O Republican National Convention begins this week, with delegates and officials arriving in Wisconsin amid the ensuing turmoil an assassination attempt on Saturday in the old President Donald Trump as he prepares to become the Republican Party’s official nominee.
The quadrennial event comes not only as Trump leads a party in lock step with him, but also as Democrats roil. Viability of President Joe Biden and whether they should replace him as their candidate.
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Here are the latest:
First Lady Jill Biden spoke with Melania Trump following an assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The first lady’s office confirmed that they spoke on Sunday afternoon, but did not release details of the conversation. President Joe Biden spoke with Donald Trump after the attack at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump will attend the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week.
Milwaukee’s mayor says he knows Americans will have questions about security at the Republican National Convention following Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, but the event has the highest level of security possible, “so I feel quite trusting”.
“The people who are here have confidence in the work they’ve done over the last 18 months,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson said at an informational meeting Monday morning. “And I also have faith and trust in the Secret Service, the police, the fire department and other agencies that provide security today.”
The director of the US Secret Service says she is confident in the plan to secure the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday, following an attempt on the life of presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In a statement, Kim Cheatle said Monday that security plans for the event are “designed to be flexible.”
“The Secret Service will continually adapt our operations as necessary to ensure the highest level of security,” she said.
Cheatle says the plan will be changed as necessary to ensure the continued safety of event attendees in Milwaukee.
A man shot Trump from a rooftop near a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Trump is recovering and will attend the convention. President Joe Biden ordered a national security review of the incident over the weekend.
King Charles III wrote to Donald Trump after the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, Buckingham Palace said.
The palace has not released 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 phone call addressed to Trump on Sunday by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who condemned the violence, expressed condolences to the victims and their families and wished the former president and the injured a speedy recovery.
Donald Trump spent much of Sunday on the phone with friends, news anchors and local and foreign officials, a day after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.
Ohio pastor Darrell Scott, a longtime ally, said Trump “was in a great mood” when they spoke Sunday morning, hours after the shooting.
“He was great, as he always is. He didn’t even think much of it,” Scott said. “He was actually trying to downplay it a little bit, asking how I was doing.”
Former RNC Chairman 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. … A quarter of an inch turned the other direction and obviously we’re talking about something very different this morning.”
Tony Perkins, one of the Republican Party’s most influential Christian conservatives, was preparing to mount a showdown with convention planners over their disdain for the way debate during the RNC platform committee was shut down on Monday, virtually eliminating objections to the Trump campaign’s desire to soften language on abortion.
The assassination attempt changed all that, Perkins told The Associated Press after a prayer service in suburban Milwaukee on Sunday night.
“We live in a violent society. And we run the risk of becoming insensitive to it. And if we become desensitized to it, we will have more,” Perkins said. “I hope and pray it’s a wake-up call in many ways.”
“Therefore, as a result, I am avoiding forcing the issue on the platform,” he added. “More division would not be healthy.”
Perkins called social media “a contagion” for toxic rhetoric spread by people who do not feel they are heard by their government or leaders, and attributed the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in part, to the notion of superheated online rage.
“We need to stop,” he said.
And while thanking God during the service for Trump’s survival, Perkins told more than 100 people at the Pewaukee church: “Lord, I believe our nation is in such a volatile time that yesterday it could have ripped this nation in half.”
The 20 year old man who tried to murder Former President Donald Trump caught the attention of authorities at Saturday’s rally when spectators noticed him acting strangely outside the campaign event. The tip sparked a frantic search, but police were unable to find him before he managed to climb onto the roof, where he opened fire.
In the wake of the shooting that killed a bystander, investigators are searching for clues as to what may have driven Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, to carry out the shocking attack. The FBI said it was investigating this as a potential act of domestic terrorismbut the absence of a clear ideological motive on the part of 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 found no threatening comments on social media accounts or ideological positions that could help explain what led him to attack Trump.
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022. In his senior year, Crooks was one of several students who received a math and science award, according to a Tribune Review history at the time.
He tried out for the school’s rifle team but was rejected because he was a poor shot, said Frederick Mach, the team’s current captain who was a few years behind Crooks in high school.
Jason Kohler, who said he attended the same school but did not share any classes with Crooks, said Crooks was bullied at school and sat alone at lunch. Other students made fun of him for the clothes he wore, which included hunting gear, Kohler said.
Former President Donald Trump told The Washington Examiner that he rewrote the speech he was supposed to give at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday after being targeted by an assassination attempt at his rally on Saturday.
“The speech I would give on Thursday would be incredible,” he told the media outlet in an article published Sunday night.
In the interview, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee says he will now call for a new effort at national unity, noting that people of different political views have called him.
“This is an opportunity to unite the entire country, even the entire world. The speech will be very different, very different from what it would have been two days ago,” he said.
Trump also reflected on the moment a bullet pierced the top of his right ear. He said he was saved from death because he turned away from the crowd and looked at a screen that showed a graph 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. If I hadn’t done it then, well, we wouldn’t be talking today, would we?”
