Donald Trump resumed campaigning Tuesday for the first time since a second apparent attempt on his life, boasting “only consequential presidents get shot at” while praising Kamala Harris for making a phone call to check on him.
Trump spoke at a town hall meeting before fervent supporters in Flint, a beleaguered industrial city that was once a jewel of the US automotive industry in swing state Michigan, before factories closed due to foreign competition.
Trump drew a link between what the FBI called a foiled assassination bid against him Sunday at his golf course in Florida and his pledge to slap heavy tariffs on imports of cars from Mexico and China.
“And then you wonder why I get shot at, right? You know, only consequential presidents get shot at,” Trump said.
Trump’s election rival Harris, campaigning in another swing state, Pennsylvania, said Tuesday she had reached out to the former president after the thwarted attack.
“I checked on him to see if he was OK. And I told him what I have said publicly — there’s no place for political violence in our country,” Harris said in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
The White House described it as a “cordial and brief conversation.” Trump said Harris “could not have been nicer.”
Trump has said the would-be shooter was a follower of what he called President Joe Biden’s and Harris’s rhetoric insisting that he is a threat to US democracy.
At the town hall meeting, Trump supporters said the foiled attack made them support him even more.
“I believe that they want to kill Trump so that Trump cannot try to make his second term in office,” said retired autoworker Donald Owen, 71.
– ‘Zero jobs’ –
Trump depicted himself at the event as the saviour of the US auto industry as it competes with foreign companies.
He insisted: “If a tragedy happens, and we don’t win, there will be zero car jobs, manufacturing jobs, it will all be out of here.”
Trump also defended his convoluted, rambling way of speaking, and then in a tangent on fossil fuel drilling he said, “We have Bagram in Alaska. They say it might be as big, might be bigger than all of Saudi Arabia.”
But Bagram is an air base in Afghanistan. Trump may have confused it with a place in Alaska called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
Meanwhile, Harris used her interview in Pennsylvania to give her first reaction to a row over false stories spread by Trump that Haitian immigrants were eating residents’ cats and dogs in a town in Ohio.
Dozens of bomb threats were made against the community in the town of Springfield after Trump and his running mate JD Vance publicly boosted the fake story, forcing the closure of some schools.
“It’s a crying shame, literally, what’s happening to those families, those children in that community,” Harris said.
– ‘Hateful’ –
“It’s got to stop. We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States engaging in that hateful rhetoric,” she added.
On Sunday, Trump was whisked away by the US Secret Service after gunman Ryan Routh was discovered in a hedgerow at his Florida golf course.
It was the second such close call for the Republican nominee in as many months, after a bullet grazed his ear in a shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania that left one man dead in June.
The duelling visits of Trump in Michigan and Harris in Pennsylvania come as both focus on the half-dozen swing states critical to winning in the election.
A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today shows Harris with a slight 49-46 per cent 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 per cent to 39 per cent, and Trump earning male votes by a slimmer 53-41 per cent.
AFP