The site where an assassination attempt was made on former U.S. president Donald Trump at a campaign rally on July 13 in Butler, Pa.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
The assassination attempt on former U.S. president Donald Trump days before he is set to be formally renominated by Republicans is forcing the country to confront its rancorous partisan divides and throwing an already turbulent race for the White House into more turmoil.
Investigators on Sunday identified the sniper who shot at Mr. Trump before being gunned down by the Secret Service, and also named the Americans killed and wounded by the gunfire. But the motive for the shooting, at a Saturday Trump rally in Pennsylvania, remains unclear.
President Joe Biden, Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival in November’s presidential election, announced Sunday that he was ordering a review of Secret Service security operations after a day of disbelief that a man with an assault-style rifle could have positioned himself so close to Mr. Trump, one of the country’s most heavily protected people.
Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. president Donald Trump is assisted by U.S. Secret Service personnel after he was wounded during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pa.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The rematch between the pair has already taken turns unprecedented in the country’s history. This spring, Mr. Trump became the first-ever former president to be criminally convicted after a New York court found him guilty of 34 felonies. And since a June debate, Mr. Biden has been fighting calls from his own party to step aside over age-related concerns about his fitness for office.
The Republican National Convention opens in Milwaukee on Monday, with organizers saying everything will go ahead as planned. The gathering is expected to culminate in Mr. Trump formally accepting the party’s nomination for president on Thursday night, and will be his first appearance on the national stage since the attempt on his life.
Carlson: At Mar-a-Lago, the Trump faithful see attempted assassination as a Braveheart moment
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Trump said he briefly considered changing his convention plans after the shooting, but decided instead to go ahead and fly to Milwaukee immediately.
“I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “UNITE AMERICA.”
The stage is set for the Republican National Convention, which opens in Milwaukee on Monday.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In a national address from the Oval Office Sunday, Mr. Biden called on politicians of all stripes to “lower the temperature in our politics” and stop the political arena from becoming a “killing field.”
“We cannot, we must not go down this road in America. We’ve travelled it before throughout our history,” he said. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever, period, no exceptions. We cannot allow violence to be normalized.”
The President warned that the coming election would be “a time of testing.”
Police tape cordons off the house of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man law enforcement identified as the shooter at the Butler Pennsylvania Trump campaign rally on the weekend, in Bethel Park, Pa.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
The FBI, which is leading the investigation of the attack, identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks. Twenty years old, he lived in Bethel Park, an affluent, leafy Pittsburgh suburb about 85 kilometres from Butler, Pa., the town of 13,500 where Mr. Trump held his rally.
Mr. Crooks was registered as a Republican voter. Someone with Mr. Crooks’s name in his zip code made a US$15 donation through ActBlue, a Democratic political fundraising platform, the day of Mr. Biden’s inauguration.
Kevin Rojek, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, told reporters Mr. Crooks had an AR-style rifle, which authorities said had been bought legally by his father. A “suspicious device” was seized from Mr. Crooks’s car and inspected by bomb technicians, Mr. Rojek said.
In interviews with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Crooks’s former school peers said he was a kitchen worker and community college student who liked video games, and websites celebrating U.S. gun culture.
Video taken of Mr. Crooks after he was shot dead appears to show him wearing a T-shirt promoting Demolition Ranch, a popular YouTube channel that shows its creator firing off handguns and assault rifles.
But Summer Barkley, a former classmate, said Mr. Crooks was “not a textbook type of person that you would expect to do something like this.” She said he was well liked by teachers, got along with people in class and knew a lot about history. “He was very quiet, but a kind person,” she said.
Corey Comperatore, 50, died in a shooting at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.Facebook
One attendee was killed and two were seriously injured at Mr. Trump’s rally, authorities said. On Sunday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro identified the man who was killed as Corey Comperatore, a father, firefighter and “avid supporter” of Mr. Trump. “Corey died a hero,” Mr. Shapiro said. “Corey dove on his family to protect them last night at this rally.”
Pennsylvania State Police also identified the two wounded victims, both of whom were stable Sunday after being in critical condition. Their names are David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pa., and 74-year-old James Copenhaver, of Moon Township, Pa.
Witnesses to the shooting said they were bewildered by the fact that a sniper was able to get on top of a building just 140 metres from Mr. Trump with a line of sight to the event stage.
“Somebody should have been stationed on top of it. I don’t understand that,” Barbara Williams, a Trump supporter from Maryland who sat on the riser behind the former president at the rally, said in an interview.
Witnesses recount chaos and confusion after attempted Trump assassination at Pennsylvania rally
While those attending the rally had to pass through metal detectors, the building from which the shots came was outside the secure perimeter. Speaking to the BBC and CBS, two men recounted seeing the shooter on the rooftop. They said they had warned police.
One of the men described police searching for the man. Two law enforcement officials told the Associated Press that an officer confronted Mr. Crooks on the roof. When Mr. Crooks pointed his rifle at the officer, the officer retreated down a ladder, Mr. Crooks opened fire on Mr. Trump and the Secret Service fired back, the sources said.
Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents after shots were fired at his campaign rally in Butler, Pa. on Saturday.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
Donald Trump is seen with blood on his face as he is taken off the stage by U.S. Secret Service agents. President Joe Biden said Sunday that the security arrangements for Mr. Trump would be reviewed.REBECCA DROKE/Getty Images
Mr. Biden said Sunday that security arrangements for Mr. Trump would be reviewed. He also ordered the head of the Secret Service to review security measures for the Republican National Convention.
The President, who was at mass in Rehoboth Beach, Del., when the shooting took place, cut short his beach weekend and cancelled a Monday trip to Texas in order to return to the White House. He said he spoke briefly with Mr. Trump on Saturday night.
Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson urged political leaders on both sides of the aisle to “turn the rhetoric down.” He then accused Democrats of exacerbating the situation by labelling Mr. Trump an authoritarian.
“When the message goes out constantly that the election of Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the republic would end, it heats up the environment,” he told NBC’s Today show.
He placed some of the blame on Mr. Biden, who in a call with donors one week earlier said “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Location of assassination attempt:
Butler Farm Show grounds
Butler
HWY. 68
MERIDIAN RD.
PENNSYLVANIA
PENN.
1 km
Butler Farm Show grounds
Law enforcement
snipers
125 metres
MAIN ST.
Roof where suspected
gunman’s body
was located
Stage area where
Trump was injured
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap;
new york times; nbc news; google earth image
Location of assassination attempt:
Butler Farm Show grounds
Butler
HWY. 68
MERIDIAN RD.
PENNSYLVANIA
PENN.
1 km
Butler Farm Show grounds
Law enforcement
snipers
125 metres
MAIN ST.
Roof where suspected
gunman’s body
was located
Stage area where
Trump was injured
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap;
new york times; nbc news; google earth image
Location of assassination attempt:
Butler Farm Show grounds
Butler
HWY. 68
MERIDIAN RD.
PENNSYLVANIA
PENN.
1 km
Butler Farm Show grounds
Law enforcement
snipers
125 metres
MAIN ST.
Roof where suspected
gunman’s body was
located
Stage area where
Trump was injured
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap;
new york times; nbc news; google earth image
At a Secret Service briefing on Sunday, officials refused to answer questions about security operations at Mr. Trump’s Butler rally. It was unclear why the building on which the shooter positioned himself was not included in the Secret Service’s perimeter for the site, given its proximity.
Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, Republican National Convention co-ordinator for the service, said there would be no changes to the security plan for the convention, which she said has the highest level of security possible and is the product of 18 months of planning. “We are confident in the security plans that are in place for the event and we’re ready to go,” she said.
Around Milwaukee on Sunday, a section of downtown was blocked off with three-metre-high fences and concrete blast barriers. Convention attendees require two different passes and a Secret Service background check to enter the venue, the Fiserv Center.
The United States has a long history of political violence, including a string of incidents in recent years. Four of the country’s presidents have been assassinated, including at least two, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, who were killed for ideological reasons.
A convoy of Donald Trump supporters gather outside Mar-A-Lago on July 14 in Palm Beach, Fla., in the wake of the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump.Saul Martinez/Getty Images
Mr. Trump is the third president or former president to be injured. Theodore Roosevelt, while unsuccessfully campaigning to return to office in 1912, was shot in the chest before a speech in Milwaukee. Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington in 1981, early in his first term.
In 2017, an Illinois man with an axe to grind against Mr. Trump and his party opened fire on a group of Republican legislators at a baseball diamond near Washington. He critically injured Steve Scalise, a member of Republican congressional leadership, before being mortally wounded.
In October, 2020, a group of men were arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer over her COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
And on Jan. 6, 2021, a Trump-supporting mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and “Where’s Nancy?” as they hunted lawmakers. They did not find the then-vice president, the then-Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, or any other lawmakers, all of whom had fled to safety elsewhere in the building.
In 2022, a Canadian conspiracy theorist broke into Ms. Pelosi’s San Francisco home planning to kidnap her. When he discovered she wasn’t there, he beat her husband, Paul, with a hammer.
In every case, it was clear that matters could have turned out worse. That appears to also be true for Mr. Trump.
“It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” he wrote on Truth Social Sunday. “We will fear not, but instead remain resilient in our faith and defiant in the face of wickedness.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office said he had spoken with Mr. Trump on Sunday afternoon, condemning the “appalling assassination attempt” and offering condolences for Mr. Comperatore’s family and the other people shot.