FLINT, Mich. — Former President Donald Trump made his first public appearance Tuesday since the apparent second assassination attempt on his life Sunday, addressing a crowd chanting “God bless Trump!” and “Fight, fight, fight” as U.S. Secret Service agents surrounded the stage to protect him.
“It’s a great experience,” the Republican presidential candidate said at a town hall meeting in Flint, Michigan, about hosting events with thousands of supporters. But he also called running for president a “dangerous activity,” comparable to car racing or bull riding.
“Only important presidents are targeted,” he said.
Earlier in the day, Vice President Kamala Harris struck a measured tone, even avoiding mentioning Trump by name in an interview with black reporters, in stark contrast to the former president’s highly controversial appearance before the same group.
The two candidates briefly put aside their differences in a phone call that Trump described as “very, very nice,” though the crowd booed when he referred to Harris by her first name. Harris had said earlier in the day that she told Trump “there is no place for political violence in our country.”
Both sides have stepped up their campaigning without changing Trump’s schedule, despite the apparent assassination attempt at one of his Florida golf courses, which renewed Republican accusations that Democrats’ criticism of Trump inspires violent attacks. Democrats have criticized Trump in the past for his long history of inflammatory campaign rhetoric and advocacy of jailing or prosecuting his political enemies. But Harris has been more cautious after the latest incident.
Her meeting with the National Association of Black Journalists was one of the few in-depth interviews Harris has given since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader in July. She has repeatedly criticized Trump on issues including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his opposition to abortion access, but has been careful to refer to him as the former president and in other ways that avoided naming him directly.
Trump has reiterated his threats of retaliation against election workers, donors and others as he tries to stoke fears about the integrity of the upcoming 2024 election.
He posted on his social media site Tuesday: “Those who engage in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, arrested and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before.”
The Michigan town hall meeting was billed as a meeting devoted to the auto industry, a pillar of the swing state. Trump claimed that Democrats would undermine the U.S. auto industry by pushing for electric vehicles and repeated false claims that Chinese automakers were building large factories across the border in Mexico to flood the United States with vehicles.
Trump will make appearances later in the week in New York, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina.
Harris also plans to travel to Washington, Michigan and Wisconsin in the coming days, with both candidates focusing on the industrial Midwest, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — all key areas that could decide what is shaping up to be an extremely close election.
Harris answered questions from three NABJ reporters in a small, relatively quiet space in the Philadelphia studios of public radio station WHYY. It was a stark contrast to Trump’s speech at the NABJ conference in Chicago in July, when he was hostile to moderators and sparked an uproar by questioning the vice president’s racial identity.
Her demeanor was different from her campaign rallies, where Harris often receives her loudest applause by declaring that her experience as a prosecutor means, “I know the type of Donald Trump.”
Asked about reports of eroding support among black voters, Harris said she didn’t “assume that I would have it because I’m black.” She sidestepped a question about whether she supports efforts by some congressional Democrats to have the government compensate descendants of slaves for years of unpaid labor by their ancestors. Biden has supported the idea of at least exploring reparations.
So far, Biden and Harris have tried to avoid politics in their responses to Sunday’s incident, instead condemning political violence in all its forms. The president has also urged Congress to increase funding for the Secret Service.
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that months of criticism of him by Harris and Biden, who call him a threat to American democracy, inspired the latest attack.
“I really believe that the rhetoric from the Democrats” “is making bullets fly. And it’s very dangerous. Dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for both sides,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Authorities say Ryan Wesley Routh camped for nearly 12 hours outside the West Palm Beach golf course where Trump was playing Sunday with food and a rifle, but fled without firing a shot when a Secret Service agent spotted him and shot him. He was later arrested while driving on the highway.
Routh’s online posts suggest he has not always been consistent in his political choices, whether he supports Democrats or Republicans. The attack came just two months after Trump was injured at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump also met Tuesday with sheriff’s deputies who initiated the traffic stop that took Routh into custody.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, said at an event hosted by the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition on Monday that “in many quarters of the left, it’s common to say we have a problem on both sides.” But “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last two months, and two people have now tried to kill Donald Trump.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday during her briefing with reporters that there should be zero tolerance for speech that incites violence. She chafed at the suggestion that Biden and Harris have stoked division by calling Trump a threat to democracy, saying there were real-life examples of the former president being such a threat, such as when he helped incite an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In response to Vance’s comments, Jean-Pierre said: “When that kind of language is used, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because people look up to that particular national leader and they listen to you.” She added that such comments open the door to “people taking you very seriously.”
Dan Curry, 44, of Saginaw, Michigan, attended the town hall meeting Tuesday and said he was concerned about the prospect of further violence against Trump.
“They say Republicans are gun-crazy lunatics trying to shoot people, but you don’t see us going after them,” Curry said, adding that such attacks could drum up more support for Trump.
“It energizes his base,” he said. “How could it not be?”
Weissert reported from Washington, D.C., and Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Philadelphia, Matt Brown in Washington, Jill Colvin in New York and Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this report.
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