Trump accuses Biden, Harris of rhetoric against him despite his own history of bullying rivals

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump claimed Monday without proof that the president Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris Comments that he poses a threat to democracy inspired the latest apparent assassination attemptdespite his long history of inflammatory campaign rhetoric and advocacy for the imprisonment or prosecution of his political enemies.

With just 50 days to go until the presidential election and early ballots already being mailed out in some places, this year’s presidential campaign has been one of the most turbulent in American history, even before Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt. Trump was unharmed after the Florida incident and praised the Secret Service for protecting him, but he didn’t hesitate to blame his opponents.

“Their rhetoric is getting me shot, when I’m the one who’s going to save the country and they’re the ones who are destroying it — from the inside and the outside,” Trump said in comments on Fox News Digital.

The former Republican president’s remarks are a sharp departure from how he responded to an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in which a bullet grazed his ear.

Trump then called for national unity, saying in a social media post that it was “more important than ever that we stand together.” Days later, however, the former president returned to his usual commentary, sharply criticizing Democrats and relishing political bombast.

As authorities continue to investigate the motives of the Pennsylvania shooter and the person arrested Sunday in Florida, Trump has made clear that he views the assassination attempts against him as politically motivated — and that he blames his rivals for them.

This is despite Trump’s repeated criticism of his political opponents. He has raised the possibility of suing his political opponents and has claimed, without evidence, that Democrats brought the case against him for political reasons.

In a message posted to his social media site on Monday, Trump again claimed he had been the target of politically motivated attacks, writing that the left “has taken politics in our country to a whole new level of hate, abuse and distrust.” He said “it’s only going to get worse” and then pivoted to comments about immigration, even though there is no evidence that the person arrested in connection with the apparent assassination attempt was an immigrant.

This follows the former president’s remarks during last week’s debate and in the days since. amplify false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are kidnapping and eating pets. The community a few days later Schools and government buildings evacuated amid bomb threats, adding to the sense of a particularly volatile and tense moment in America, even before Sunday’s stunning development.

Biden, by contrast, has sought to stay out of politics. He denounced the apparent assassination attempt and said Monday that America must work to end the scourge of political violence.

“America has suffered the tragedy of an assassin’s bullet too many times,” Biden said at the start of a speech at the National HBCU Week Conference in Philadelphia. “It doesn’t solve anything. It just tears the country apart. We have to do everything we can to prevent it and never give it oxygen.”

Biden added in his speech that Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the Secret Service, was in Florida to “assess what happened and determine whether any further adjustments need to be made to ensure” Trump’s safety. The president spoke with Trump by phone later Monday and expressed relief that the former president was safe, according to the White House, which described the conversation as cordial.

In a statement released by his campaign, Mr Trump said: “We had a very pleasant conversation. It was about Secret Service protection.” His campaign did not provide further details.

After Trump’s shooting in Pennsylvania, Biden initially called on the nation to lower the political temperature, though he too eventually returned to criticizing Trump as a threat to the nation’s founding principles.

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said Sunday’s “deeply unsettling” event, which comes on top of an already dramatic year with an election looming, has created “a kind of uncertainty across the country.”

“The year 2024 has just unfolded in a chaotic and frightening way. It’s impossible for anyone to find balance in their daily lives with a constantly grim and absurd news cycle,” Brinkley said.

Trump was already scheduled to spend Monday at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, according to a person familiar with his schedule. That evening, the former president was scheduled to speak about cryptocurrency on social media site X for the launch of his sons’ crypto platform, and then he’s expected to return to the field Tuesday for a town hall meeting in Flint, Michigan. He’s scheduled to travel to New York, Washington, and North Carolina later in the week.

HarrisShe, meanwhile, met with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters at the organization’s 1.3 million-member headquarters in Washington. She is seeking support from another union, but it was not immediately forthcoming.

The vice president was scheduled to campaign Tuesday in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania and speak later in the week in Washington, Michigan and Wisconsin. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was scheduled to attend campaign receptions in Washington and New York on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Their return to the campaign trail will likely be overshadowed by questions about the gunman arrested by Secret Service agents on the former president’s golf course in Florida. The FBI was leading the investigation and was working to determine the motives for the probe.

Beyond the first assassination attempt on Trump, when he was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the campaign has been upended in the past six months by Trump’s historic criminal trial and conviction, the crisis and eventual demise of Biden’s reelection campaign after his botched debate performance, and Harris’s takeover, which fundamentally changed the race.

In August, the Trump campaign disclosed that it had been hacked and claimed that Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. The Justice Department is preparing criminal charges in connection with the hack.

Trump’s accusations against Democrats, who see him as a threat to American democracy, are also being echoed by his allies, who are seeking to link those arguments to the detention of a suspect on Sunday. Investigators have not commented on the suspect’s potential motives.

Republican strategist David Urban, a Trump ally, said it was too early to know how this might affect the coming days and weeks of the campaign, but in his conversations with those around Trump, he sensed a deep sense of shock and uncertainty.

“We’ve said ‘unprecedented’ a lot of times this year,” Urban said. “I don’t even know if we can say that word anymore.”

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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Ayanna Alexander in Philadelphia, Darlene Superville and Aamer Madhani in Washington, Steve Peoples in New York and Adriana Gomez Licon in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., contributed to this report.