“Tone it down!”
“Tone it down!”
That was the plea from one Republican congressman as he came to grips with the assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a political rally in the Butler Farm area where he grew up.
“I am in a state of bewilderment of how and what has happened to the United States of America,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-PA., told The Associated Press early Sunday.
The shocking attempt on Trump’s life has brought into stark relief the toxic climate in America’s political life. While the details of the shooter’s motive remain unclear, the violence is a further gauge of how what was once unacceptable, if not unthinkable, in American society has become painfully commonplace.
As the 2024 election enters a crucial phase ahead of the national conventions, how the nation responds will test the first presidential contest since 2020, an election that became defined by efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
On Sunday, civic leaders, pastors and elected officials from President Joe Biden on down appealed to Americans for unity, urging an end to vitriol.
“We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said in an evening address to the nation from the Oval Office.
Under a charged atmosphere, the Republican National Convention opens this week in Milwaukee to renominate Trump to lead the ticket, while Democrats prepare for their own convention next month uncertain if the party will stick with the incumbent Biden in an expected rematch.
Trump’s rhetoric, though tempered in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, had taken on deeper and darker tones in this, his third campaign for the White House.
This spring, Trump who has accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the country” and vowed to launch the largest domestic deportation operation, told autoworkers there would be a “ bloodbath ” in this country if he is not reelected.
“If we don’t win, I think our country is finished,” he said during the New Hampshire primary.
Trump has promised retribution on his political rivals, particularly those in the Justice Department after he was indicted on federal charges of storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home and in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump also made make light of violence.
