Former President Trump made his first public appearance on Tuesday since the second assassination attempt on Sunday. An overflow crowd chanted “God bless Trump!” and “Fight, fight, fight” as Secret Service agents surrounded the stage to protect the Republican presidential nominee.
“It was a great experience,” Trump said at an evening rally in Flint, Michigan, where he hosted an event with thousands of supporters, but he also said running for president was a “risky business” like car racing or bull riding.
“Only important presidents get shot,” he said.
The same day, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke carefully about the issue in an interview with black journalists and avoided mentioning Trump by name, in contrast to her highly controversial comments to the same group in July.
Despite boos from the crowd when Trump called Harris by her first name, the candidates briefly put their differences aside, describing the phone conversation as “very, very lovely.”
“It was wonderful. I appreciate it,” Trump told supporters. Harris, in an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia on the same day, said she told Trump “there is no place in our country for political violence.”
Both campaigns have stepped up campaigning, but Trump’s schedule remains unchanged, despite an assassination attempt Sunday at one of his Florida golf courses. Trump and other Republicans have renewed their accusations that Democratic criticism of him is inciting violent attacks.
Democrats have previously pointed to Trump’s long history of incendiary campaign rhetoric and his advocacy for the jailing and prosecution of political opponents, but Harris has tread more cautiously in the wake of Sunday’s assassination attempt.
President Trump has redoubled his past threats of retaliation against campaign staff, donors and others in an attempt to stomp on fears about the integrity of the upcoming election.
“Anyone who engages in immoral activities will unfortunately be hunted down, arrested and prosecuted to an unprecedented extent,” he posted on his social media site on Tuesday.
The Michigan town hall was billed as focusing on the auto industry, a mainstay of the battleground state, where Trump argued Democrats would undermine U.S. auto manufacturing by pushing for electric vehicles and repeated false claims that Chinese automakers were building massive factories across the border in Mexico to flood the U.S. with cars.
Trump is scheduled to speak in New York, Washington DC and North Carolina later this week.
Harris is scheduled to visit the nation’s capital, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin in the coming days, but both candidates are focused on the industrial Midwest, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where voters could decide the outcome of what is expected to be a very close election.
So far, Biden and Harris have avoided politics in their response to Sunday’s incident, condemning political violence of any kind. The president also called on Congress to increase funding for the Secret Service.
Trump has alleged without evidence that the attack was prompted by months of criticism of Harris and Biden, calling him a threat to American democracy.
“I truly believe that the Democrats are firing bullets, and that’s very dangerous. It’s dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for both sides,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Authorities said suspect Ryan Wesley Routh had been camping with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours outside the West Palm Beach, Florida, golf course where Trump was playing Sunday, but fled without firing a shot when Secret Service agents found him and opened fire.
Mr. Rouse, who was subsequently arrested while driving on a highway, has had past online posts that suggest he has an inconsistent political stance as to whether he supports Democrats or Republicans. The attack came just two months after Mr. Trump was injured at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump also met Tuesday with the sheriff’s deputies who conducted the highway traffic stop that detained Routh.
“In many quarters on the left, it’s often said that there are problems on both sides,” Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, said Monday at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition event, but “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in recent months, but two people have tried to kill Donald Trump.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press conference on Tuesday that rhetoric inciting violence should not be tolerated. Jean-Pierre was outraged by Biden and Harris’ criticism that Trump is stoking division by calling him a threat to democracy, and said there are concrete examples of the former president doing so, such as helping to incite the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In response to Vance’s comments, Jean-Pierre said: “It’s dangerous when those words are used. It’s dangerous because it makes people respect and listen to the leader of their country,” and that such comments make “people take you very seriously.”
Dan Curry, 44, of Saginaw, Michigan, attended the town hall on Tuesday and said he was concerned about the possibility of more violence against Trump.
“They say Republicans are gun-crazed lunatics who want to shoot people, but I don’t see us going after them,” Curry said, adding that the attacks and threats against Trump could galvanize further support for him.
“It energizes his base,” he said. “How could it not?”
Peoples, Weissert and Licon were Associated Press reporters. Peoples reported from Flint, Weissert from Washington and Gomez-Licon from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Philadelphia, Matt Brown in Washington, Jill Colvin in New York and Tom Krischer in Detroit contributed to this report.
