Donald Trump targeted in assassination attempt

Days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, lawmakers and watchdogs are taking the US Secret Service to task over how a gunman could have made it to a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle just 400 feet away from the former president, let alone fire a weapon.

As more details trickle in, it’s clear that the Secret Service failed to properly do its job. “It was unacceptable,” the agency’s director, Kimberly Cheatle, told ABC News, adding that she doesn’t plan on resigning.

We don’t know much yet about the shooter who killed one man and wounded two others in an apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday.

We do know that he was 20 years old, and male.

The recent shooting of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally has raised serious questions about the security failures that enabled the attack.

While there was significant Secret Service presence as well as local law enforcement on the scene, a gunman was able to get onto the roof of a building about 150 meters away from Trump and fire at both him and members of the crowd. That development has prompted concerns about missteps made by the Secret Service and gaps in the coverage provided for the former president at the event.

Information is still emerging about the shooting at former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. However, even though the complete picture isn’t available, there are ways to think about the political and social moment we’re living in and how it may have contributed to the violence.

We do know the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about a 75-minute drive from Butler, where the rally was being held. He was a registered Republican (though he also made a $15 donation to a progressive group), perpetrated the shooting with an AR-15 style rifle purchased by his father, and had at least two explosive devices with him. And he was killed by a Secret Service agent after he killed 50-year-old Corey Comperatore and injured Trump as well as two others.

Many congressional Democrats believe their party is hurtling toward a cliff’s edge and shouldn’t even bother trying to turn around.

Late last week, Senate Democrats held a private meeting to discuss Joe Biden’s electoral viability in the wake of his disastrous debate performance and subsequent revelations of his apparent cognitive decline. According to Politico, no more than four of the caucus’s 50 Democrats said they were committed to sticking with Biden as their party’s nominee.

The shooter who attempted to kill former president Donald Trump at a rally in western Pennsylvania on Saturday was found with an AR-15-style rifle near his body.

Anyone familiar with the recent history of American gun violence should not be surprised. The AR-15 — an exceptionally deadly weapon capable of firing several rounds at high rates of speed — and AR-15 style weapons have been used in recent years to kill scores of people and injure hundreds more in mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Buffalo, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Parkland, Florida, and Orlando, Florida.

The photo has already become inescapable. You’ve undoubtedly seen it: It is in newspapers, in memes, on T-shirts. Former President Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, face streaked with blood, raising a fist into the sky. A man defiant in the face of potential death.

“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump told the New York Post of the picture, taken immediately following an attempt on his life at a July 13 rally. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”

I met Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s new choice for vice president, in the summer of 2022. I was covering a conservative conference in Israel, and Vance was the surprise VIP attraction. We chatted for a bit about the connections between right-wing movements across the world, and what American conservatives could learn from foreign peers. He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed.

Yet his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.

The rebellion against President Biden that was brewing among some Democrats since the president’s debate performance has vanished from the headlines, and some are speculating that it may be over for good.

Just a few days ago, Biden’s hold on the nomination seemed seriously in doubt. A series of brutal reports — on his plummeting fundraising, on some of his own aides losing confidence in him, and on top party figures privately seeming open to his ouster — buffeted him last Wednesday and Thursday. Anonymous sources told reporters that dozens more House Democrats would soon publicly call for him to step aside.

Almost as soon as photographs emerged of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, conspiracy theories wondering whether the shooting could have been fake boomeranged around the internet.

The fevered thinking went like this: The images of Trump pumping his fist and apparently saying “fight” were too conveniently media-ready. The term “staged” promptly trended on X, with multiple viral tweets getting over 100,000 likes. Redditors debated whether it was uncouth to be suspicious that Trump was trying to drum up sympathy votes.

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” President Joe Biden said on Saturday, following the shooting at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania that left the former president hurt and killed an audience member.

But the fact is, this type of violence has a long history in American politics: Four US presidents have been killed in office and virtually all of them, in the modern era, have been targeted by assassination plots of varying levels of seriousness.

Roughly two hours after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) blamed President Joe Biden.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance, the odds-on favorite to be Trump’s vice president, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Former President Donald Trump is the ninth US president to be a target of an assassination attempt. The last was President Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, survived an attack by a lone shooter. But that was in 1981 — a decidedly different political moment than today’s highly polarized environment. And that means it’s uncertain that the political benefits Reagan saw after surviving his attempt will come to Trump.

On March 30, 1981, Reagan was exiting the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, where he had just given a speech before members of the AFL-CIO. As he raised his arm to salute the crowd gathered outside, six shots were fired toward him. President Reagan and three others were hit, including press secretary James Brady, who was left disabled. The bullet that hit Reagan narrowly missed his heart, but struck his rib, leading to a punctured lung. Reagan was rushed to the hospital, and emergency surgery saved his life.

Editor’s note, July 14, 5:30 pm ET: This is a rapidly evolving news story that will be updated with new verified information.

On Saturday, July 13, gunshots rang out as former President Donald Trump addressed a crowd at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Shortly after, Secret Service agents rushed the stage, and Trump was escorted off — his face smeared with blood.

Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on Saturday.

The former president was addressing a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a 20-year-old carried a rifle onto a nearby roof. That gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, proceeded to fire several bullets at Trump, injuring the Republican’s ear, killing a male rallygoer, and wounding another. Security forces then shot Crooks dead.

It didn’t take long after the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, the killing of one of his rally attendees, and the injury of two others, for the political world’s attention to turn to a crass but undeniably important topic: What will it mean for Trump politically?

Among commentators and social media posters, there have basically been two separate instinctive — and conflicting — reactions.