JD Vance Says Democrats Provoked Shooting Attempt With ‘Inflammatory’ Language
Echoing Trump, Vance tried to blame Democrats and the Harris campaign for yesterday’s apparent assassination attempt on the GOP nominee for president, saying “inflammatory political rhetoric” is stirring up violence.
“We can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist, and if he's elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy,” Vance said during a speech in Georgia.
“Some crazy person is going to take matters into their own hands and actually listen to the crazy rhetoric that you're putting out there,” he continued, adding that the second shooting attempt on Trump is “pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”
Trump, whose trademark incendiary remarks are essentially unrivaled in political history, is facing multiple federal charges for inciting a violent, deadly riot at the U.S Capitol in 2021 when he refused to admit he’d lost the presidential election to Biden. In May, he called his political opponents “human scum.”
Ohio Governor Sends State Troopers To Boost Security At Springfield Schools
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced on Monday that he is sending State Highway Patrol troopers to be stationed at each of the Springfield school district’s 18 buildings “beginning tomorrow and continuing for the foreseeable future.”
The move is in response to multiple schools in Springfield recently having to evacuate following a series of bomb threats. The threats began after Trump, Vance and their allies started spreading the racist lie that the city’s Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets and posing a danger to other residents – a repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that Springfield officials warn is contributing to increased hostility against the town. The Republican governor did not mention Trump or Vance in his announcement.
“Many of these threats are coming in from overseas, made by those who want to fuel the current discord surrounding Springfield. We cannot let the bad guys win,” DeWine said in a statement. “We must take every threat seriously, but children deserve to be in school, and parents deserve to know that their kids are safe. The added security will help ease some of the fears caused by these hoaxes.”
About 36 troopers with the patrol’s Mobile Field Force will provide “added security” to the schools by sweeping each building for threats before students and staff arrive and staying on campus throughout the school day and during dismissal, according to the governor. None of the threats so far have been legitimate, DeWine said, but the increased security is “purely as a precaution” so schools are prepared.
Biden’s Directions To Secret Service Helped Response To Apparent Assassination Plot, Acting Director Says
At a press conference on Monday, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. lauded the Secret Service for their “hyper-vigilance” and “exemplary response” to the apparent assassination attempt on Trump on Sunday.
Rowe claimed that the Secret Service stepped up its security of Trump (and Harris) following the July 13 assassination attempt at Biden's request. He also credited a “layered approach to security” as the reason the suspect was found before shooting at Trump.
“In the days that followed, President Biden made it clear that he wanted the highest levels of protection for former President Trump and for Vice President Harris,” Rowe said. “The Secret Service moved to sustain increases in assets and the level of protection sought. And those things were in place yesterday.”
As directed by Biden, according to Rowe, the elements in place on Sunday included a counter-sniper team, counter surveillance agents placed on the exterior, a counter-assault team and a counter-unmanned aerial system.
Federal Prosecutor For Ryan Routh Is Also The First Haitian American U.S. Attorney
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida is helping oversee Routh’s prosecution in the apparent assassination plot against Trump.
He is also the first Haitian American to serve as U.S. attorney, nominated by Biden before getting confirmed by the Senate in December 2022.
Markenzy Lapointe was raised in both Haiti and the Miami area, serving in the Marine Corps during the Gulf War in Iraq before becoming a lawyer and eventually the first Black attorney to be South Florida’s top federal prosecutor.
In a Monday press conference, Lapointe announced the criminal charges against Routh, who is accused of trying to assassinate Trump one day earlier at his golf club in West Palm Beach. Routh was federally charged with firearm possession by a convicted felon, and possession and receipt of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
It is notable that Lapointe will prosecute the suspect in what the FBI has called the attempted assassination of Trump, given that the former president and his allies are continuing to repeat racist lies about Haitian immigrants who have settled in the industrial Ohio town of Springfield.
Lapointe was born in Port-au-Prince as the son of a Haitian street vendor and a tailor, moving to the U.S. as a 16-year-old who did not know English and sharing a cramped Liberty City apartment with his mother and four siblings. He was naturalized in 1995.
As a lawyer, Lapointe clerked with Florida Supreme Court Justice Harry Lee Anstead during the contested 2000 election litigation, and as U.S. attorney helped prosecute individuals accused of participating in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
The federal prosecutor has maintained a pro bono practice, where he helped reunite a baby girl who was buried in the rubble of the 2010 Haiti earthquake with her family. Jenny, now a teenager, lives with her parents in the U.S., according to NBC Miami.
“One of the things you realize being the first of anything – first Haitian American, first Black U.S. attorney, is there’s a tremendous responsibility that comes with that,” Lapointe told the outlet last year. “Part of that is recognizing it means a whole lot more than you thought it would because there’s an entire community who may have felt outside of the process, outside of the mix.”
Secret Service Is Aware Of Elon Musk’s ‘Jokes’ About More Assassination Attempts
The U.S. Secret Service is aware of Elon Musk’s since-deleted post on social media noting “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” it told Reuters.
"The Secret Service is aware of the social media post made by Elon Musk and as a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence," a Secret Service spokesperson told Reuters. "We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees."
The spokesperson wouldn’t say if the law enforcement agency had reached out to Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X the following year.
After deleting the post, Musk repeatedly insisted he was joking and meant no harm, saying: “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text” and that “just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”
Biden, Trump Spoke On The Phone Today: Report
Biden spoke with Trump over the phone Monday afternoon about the apparent assassination attempt, the Washington Post reports.
Secret Service Warned Trump Years Ago Of Safety Risks Of His Golf Outings: Report
The Secret Service had reportedly warned Trump shortly after he became president in 2017 of the possible safety risks of golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Former U.S. officials told The Post that the Secret Service pointed out that if photographers can catch sight of Trump on his golf courses, so could potential gunmen.
But Trump reportedly dismissed the warning and insisted that his golf clubs were safe and that he wanted to keep playing there, posing threats to his safety that only intensified after he left office as there was less security and fewer agents guarding him.
Trump Suspect Ryan Routh Self-Published Book In 2023 On Ukraine, Geopolitics
Routh had self-published a 291-page book last year on a range of geopolitics – including his unsuccessful efforts to assist Ukraine in the ongoing war against Russia’s invasion, his opinion on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and the growing military threats that Taiwan faces from China.
The book published in February 2023 is titled, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity.” HuffPost has not read the book and therefore cannot independently verify its contents, though the book appears to still be on sale through Amazon.
Routh’s book notably criticized Trump’s “tremendous blunder” of a withdrawal from the country’s nuclear deal with Iran when he was president in 2018 – calling the Republican an “idiot,” “buffoon” and a “fool” for the decision Routh said pushed Tehran to eventually supply Russia with drones that have cause immense damage in Ukraine, according to CNN.
He also reportedly compared the Venezuelan dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro with the attempted coup by Trump’s followers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We have mirrored [Venezuela’s] devastating events with our own catastrophe on January 6th perpetrated by Donald Trump and his undemocratic posse,” Routh wrote, according to CNN.
The 58-year-old suspect in Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt had reportedly voted for Trump in 2016, but wrote in his book that he is “man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake.”
Secret Service Says Suspect Did Not Fire A Shot At Trump
The Secret Service confirmed that the suspect in the second assassination attempt of Trump on Sunday did not get off a shot at the agent or Trump, and never had a line of sight on Trump at all, NBC News reported.
Previous reports said that the suspect had line of sight on Trump.
Ohio City Has Received 33 Bomb Threats; Will Have Schools Searched Daily, Gov. Says
The city of Springfield, Ohio, will have state troopers conduct daily sweeps of its schools in response to it receiving 33 bomb threats in recent days, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Monday.
“People have the right to feel safe as well as be safe," DeWine said while announcing the coming arrival of 36 members of the state patrol who will sweep and patrol 17 schools for the foreseeable future.
"They will sweep the building every single day and will remain there during the school day," he said. "We want to make sure as schools continue this week in Springfield that parents have confidence that school is in fact safe."
The threats, which DeWine said are being made from overseas, follow racist conspiracy theories against the city’s growing immigrant population. Trump and Vance have been among those publicly spreading the conspiracies.
X Suspends Account That Appeared To Belong To Trump Shooting Suspect
An account on X, formerly Twitter, that appeared to belong to Trump attempted assassination suspect Ryan Routh has been suspended for violating the social media platform’s rules.
The account, whose handle is @RyanRouth, featured many posts about the Russia-Ukraine war and the user’s desire to volunteer as a fighter alongside Ukrainian soldiers, as observed Sunday evening by HuffPost. The account’s user also posted his support for Trump and eventually former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) while she was running in the 2020 presidential primary, but shifted over time to appear more supportive of Biden and Harris, according to the AP.
The posts aligned with a New York Times report from last year in which the paper spoke to Routh about how some U.S.-based Americans wanted to travel to Ukraine in order to help the country fight back against Russia’s invasion.
“I feel lucky to have been born in America, with freedom and opportunity and hope that I do not waste such a valuable thing; to do more and take less,” the X account’s biography said before it was suspended.
Several outlets had revealed that Routh was the suspect law enforcement apprehended for Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt in Florida, resulting in the public widely sharing the X account as belonging to Routh. Officials investigating the incident have not yet confirmed whether the account was run by the 58-year-old man.
X CEO Elon Musk did not mention the account’s suspension, but posted on Monday morning that the “incitement to hatred and violence” against Trump “by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop.”
Biden Denounces Apparent Assassination Attempt On Trump
In a Monday speech at the HBCU Week Conference in Philadelphia, Biden denounced Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Trump, claiming that there is “no place for political violence in America.”
“I’ve always condemned political violence and I always will,” Biden said. “In America, we resolve our differences peacefully, at the ballot box, not at the end of a gun. America’s suffered too many times the tragedy of an assassin’s bullet. It solves nothing and just tears the country apart. We must do everything we can to prevent it and never give it any oxygen.”
Bodycam Footage Shows Arrest Of Suspected Trump Gunman
The Martin County Sheriff’s Department released bodycam footage showing Routh’s arrest. In it, officers instruct Routh, who has his shirt pulled up over the back of his head, to walk backwards toward them and then handcuff him.
You can watch the arrest footage here.
