Former President Trump will return to the campaign trail Tuesday night for the first time since the Secret Service foiled an apparent second attempt to assassinate him.
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Trump will participate in a town hall event this evening in Flint, Mich., that will be hosted by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), his former press secretary.
- The majority Black city is in Genesee County, which traditionally votes Democrat, but the margins will matter in 2024.
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In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by about 19,000 votes in Genesee County. However, she received about 7,000 fewer votes there than former President Obama did in 2012. She lost the state by just over 10,000 votes.
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President Biden outperformed both Obama and Clinton in the county in 2020, defeating Trump there by about 21,000 votes on his way to putting Michigan back in the blue column.
There are questions about how the attempts to kill Trump might impact the election. Trump’s approval rating went up after the first attempt on his life, although Vice President Harris has been rising in the polls since last week’s debate.
But the politics this week have been secondary to the latest attempt on Trump’s life, which has elicited bipartisan anger and sparked a scramble to ensure it doesn’t happen a third time with only 49 days to go before the election.
The Hill’s Brett Samuels reports that anti-Trump rhetoric on the left has come under scrutiny, even as Democrats vent frustration with Trump for turning up the temperature with his own rhetoric.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), unloaded on Democrats and the news media at a campaign event in Michigan.
“I think that it’s time to say to Democrats, to the media, to everybody that has been attacking this man and trying to censor this man for going on 10 years, cut it out or you’re going to get somebody killed.”
There is bipartisan anger and a sense of exasperated frustration that a second gunman was able to get so close to Trump.
“They’re obviously not doing the job they ought to be doing,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told Semafor. “The problem is, they failed twice.”
“They’re going to eventually get the guy killed,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told The Hill’s Al Weaver. “You hate to say it, but what this looks like is an intentional [act] of not funding what they should fund to help him. I hope nothing happens.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the Secret Service could get additional funds in a stopgap spending bill that must be passed before Sept. 30 to avoid a government shutdown.
Meanwhile, new details are emerging about the Secret Service’s encounter with suspect Ryan Wesley Routh, who was able to hide in waiting on Trump’s golf course with an automatic rifle.
- The Secret Service did not sweep the grounds of the golf course before Trump arrived, The New York Times reports.
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Routh did not fire any shots, and he never had a line of sight on Trump, the Secret Service says.
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The Secret Service is telling Trump that new arrangements are needed before he golfs again.
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The Secret Service is undergoing a “paradigm shift” with the goal of being more proactive, NBC News reports.
Multiple probes into the first assassination attempt are still ongoing to determine the security failures that allowed a 20-year old gunman to fire on Trump from fewer than 150 yards away at a rally in Butler, Pa., only two months ago.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said the Department of Homeland Security has been “almost derelict in its duty by resisting our requests for documents, evidence and information that are necessary to investigate.”
Blumenthal added that a report on the incident will be coming soon and that the public will be “shocked” and “appalled” by the findings.
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