Trump is safe after deadly shooting at Pennsylvania rally

Former US President Donald Trump was safe following what investigators said was an attempted assassination at a campaign rally, a shooting in which at least one other person died and two others were badly wounded.

Officials said the gunman was also killed. The motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.

The incident will likely have significant implications for November’s US presidential election — President Joe Biden condemned the shooting and spoke with Trump via telephone, the White House said — in a country where polls show growing divisions between rival camps.

Trump had been in the midst of his speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, when shots rang out. The former president put his hand to his right ear, ducked down, and was quickly covered by Secret Service agents. When he got up shortly thereafter, he was surrounded by security, pumped his fist and mouthed “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Video showed Trump on the ground for a few seconds and an agent was heard saying “Hawkeye’s here,” referring to the codename of the former president’s counter assault team. Another voice was heard saying, “Shooter’s down, we’re good to move.”

In a Truth Social post, Trump recounted that a bullet “pierced” part of his ear and “much bleeding” occurred. He extended his condolences to the family of the rally attendee who died. Officials later said the Republican candidate left the hospital and had returned home.

The White House said late Saturday that Biden had spoken to Trump. In an earlier statement, Biden said he was “grateful to hear that [Trump was] safe and doing well.” In a televised speech, Biden said this kind of violence was “sick,” adding: “We cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

A Biden campaign official said they were pausing all outbound communications and working to pull their television ads as quickly as possible.

The shooting marked the first attempted assassination of a US president or major party candidate since 1981, when a gunman fired upon President Ronald Reagan. More recently, the US lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords was shot at a 2011 constituent meeting and Congressman Steve Scalise was seriously wounded in a 2017 mass shooting at a baseball field.

As a result, it is expected to lead to questions for the Secret Service: The New York Times cited two law-enforcement officials to report that a semiautomatic rifle was recovered at the scene of the shooting, despite attendees at Trump campaign events being subject to security screenings and searches.

Top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi — whose husband survived a politically-motivated attack in 2022 — and Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were quick to condemn the incident as political violence.

Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Scalise, also reacted to the incident. Johnson in particular said that the House would conduct an investigation into the shooting, and get the head of the Secret Service, as well as Homeland Security and FBI officials, to testify before lawmakers.

Saturday’s attack confirmed longstanding fears that the former president would at some point be an assassination target, with a close Trump confidant telling Semafor’s Shelby Talcott that such an incident was inevitable — a matter not of “if,” but of “when.” The idea among many close to Trump is this: That the opposing side’s hatred of him is so strong that it would spur on an attempt against his life.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson crystallized this point of view last year: “We are speeding towards assassination, obviously. No one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach this conclusion,” he said.

Read Shelby’s story on the long-held fears among Trump aides and supporters.

The former president’s wife, Melania Trump, released a rare statement on Sunday condemning the attack and the idea of Trump as an “inhuman political machine,” and calling for unity.

World leaders expressed a mixture of horror at the incident and questions about the state of US democracy.

Trump’s admirers on the global right were among the first to react: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who recently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago — said his “thoughts and prayers” were with Trump during “these dark hours,” while Dutch politician Geert Wilders posted simply, “#prayfortrump.” The leader of the French far-right National Rally party, Jordan Bardella, reacted by saying, “Violence is the poison of any democracy.”

Beijing expressed “condolences” in a brief statement issued by the foreign ministry, but speculation proliferated on the messaging platform WeChat over the motives for the attack, as well as its implications for this year’s election.

Russia, meanwhile, called on the US to “take stock” of its “policies of incitement to hatred,” and linked the shooting to Washington’s support for Kyiv’s efforts to repel Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Global reaction to the shooting included shock, and questions about American democracy.