Dutch is a longtime Trump supporter, along with other members of his family, Veri-Grazier said. He saw a photo of his brother before leaving on Saturday, dressed in a flag blouse and sunglasses. He looked “delighted,” she says. Today he is hospitalized with pain in his liver and ribs, and is waiting for some other surgery, he 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 that, he called it a miracle,” said Trump, who wore a large, 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. “
… “Thankfully or by God, a lot of other people say it’s thank God that I’m still here,” he said.
Trump explained that as of 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 very bad if I got up and started lashing out saying how terrible and corrupt and corrupt we all are, even if it’s true. If this had not been the case, we would have done it. We have had a fairly well-crafted and incredibly tough speech. Now we have a more unifying discourse.
Trump did not mean that a completely new speech had been written, however, parts of it have already been written, hours after the assassination attempt. The concept is to reframe the intense conflicts in which Trump has participated in his years of national politics. “I’ve been fighting for a long time against an organization of other people that he thought were very bad, and they’re fighting against me, and we’ve fought a really smart fight,” Trump said. “We had a very tough speech and last night I rejected it, I said I couldn’t say those things after what I went 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 to Trump in the past 12 hours said he was almost “witty” on stage, “and that’s surely not general for him. “
“He thinks he has won a gift from God. He can’t,” the user stated.
The user said Trump told his team they needed “unity” at the conference. The lecture is now more about his courage and resilience, the user said. “They need the speakers to minimize the sound, not increase it. “
We know that a Secret Service sniper would have had to have a transparent view of the ceiling, since gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was shot dead seconds after opening fire on Trump. But why did this sniper forget about Crooks until then? One credible explanation is that the Secret Service (which is completely separate from the FBI) assumed the killer was a police sniper on his security team.
This causes serious communication failures. When it comes to making plans on occasions like this, I would expect police and Secret Service groups to not only meet and introduce themselves, but also describe in detail their stated roles. They have been able to recognize each other through sight. They also double-checked at each level of the rally, making sure they knew who everyone was and what they were doing. It’s just basic.
The investigation must also focus on the consequences of the shooting. Former President Trump placed reinforced barriers on the ground: those panels, 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 from the news video it appears that the message “the shooter has fallen” was sent and at that moment Trump was able to turn to the crowd, punch the air and shout his defiance. Array. . . At the time, the Secret Service had no way of knowing if the shooter was acting alone. It is possible that other shooters were simply present. . . .
The audio also appears to capture Trump asking for his shoes as he is carried to his car, and his bodyguards comply with this request. This is contrary to all protocol. The protection squad has only one job: to protect its man. They are his human shield. If necessary, they can tie him up and transport him by car, but they never risk their lives 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.
Trump was referring to a graphic displaying immigration statistics on a screen to his right during his rally in a box in Butler County, Pennsylvania. He had turned to point at it and describe what was on the screen when the shots rang out.
“He says, ‘Border Patrol saved my life,'” Dr. Jackson said in an interview Sunday. “I’m going through that Border Patrol meeting. ” He said, “If I hadn’t pointed at this painting and turned my head to look at it, that bullet would have hit me right in the head. ” »
In separate posts on social media, Corey Comperatore’s family mourned his loss.
“The AP Trump Rally protects the life of my brother, Corey Comperatore,” Dawn Comperatore Schafer posted on Facebook. “I hate the life of a boy we enjoy the most. “
“He was a hero just like his daughters. His wife and daughters 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-in-law, my nieces, my mother, my sister, myself and her nieces and nephews because this is like a terrible nightmare but we know it is our painful reality. …
Comperatore’s spouse and daughter, in statements on Facebook, described a chaotic scene in which he attacked their family.
His daughter, Allyson Comperatore, wrote that her father died “a true superhero,” who temporarily threw her and her mother to the ground when gunfire erupted at the demonstration. “He protected my body from the bullet coming at us. “”He enjoyed his family enough to hold a genuine dance for us,” he 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 began shooting at the fairgrounds, the county sheriff said.
Slupe said the city officer went to read on the roof following a request from authorities to verify and identify a suspicious individual observed near the gathering. He said he did not know if this request came from a federal, state or local agency.
“Then the police came to investigate the man, 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 defuse the situation. The heads of Trump’s crusade, 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 in which he said, “they tried to stop him from voting, they tried to jail him, and now you see this,” as WaPo’s Michael Scherer points out. MIKE KELLY (R-Pa. ), a Butler local who participated in the rally, said in an initial message: “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 American history has been marked by a long litany of assassinations and attempted assassinations (Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts within 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 even if the duty to maintain social peace and the norm of nonviolence is similarly shared by all political actors, the duty of its decline 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, former SWAT commander in Long Beach, California, called Saturday’s shooting a “fundamental protection failure. ” He has worked in security for visiting world leaders, adding presidents, and now trains officials on how to respond to critical incidents. He noted there were most likely errors in pre-event reconnaissance and in 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 through the Secret Service, said he was surprised that the gunman could occupy a superior position within the diversity of rifles at the rally site. “When I’m with them, any and all heights are occupied by them or by the local SWAT police,” Cavanaugh said. “No one is allowed to walk on rooftops. They dominate the heights. He said a high-powered rifle as a. The AR-15 can hit targets at two hundred meters. Trump is located about 148 meters from the roof where the gunman was found dead, NBC News has found, discovered in an investigation of Google Earth imagery.
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 concern to me in the summer of 2022 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 covering the Trump campaign. The concept spread by many close to Trump is the following: the hatred of the opposing party towards him is so strong that it would incite an attempt on his life. Some have even speculated obscurely and without evidence that their conflicting political parties would prove it. …
I’ve spoken periodically with my editor’s best friend over the past two 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 believe that broadening the outlook could, in a sense, increase risk. In fact, a best friend of Trump’s told me that the crusade bristled when he publicly speculated about that 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, these were other people protecting their right to assemble and exercising their right to express themselves freely. 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 also lately collaborating with the Secret Service. as national 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 accounts 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 acting on behalf of transgender people. None of the publications provided any evidence for his theories.
I am grateful to hear that he is here and that he is doing well. I pray for him, his family, and everyone who was at the collection as we wait for more information.
Jill and I thank the Secret Service for keeping him safe. There is no position for this type of violence in the United States. We will have to unite as one country to condemn it.