Here’s the latest: King Charles writes to the former U.S. president after the assassination attempt
A shooting at Donald Trump ‘s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania is being investigated as an attempted assassination of the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, law enforcement officials say.
Trump called Sunday for unity and resilience as shocked leaders across the political divide reacted to the shooting.
The Secret Service said it killed the suspected shooter, who attacked from a rooftop of a nearby building outside the rally venue.
Here’s the Latest:
King Charles writes to Trump
King Charles III has written to Donald Trump after the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, Buckingham Palace said.
The palace did not disclose the contents of the monarch’s private message, which was delivered on Sunday through the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.
The message follows a call to Trump on Sunday by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who condemned the violence, expressed condolences for the victims and their families and wished a quick recovery for the former president and those injured.
Trump in ‘great spirits’ Sunday
Donald Trump spent much of Sunday on the phone with friends, news hosts and local and foreign officials the day after he was injured in an assassination attempt.
Ohio Pastor Darrell Scott, a longtime ally, said Trump “was in great spirits” when they spoke Sunday morning, hours after the shooting.
“He was great, like he always is. He didn’t even make a big deal of it,” Scott said. “He was actually trying to downplay it somewhat, asking how I was doing.”
Former RNC chair Reince Priebus, who also served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that Trump was “grateful for the miracle of what happened, in his case. … One quarter inch turned the other direction and we’re obviously talking about something very different this morning.”
Leading Christian conservative calls shooting ‘wake-up call’ on rhetoric and social media
Tony Perkins, among the most influential Christian conservatives in the Republican Party, was preparing to mount a confrontation with convention planners over his disdain for how debate during the RNC’s platform committee was shut down on Monday, all but eliminating objections to the Trump campaign’s desire to soften language on abortion.
The attempted assassination changed all that, Perkins told The Associated Press after a prayer service in suburban Milwaukee Sunday evening.
“We live in a violent society. And we run the risk of becoming callous to it. And if we become callous to it, we’re going to have more of it,” Perkins said. “I’m hoping and praying it’s a wake-up call in many ways.”
“So, as a result, I’m stepping back from forcing the issue on the platform,” he added. “More divisiveness would not be healthy.”
Perkins called social media “a contagion” for toxic rhetoric passed along by people who do not feel that they’re heard by their government or leaders, and attributed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in part to the notion of overheated online rage.
“We need to stop,” he said.
And while thanking God during the service for Trump’s survival, Perkins told more than 100 in the Pewaukee church, “Lord, I believe that our nation is at such a volatile moment that yesterday could have torn this nation right in half.”
Motive of man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump remains elusive
The 20-year-old man who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump first came to law enforcement’s attention at Saturday’s rally when spectators noticed him acting strangely outside the campaign event. The tip sparked a frantic search, but officers were unable to find him before he managed to get on a roof, where he opened fire.
In the wake of the shooting that killed one spectator, investigators are hunting for any clues about what may have drove Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, to carry out the shocking attack. The FBI said they were investigating it as a potential act of domestic terrorism, but the absence of a clear ideological motive by the man shot dead by Secret Service allowed conspiracy theories to flourish.
The FBI said it believes Crooks, who had bomb-making materials in the car he drove to the rally, acted alone. Investigators have found no threatening comments on social media accounts or ideological positions that could help explain what led him to target Trump.
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022. His senior year, Crooks was among several students given an award for math and science, according to a Tribune-Review story at the time.
He tried out for the school’s rifle team but was turned away because he was a bad shooter, said Frederick Mach, a current captain of the team who was a few years behind Crooks at the school.
Jason Kohler, who said he attended the same high school but did not share any classes with Crooks, said Crooks was bullied at school and sat alone at lunch time. Other students mocked him for the clothes he wore, which included hunting outfits, Kohler said.
Trumps tells Washington Examiner he has rewritten his speech for the RNC
Former President Donald Trump told The Washington Examiner that he has rewritten the speech he was set to deliver at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday after being the target of an attempted assassination at his rally Saturday.
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he told the news outlet in an article posted Sunday evening.
In the interview, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee says he will now call for a new effort at national unity, noting that people from different political views have called him.
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said.
Trump also reflected on the moment a bullet pierced the upper part of his right ear. He said he was saved from death because he turned from the crowd to look at a screen showing off a chart he was referring to.
“That reality is just setting in,” he told the news outlet as he boarded his plane in Bedminster, New Jersey, for Milwaukee. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”
‘In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box,’ Biden says
President Joe Biden spoke for about five minutes from the Oval Office and noted that the Republican National Convention was opening in Milwaukee on Monday, while he himself would be traveling the country to campaign for reelection.
He says that during the RNC, he has “no doubt” Republicans will “criticize my record and offer their own vision for this country.” But he promised in campaigning to lay out “our vision.”
The president said passions would run high on both sides and that the stakes of the election were enormous.
But he added, “it’s time to cool it down” and noted not just the weekend attack on Trump but also the possibility of election-year violence on multiple fronts.
He used the address to urge all Americans not to accept an escalation in political violence as normal.
“We debate and disagree, we compare and contrast … but in America we resolve our differences at the ballot box,” Biden said in his address.
He added: “Politics must never be a literal battlefield. God forbid a killing field.”
Biden decries political violence in address from Oval Office
President Joe Biden says “we can’t, we must not go down” the road of political violence in American after Saturday’s attempted Trump assassination.
In a prime-time national address, Biden said that political passions can run high but “we must never descend into violence.”
“We can do this,” Biden implored, saying the nation was founded on a democracy that gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force. “American democracy — where arguments are made in good faith. American democracy where the rule of law is respected. Where decency, dignity, fair play aren’t just quaint notions, they’re living, breathing realities.”
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