Key events
Writing for the New York Times, David French has looked at the likely impact of the weekend’s shooting on the way the Republican National Convention plays out over the next few days. He said:
The key change will be in the intensity of the gathering. Expect to see an immense amount of anger and pride. Republicans are rightly proud of Trump’s immediate response to the shooting. His presence of mind to raise his fist to the crowd to signal that he was very much alive and defiant was an impressive act of leadership. And we should all feel angry when someone tries to assassinate a former president and current candidate. We also know, however, that anger can be dangerous. Our great national challenge will be responding to that anger, to keep it from spiraling out of control. The key player here will be Trump, of course, and his nomination speech may well be the most-watched address in a generation. He has a historic opportunity to rise to the moment – or pull us deeper into darkness.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Former US Secret Service agents spent the early aftermath of what authorities say was an attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at a political rally on Saturday speaking out about what might have prevented their previous employer from failing to halt the shooter before he opened fire.
Evy Poumpouras, who served in the Secret Service’s presidential protective division during Barack Obama’s time in the White House, told NBC’s Today show that rallies like the one this weekend – in a relatively exposed rural tract of Butler county, Pennsylvania – “are the most anxious you’re ever going to be as an agent because you’re trying to secure all of it”.
In her remarks Sunday, the author and journalist suggested local- and state-level law enforcement officers who collaborate with the Secret Service for such events were likely the first line of defense in the area surrounding the Trump rally venue – a position reportedly confirmed by agency spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi.
At Saturday’s rally, a man with a rifle was able to climb atop the roof of a bottle manufacturing plant and fire several shots at the former president at a distance of only about 165 yards.
Multiple people who were outside the venue but near that building – listening to Trump campaign for another presidency – reported trying to point out the gunman to police officers stationed there. But Poumpouras said a key question to answer moving forward is to determine whether those people were directly speaking to officers or if they were unsuccessfully trying to get their attention.
Read more here: Ex-Secret Service agents say ‘massive realignment’ warranted after Trump rally shooting
The Kremlin said on Monday that Russian president Vladimir Putin had not contacted Donald Trump after the assassination attempt on the Republican US presidential candidate and had no plans to do so, Reuters reports.
Edward Helmore
Edward Helmore reports for the Guardian
In Bethel Park, where the man who is suspected of opening fire at a Donald Trump campaign rally on Saturday lived with his mother and sister, the houses are small and built of brick, Walmart and Target form central social hubs, and moms watch over their children at a junior league baseball park next to a tributary of the Allegheny river.
Claire, a young woman who had known Thomas Matthew Crooks through his elder sister and who did not provide a last name, said she could not quite believe the boy she had once knew had attempted to assassinate a US president. “He’s so young to want to go do that”, she said.
She said Crooks had had a difficult time socially. “He wasn’t the most attractive-looking and I don’t think he did sports that can add appeal’” she said.
Jameson Myers said that Crooks had tried out for the school rifle team but had not made the roster. “He didn’t just not make the team, he was asked not to come back because how bad of a shot he was, it was considered like, dangerous”, Myers told ABC News. Jameson Murphy told the Post that Crooks was “a comically bad shot”.
President Joe Biden has postponed a planned trip to Texas today, where he was to speak on the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B Johnson presidential library. An NBC News interview between Biden and anchor Lester Holt will now occur at the White House, instead of in Texas, as initially planned, Associated Press reports.
Here is the key passage from president Joe Biden’s response on Sunday to the shooting at Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally at the weekend:
There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence for that matter.
An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation. Everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen.
Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is important than that right now – unity.
We’ll debate, and we’ll disagree. That’s not going to change. But we’re going to not lose sight of the fact of who we are as Americans.
Speaking in a telephone briefing, FBI special agent in charge Kevin Rojek gave the media this update, saying:
At this time, the information that we have indicates that the shooter acted alone and that there are currently no public safety concerns. At present we have not identified an ideology associated with the subject, but I want to remind everyone that we’re still very early in this investigation.
The FBI said they found a suspected explosive device in the suspects vehicle. Rojek said “We have seized the device, rendered it safe and we are also in the process of analyzing that further.”
A later FBI update said suspicious devices had been found in the home of the suspect.
Reuters has spoken to residents of Bethel Park, where the suspected shooter came from.
Wes Morgan, a 42-year-old who works at an investment management company and bikes with his children on the same street as Thomas Matthew Crooks’ residence said “Bethel Park is a pretty blue-collar type of area, and to think that somebody was that close is a little insane.”
A couple standing on the porch of their nearby brick ranch-style home was left processing the events and spotlight on their neighbourhood.
“There’s never been a gun issue. There’s never been the police being called,” Mary Priselac, 67, said alongside her husband. “You kind of have to wonder what didn’t he get in life? What led to this extreme?”
Crooks’ gun – an AR-style-5.56 caliber rifle – had been legally bought, FBI officials said.
Jim Knapp, who retired from his job as the school counselor at Bethel Park High School in 2022, said Crooks had always been “quiet as a churchmouse,” “respectful” and kept to himself.
He contradicted some statements by former pupils which suggested Crooks had been frequently bullied, telling Reuters he rarely came across Crooks because “he wasn’t a needy type kid.”
Crooks occasionally ate lunch by himself in the school cafeteria, said Knapp, who would engage such students to see if they wanted company.
“Kids weren’t calling him names, kids weren’t bullying him,” Knapp said.
Knapp said he never knew Crooks to be political in any way “Anybody could snap, anybody could have issues,” he said. “Something triggered that young man and drove him to drive up to Butler yesterday and do what he did.”
Helen Sullivan has spoken to Evan Vucci, the photographer who took the picture of Donald Trump that seems likely to be remembered as an iconic imagine in US history:
The photograph was taken by Evan Vucci, chief Washington photographer for the Associated Press. Vucci has been covering Trump since his candidacy eight years ago and in 2020 won a Pulitzer for a photograph of protests after George Floyd’s death.
“I heard the shots. So I ran to the stage as the Secret Service agents were starting to cover President Trump up. They were coming up on the stage from all different directions, and they were going on top of him. I went to the front, side of the stage and I started photographing everything I could,” says Vucci, who told the Guardian he has covered hundreds of rallies like the one in Pennsylvania on Sunday.
More agents arrived, he said, and what appeared to be a Swat team.
“I started thinking, OK, what’s going to happen next? Where is he going to go? Where do I need to be? Where do I need to stand? What is going to happen?”
“The job is all about anticipation,” Vucci says.
Vucci started thinking about the evacuation route. It would be on the other side of the stage, the quickest way to Trump’s SUV. He positioned himself at the stairs near the stage.
Vucci says he “was somewhat taken aback” when Trump raised his fist, but there was only one thing was running through his mind: “Slow down, think, compose. Slow down, think, compose.”
Read more here: ‘The job is all about anticipation’: behind the lens of the defining photo of the Trump rally shooting
Ramon Antonio Vargas
My colleague Ramon Antonio Vargas overnight has pulled together everything we know so far about the man who attempted to kill Donald Trump:
The early portrait that has emerged of the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who authorities say tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in the state on Saturday before secret service agents shot him to death is a complicated and so far sparse one.
Thomas Matthew Crooks resided in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white, generally affluent suburb of Pittsburgh. Public records show he shared a home with parents who were licensed behavioral care counselors. Those same records contain no mention of any criminal or traffic citations – as well as any financial problems such as foreclosures.
Actions that Crooks took late in his time as a student at Bethel Park high school offered virtually no hint of his political leanings. He was a junior at the school, and it was the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Crooks donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee aligned with the president’s Democratic party. Public records show his father is a registered Republican and his mother a registered Democrat.
A former classmate of Crooks’ said he had not shown any particular interest in politics in high school, but they would discuss computers and games. Another young man who described himself as a former schoolmate of Crooks at Bethel Park high school spoke with reporters Sunday, recalling how his ex-companion “was bullied almost every day” on campus.
Read more here: Trump rally shooting – what we know about the suspected gunman
Protest organisers say they will still demonstrate during RNC despite Trump shooting
Associated Press reports thast activists gathering in Milwaukee for the start of the Republican National Convention say the assassination attempt on Donald Trump won’t affect their longstanding plans to demonstrate outside the convention site this week.
A diverse range of organizations and activists is expected outside the downtown Fiserv Forum, it says. The largest expected demonstration was slated to start Monday morning. The Coalition to March on the RNC, comprised largely of local groups, planned to protest for access to abortion rights, for immigrant rights, and against the war in Gaza among other issues.
“The shooting has nothing to do with us,” said Omar Flores, a coalition spokesperson. “We’re going to continue with the march as we planned.”
Organizers expect an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 attendees. Separately, the Philadelphia-based Poor People’s Army, which organizes for economic justice, plans an afternoon march.
The US Secret Service has said security plans for the Republica National Convention, which have been in the works for more than a year, remain the same.
The investigations and likely recriminations after someone was able to breach security and shoot at Donald Trump during his rally in Pennsylvania will most likely continue apace.
On Sunday evening House speaker Mike Johnson said “Congress will do a full investigation of the tragedy yesterday to determine where there were lapses in security and anything else that the American people need to know and deserve to know.”
Secret Service director, Kimberly A Cheatle, has already been summoned to appear before the House oversight committee on 22 July.
If you wanted to plan ahead who and what to watch at this week’s Republican National Convention, then I have bad news: the party hasn’t released a full slate of speakers, and it’s possible we won’t know who is taking the stage each night until hours before.
Donald Trump is expected to give his nomination acceptance speech Thursday. The day prior to that, his as-yet-unannounced pick for VP is due to give a speech in their own right on Wednesday.
There are themes for each night’s speeches, from economics to immigration to crime to national security, and we know that several members of the Trump family and their associates are due to speak. The RNC will livestream proceedings across a number of online platforms, including YouTube.
Welcome and opening summary …
Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics, which is dominated by the aftermath of the attempted assasination of former president and presumptive Republican nominee for this year’s election, Donald Trump. Here is the latest …
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Trump gave an interview, his first since the shooting, to the conservative newspaper the Washington Examiner, saying that he has rewritten his RNC speech. “The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he said, and that it “would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches”. Its focus was Biden’s policies while in office, Trump said. “This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said
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Trump said that the reason he wasn’t killed was that he looked away from the crowd and to a screen with speech notes. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”. Trump arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday night for the Republican National Convention, which is expected to continue as scheduled
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Two other rally attendees were also shot and survived. One man, Corey Comperatore, 50, died in the shooting, and has been hailed as a hero from trying to protect his daughters from the bullets
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CNN and the ABC reported that Trump underwent a precautionary CT scan after he was grazed by a bullet at a rally on Saturday. The ABC cited unnamed sources who said the scan came back clear
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FBI officials said on Sunday they were assessing the shooting as a possible domestic terrorism attack and assassination attempt. The suspected shooter is dead. He was named as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
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Early details shed little light on why Crooks might have wanted to carry out an attack on Trump or his supporters. Public records showed he was a registered Republican, though he had once donated $15 to a progressive PAC.
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Early attempts to identify social media posts or other writings that would explain the shooting were not successful. FBI officials said on Sunday afternoon that they did not “currently have an identified motive” and that “at present, we have not identified an ideology associated with the subject”
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Joe Biden gave an address to the nation, calling for unity and a rejection of political violence. His campaign was reportedly planning to tone down verbal attacks and television attack ads against Trump in the wake of the shooting, while still continuing to tout Biden’s political message about why voters should elect him in November
