FLINT, Mich. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump made his first public appearance Tuesday since the second suspected assassination attempt on him on Sunday, addressing a crowd that chanted “God bless Trump!” and “Fight, fight, fight” as U.S. Secret Service agents surrounded the stage to protect him.
“It was a great experience,” the Republican presidential candidate said at an evening town hall meeting in Flint, Michigan, about the events with thousands of supporters. But he also described running for president as a “dangerous business,” similar to car racing or bull riding.
“Only important presidents are shot at,” he said.
Earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris struck a moderate tone in an interview with black journalists, even avoiding mentioning Trump by name. The interview stood in stark contrast to the former president’s highly controversial appearance before the same group.
The two candidates briefly put aside their differences in a phone call that Trump described as “very, very nice,” although the crowd booed when he mentioned Harris by her first name. Harris had said earlier the same day that she told Trump “there is no place for political violence in our country.”
Both sides are ramping up their campaigning without making any changes to Trump’s schedule, despite an apparent assassination attempt at one of his golf courses in Florida. The incident has renewed Republican accusations that Democratic criticism of Trump is provoking violent attacks. Democrats have in the past blamed Trump for his longstanding inflammatory campaign rhetoric and calls for the jailing or prosecution of his political opponents. But Harris took a more cautious approach after the latest incident.
Her conversation with the National Association of Black Journalists was one of the few in-depth interviews Harris has conducted since she replaced President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket in July. She repeatedly criticized Trump on issues such as his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his opposition to abortion access, but carefully referred to him as a former president and otherwise avoided directly mentioning him by name.
Trump renewed his previous threats of retaliation against campaign workers, donors and others to stoke fears about the integrity of the upcoming 2024 election.
On Tuesday, he posted on his social media page: “Those who behave unscrupulously will be tracked down, caught and prosecuted on a scale that has unfortunately never been seen before.”
The focus of the town hall meeting in Michigan was to be on the auto industry, a mainstay of the swing state. Trump claimed that Democrats were undermining American auto manufacturing by pushing the adoption of electric vehicles and repeated false claims that Chinese automakers were building immense factories across the border in Mexico to flood the U.S. with vehicles.
Trump will appear in New York, Washington, DC and North Carolina later this week.
Harris will stop in Washington, Michigan and Wisconsin in the coming days, with the two candidates overlapping in their focus on the industrial regions of the Midwest, as well as Pennsylvania and North Carolina – all swing regions that could decide what is expected to be an extremely close election.
Harris answered questions from three association reporters in a petite, relatively tranquil setting in the Philadelphia studios of public radio station WHYY. It was a far cry from Trump’s speech at the NABJ conference in Chicago in July, when he was hostile toward the moderators and sparked an uproar by questioning the vice president’s ethnic identity.
Her demeanor was different from her campaign rallies, where Harris often received the loudest applause for declaring that her background as a prosecutor meant, “I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Asked about reports of dwindling support among black male voters, Harris said she does not expect to “win because I’m black.” She dodged a question about whether she would support efforts by some congressional Democrats to get reparations from the government to compensate descendants of slaves for years of unpaid labor by their ancestors. Biden supports the idea of at least considering reparations.
Biden and Harris have so far tried to avoid political issues in their responses to Sunday’s incident, instead condemning political violence of any kind. The president also called on Congress to escalate funding for the Secret Service.
Trump has claimed without evidence that months of criticism from Harris and Biden, who call him a threat to American democracy, prompted the latest attack.
“I really believe that the Democrats’ rhetoric is making bullets fly. And that is very dangerous. Dangerous for them. It is dangerous for both sides,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Post.
Authorities said Ryan Wesley Routh camped out for nearly 12 hours with food and a rifle outside the West Palm Beach golf course where Trump was playing on Sunday. But he fled without firing a shot when a Secret Service agent spotted him and shot him. He was subsequently arrested as he drove down the highway.
Routh’s previous online posts suggest that his political stance is neither Democrat nor Republican. The attack came nearly two months after Trump was injured at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump also met Tuesday with sheriff’s office officials who conducted the traffic stop on the highway during which Routh was taken into custody.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, said Monday at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition event that “it’s popular on much of the left to say we have a problem on both sides,” but “nobody has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last few months, and now two people have tried to kill Donald Trump.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her briefing with reporters on Tuesday that there should be zero tolerance for rhetoric inciting violence. She bristled at the suggestion that Biden and Harris had stoked division by calling Trump a threat to democracy, saying there were concrete examples of the former president being such a threat – such as when he helped incite an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Responding to Vance’s comments, Jean-Pierre said, “When you use that kind of language, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because people look up to that particular national leader and listen to you.” She said such comments would cause “people to take you very seriously.”
Dan Curry, 44, of Saginaw, Michigan, attended the town hall meeting on Tuesday and said he was concerned about the prospect of further violence against Trump.
“They say Republicans are gun-crazy lunatics who want to shoot people, but we’re not going after them,” Curry said, adding that these attacks could support Trump gain even more support.
“It mobilizes its base,” he said. “How could it be otherwise?”
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Weissert reported from Washington and Gomez Licon from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Philadelphia, Matt Brown in Washington, Jill Colvin in New York and Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this report.
