(AFP) – Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail Tuesday traveling to Michigan two days after another apparent assassination attempt against him was foiled. His Democratic rival Kamala Harris will also be campaigning, as she heads to the key battleground state of Pennsylvania for an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
Political violence is “unacceptable and I strongly condemn it,” Harris told Spanish-language radio broadcaster Nueva Network early Tuesday, referring to the latest Trump scare. “We have to have civil dialogue and discourse… Violence has no place,” she said.
Ex-president Trump was whisked away by the US Secret Service after a gunman was discovered Sunday in a hedgerow at his Florida golf course, the second such close call for the Republican nominee in as many months. “All of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five, and it sounded like bullets,” he told an audio platform on social media site X late Monday. “Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me,” Trump added, noting that the shots were actually from federal agents who fired at a suspect when they saw a rifle sticking out from a treeline.
As security officials said they believed the suspect acted alone, Trump sought to blame Harris and President Joe Biden, citing what he called their rhetoric about him endangering democracy. Such language by the Democratic leaders “is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country,” he said. Trump’s politicization of the incident — even as he, on the campaign trail, paints Harris as an “evil” radical turning America into a “failing nation” — has further stoked tensions ahead of the presidential election in seven weeks. Trump holds a town hall event Tuesday in Flint, a Michigan city hard hit by car plant closures and a decade-old water crisis.
The dueling visits of Trump in Michigan and Harris in Pennsylvania come as both focus on the half-dozen swing states critical to winning in the country’s Electoral College system. A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today shows Harris with a slight 49-46 percent edge over Trump in Pennsylvania, thanks in large part to major support from women voters. It confirms a large gender gap in the race, at least in Pennsylvania, with Harris leading with women by 56 percent to 39 percent, and Trump earning male votes by a slimmer 53-41 percent.
In appealing to women, Harris has pushed the issue of reproductive rights — a hot-button issue since the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn national abortion protections unleashed a wave of bans and restrictions in 22 states. Harris spoke out Tuesday in condemnation of anti-abortion laws in Georgia after a woman there, 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman, reportedly died from delayed medical care caused by the state’s restrictive regulations. “Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms,” Harris said in a statement following release of a report by ProPublica, which deemed Thurman’s the first abortion-related death officially deemed “preventable.” “This is exactly what we feared,” Harris said.
This year’s bitter campaign has seen not just the two assassination attempts against Trump. Dozens of bomb threats were made against an Ohio town’s immigrant community after Trump spread baseless stories that Haitian arrivals were eating residents’ pets, and a fringe party has urged Harris’s murder. When Harris arrives for her interview with the NABJ, however, another Trump moment is likely to come up. Trump spoke with the group in July and said Harris, who has an Indian mother and Jamaican father, “happened to turn Black” for political expediency.
– Camille Camdessus, with Michael Mathes in Washington
© 2024 AFP
