By Lisa Mascaro and Gary Fields, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — “Calm down!”
That was the request by a Republican congressman when he addressed the attack against Donald Trump at a political rally within the Butler Farm area where he grew up.
“I am stunned by how and what has happened to the United States of America,” Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania told the Associated Press early Sunday.
The shocking attack on Trump has shone a harsh light on the toxic climate in America's political life. While the assassin's motives remain unclear, the violence is yet one more measure of how what was once unacceptable, if not unthinkable, in American society has grow to be painfully commonplace.
As the Election 2024 enters an important phase before the national conventions, how the nation reacts will likely be the primary Presidential election since 2020, an election marked by efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat and January 6, 2021, Attack on the US Capitol.
On Sunday, civil society leaders, pastors and elected officials from President Joe Biden up down appealed to Americans for unity, and calls for an end to the malice.
“We cannot allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said in a night address to the nation from the Oval Office.
Under a charged atmosphere Republican National Convention opens this week in Milwaukee for brand spanking new nomination Trump card Democrats are preparing for their very own convention next month, unsure whether the party will delay in an expected rematch with incumbent Biden.
Although Trump's rhetoric was more moderate immediately after the shooting, it took on deeper and darker tones on this, his third campaign for the White House.
This spring, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the country” and vowed to launch the biggest national deportation campaigntold the auto staff that there could be a “ Bloodbath “ in this country if he is not re-elected.
“If we don't win, I think our country is finished,” he said during the New Hampshire primary.
Trump has promised retribution to his political rivals, especially those in the Justice Department, after he was indicted at the federal level for Storage of confidential documents in his house in Mar-a-Lago and in the Conspiracy to annul the 2020 elections.
Trump also trivialized the violence. When Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi attacked by an intruder seeking the former Speaker of the House of Representatives When Trump was attacked and hit on the head with a hammer at the family's San Francisco home in 2022, he mocked the security fence she had installed, calling it inadequate.
Last year, Trump drew chuckles in a speech to Republicans in California when he asked, “How’s your husband, by the way?”
Biden, in turn, warned that Trump's return to power posed a serious threat to the country's civic traditions. He selected a location near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for his first campaign event 2024and presents the likely rematch as “everything” whether democracy can survive.
In his address to the nation on Sunday, Biden pointed to examples of past political unrest, including the Jan. 6 riots and the recent harassment of poll staff, and said, “There is never any place in America for this kind of violence, for any kind of violence.”
Nevertheless, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, one among Trump's possible candidates for vice chairman, said on social media over the weekend that Biden's earlier rhetoric against Trump “directly” led to the assassination attempt.
And House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said it was time to “lower the temperature in this country,” blamed Biden's recent comments on a call with political donors. In the decision, the president had said: “It's time to target Trump.”
Johnson said he knew Biden didn’t literally mean to focus on Trump, but added: “Such language should be denounced on both sides.”
Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, said there may be now a possibility for political leaders to “phrase their criticism of each other in terms that explicitly condemn violence.”
From the murders of American leaders From Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to the shootings of Republicans and Democrats over the past decade, violence has all the time been a component of American politics.
More recently, there have been other violent incidents which are frighteningly linked to the country's political conflicts.
In front of the suburban home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stands a person with a knife and a gun, threatened with killing The judge was arrested in 2022. Members of Congress face increasing security threats. And Harassment against Election officials from cities and states across the country have called for a Output shaft as a consequence of the threat to their livelihood.
Last summer, FBI agents shot and killed a Utah man who threatened with murder Biden and had described himself as a “MAGA Trumper.” This followed a series of drive-by shootings earlier this yr targeting Democrats in New Mexico, a daunting outbreak that led to criminal charges against a failed candidate for the state parliaments who had parroted Trump's rhetoric about election fraud.
A gunman who died in a shooting in 2022 while attempting to break into the FBI office in Cincinnati apparently called on social media for federal agents to be killed “on sight” after raiding Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.
Jacob Ware, a research fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations who focuses on domestic terrorism, said: “The warning lights have been flashing red on violence in this election cycle for months, if not years.”
When Trump took the stage on Saturday night, he opened the Pennsylvania rally as he often does, marveling on the “big, beautiful crowd” that had gathered to see him – and belittling Biden's own crowds as pathetic by comparison.
The former president had just begun his speech and started with Agenda for mass deportations and lamentations a couple of nation in decline.
“Our country is going to hell,” Trump said.
Minutes later shots were fired.
Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, who was sitting behind Trump with other Republican representatives, simply called the entire thing a terrible tragedy. “The level of rudeness and hostility is perhaps a clear signal to everyone to calm down,” he told AP.
As Americans took stock on Sunday, the common message was a call for unity.
Reverend Chris Morgan, pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park, just a number of blocks from where the shooter lived, urged his congregation to wish for the country during a morning service.
“It's obvious that there's a lot going on here and that there's a lot of anxiety and a lot of problems for people,” he said. “I encourage you to pray for those affected so that they too can discover what it means to be kind to others.”
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