible nightmare, but we know that this is our painful reality. . .
The spouse and Mr. Comperatore’s daughter, in statements on Facebook, described a chaotic scene in which he attacked their family.
His daughter, Allyson Comperatore, wrote that her father died “like a true superhero,” temporarily throwing her and her mother to the ground when gunfire erupted at the rally. “He protected my body from the bullet that was coming towards us. ” “He enjoyed his family enough to hold a genuine dance for us,” she wrote.
[Butler County Sheriff Michael T. Slupe said in an interview that] a Butler Township deputy stood up enough to look at the roof of the building adjacent to the rally when the gunman turned around and pointed it at him. from the edge of the roof, Slupe said, he didn’t have a gun in his hand and so he fell back to the ground. “He’s letting it go because he doesn’t need to be killed,” Slupe said.
That’s when the shooter fired shots at the fairgrounds, the county sheriff said.
Slupe said the city officer went to read about the roof following a request from authorities to investigate to identify a suspicious individual observed near the demonstration. He said he didn’t know if that request came from a federal, state or local agency. .
“Then the police came in to see the man, they searched the area, but they couldn’t, so they said, ‘Well, let’s check the roof. ‘”
[This morning,] top Republicans are sending a transparent message to calm the situation. Trump crusade leaders SUSIE WILES and CHRIS LaCIVITA wrote in an internal crusade memo that they will “tolerate harmful rhetoric on social media. “
LaCivita himself deleted a post saying, “They tried to stop him from voting, they tried to jail him, and now you see this,” as WaPo’s Michael Scherer points out. The same goes for Rep. MIKE KELLY (R-Pa. ), a Butler local who was at the rally, who said in an initial post, “We will not tolerate this attack from the left. “
But not everyone is up to the moment. DONALD ATOUT JR. wrote in X this morning that “the Democrats and their friends in the media knew exactly what they were doing with this ‘literally Hitler’ shit!He added that if “the Democrats had their way, my father would be dead right now. “Don’t let them pierce your memory.
Law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that bomb-making fabrics were discovered in the vehicle of the man suspected of the shooting at Trump’s rally. Materials used to make bombs were also discovered in his home.
Although the history of the United States has been marked by a long litany of murders and assassination attempts (Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts within a few weeks of each other), this one is more terrifying. This is because our social peace has become more precarious. The attempt to kill Donald Trump is far more damaging than an attempt to kill Mitt Romney a dozen years ago, or Al Gore a dozen years ago, would have been.
And while the responsibility for maintaining social peace and the norm of non-violence is shared equally across the political spectrum, the blame for its decay is not.
Trump agitates and feeds on a preference for violence. He has a demagogue’s ability to manipulate the most fundamental feelings of his followers. As a personal citizen, he used the rape of a white woman in Central Park to call for the execution of innocent young men of color. He goes on to call for the execution of various critics for their disloyalty. When a maniac tried to kill Nancy Pelosi and broke her husband’s skull, she applauded him. He continues to glorify and promise to free the criminals who stormed the Capitol in an effort to capture a second unelected term.
It’s not Trump’s fault that he tried to kill him. It is surely his fault that this has promptly triggered widespread concern of retaliation and chaos.
Security experts have said it is difficult, if not impossible, to confront all threats, especially with long-range weapons and external events.
But some said the regime’s precautions prevented the shooter from climbing onto the nearby roof.
Steve Nottingham, a former SWAT commander in Long Beach, California, called Saturday’s shooting a “fundamental failure of protection. ” He has worked in security for visiting world leaders, adding presidents and now trains officials on how to respond to critical incidents. He pointed out that there will most likely be errors in pre-event reconnaissance and real-time tracking of locations from which a gunner can simply fire. “They were late because they had covered those options beforehand,” Nottingham said.
Jim Cavanaugh, a retired special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who reported to the Secret Service, said he was surprised that the shooter could have occupied a higher position inside the gunshot collection site. “Every time I’m with them, every single height is occupied by them or the local SWAT police,” Cavanaugh said. “No one is allowed to walk on the roofs. They dominate the heights. He said a full-power rifle like an AR-15 can hit targets at two hundred yards. Trump stands about 450 feet from the roof where the shooter was found dead, NBC News discovered, discovered in an investigation of Google Earth images.
Audio investigation of the gunfire through The Times and Robert C. Maher, an expert in gunshot acoustics at Montana State University in Bozeman, says two bursts were fired. The first round of three and the second round of five shots were fired approximately 330 to 390 feet from the C-SPAN microphone on which Mr. Trump speaks. This location corresponded to the location of the suspect’s body. There is no significant difference between the sound of the 8 shots, suggesting that they probably came from the same firearm, Mr. Maher.
A confidant close to Trump first expressed to me in the summer of 2022 his concern that the former president would face an assassination attempt. The user warned that the attack is inevitable: it is not a question of “if”, but rather a question of “when”.
Since then, I’ve heard this fear expressed more times than I can count in conversations about the Trump campaign. The concept spread by many people close to Trump is the following: the hatred of the opposite side towards him is so strong that it would incite an attempt on his life. Some have even raised the dark and unproven speculation that their warring political parties would prove it. . .
I’ve spoken regularly with my editors over the past few years about how to responsibly report on fears in Trump’s entourage. At the time, there was a slight sense of danger, with no clear change in the security posture around the former president. We also feel that broadening the outlook could, in a sense, increase risk. In fact, a best friend of Trump’s told me that the crusade irritated when he publicly speculated about this possibility.
President Trump’s rally took place at the Butler Farm Fairgrounds, which is actually outside the city. We had police officers on site to ensure security. All of our staff are fine and have not heard anything different from law enforcement.
Butler is a small town, and unsurprisingly, as mayor, I am unaware of President Trump’s major security concerns. I’m not on the secret service speed dial. Much of what I learned, I learned like you; I can’t tell you much, it’s more than what you say in the media.
Certainly, we are dismayed and shocked. Regardless of our political position, those were other people who were protecting their right to assembly and exercising their right to free speech. We will have to not forget that any attack on those rights is an attack on all our rights. This type of violence is unacceptable.
I reported on the shooting at former President Trump’s rally, as well as the president. The FBI, ATF, the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the Department’s Homeland Security Division are most recently collaborating with the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement partners in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Without offering evidence, social media posts accused hard-to-understand left-wing figures of attacking Trump and relied on concepts circulated through Trump that the “deep state,” or a cabal within the government, was seeking to save him. . prevent him from returning. In the office. Unverified claims emerged on platforms such as Gab, Truth Social and Parler, favored by the far right, as well as on X, Telegram, Facebook and Instagram. …
Some social media accounts said a gunman with ties to the “deep state” opened fire and shot Trump. Without providing evidence, the stories also accuse government agencies such as the F. B. I. and the Centers for Disease Control for Trump. …
Others claimed on social media that the shooter was a member of the far-left organization Antifa or was acting on behalf of transgender people. None of the publications provided any evidence for their theories.
I’m grateful to hear that it’s okay. I am praying for him and his family circle and for all who were at the demonstration, as we wait for more information.
Jill and I are grateful to the Secret Service for getting him to safety. There is no position for this type of violence in the United States. We will have to unite as one country to condemn it.