In his first public statement since his new assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump said in an interview on Fox News that the “rhetoric” of Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is the cause of the two failed attacks he has suffered in just over two months. The shooter, arrested and identified as Ryan Routh, “believed Biden and Harris’ rhetoric and acted accordingly,” he said. “Their rhetoric is getting me shot when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones destroying the country, both from within and from without,” he added.
Specifically, Trump points to comments in which Democrats called him a “threat to democracy” after he tried four years ago to manipulate the election result and then reverse it by encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory, in the largest act of political violence in the country’s recent history.
“They say they are the leaders of unity, but they are anything but,” Trump said: “They are people who want to destroy our country. They are the enemy from within. They are the real threat.” In a post on his now-suspended X account, Routh said that, in this election, “democracy is at stake at the ballot box” and that the Democrats “cannot lose.” Trump uses this tweet as an example of the Democrats’ “highly inflammatory language”: “This is the stuff dangerous fools hear, like the shooter: that’s the rhetoric they hear, and the same with the first one.”
The White House, which was informed immediately of the foiled assassination attempt, immediately sent a statement saying that Biden and Harris “are relieved to know that he is safe.” The Democratic candidate later said, through the social network X, that “violence has no place in the United States” and “I am glad that he is safe.” Her number two, Tim Walz, reiterated that message and said that political violence “is not who we are as a nation.” President Biden, for his part, praised the work of the Secret Service “for its vigilance and its efforts to keep the former president and those around him safe,” and called for its security protocols to be further strengthened.
Over the weekend, the president suggested that Trump was trying to incite violence with his comments about Haitian immigrants, which the Republican himself said during the debate with Harris on ABC News that “they are eating the dogs” of residents of the town of Springfield, Ohio – a claim refuted by local authorities but which has led to an increase in threats against immigrants. “Any president should reject hatred in America and not incite it,” Biden said, referring to Trump.
“They use very inflammatory language,” Trump said in the interview. “I can use it, too, and much better than they can, but I don’t.” Routh, who fled by car when he was spotted by a Secret Service agent in the bushes near the fence of Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, was arrested shortly afterward and remains in custody. He was charged with two federal crimes in a Florida court this morning, while the FBI’s investigation into his motives continues.
#Trump #blames #Biden #Harris #rhetoric #apparent #assassination #attempt #calls #real #threat #Diario #Página
