Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that his Democratic rival and current vice president, Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden are partly responsible for the assassination attempt against him last month. The GOP firebrand alleged that the pair had been making it more difficult for the Secret Service to protect him, while pedaling the kind of rhetoric that could have encouraged the shooter.
Trump narrowly escaped death when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on him during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. The would-be assassin had taken position on a nearby rooftop that gave him an unobstructed view of the Republican candidate. One of the bullets grazed the former president’s right ear, with one attendee killed and two others injured as a result of the shooting. The shooter was subsequently killed by Secret Service agents.
In an interview on Tuesday with Phil McGraw, better known as Dr Phil, Trump said: “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’s fault.” He accused the pair of “weaponizing government” against him and bringing in the “whole DOJ to try and get me.”
“They weren’t too interested in my health and safety,” the Republican nominee added, claiming that Biden and Harris “were making it very difficult to have proper staffing in terms of Secret Service.”
According to the former president, Harris and Biden portrayed him as a “threat to democracy,” which “can get assassins or potential assassins going.”
“Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric,” Trump suggested.
In late July, Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives unanimously voted in favor of creating a bipartisan task force to probe the attempted assassination of Trump. Made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats, its intended goal is to examine potential security lapses on federal, state and local levels of law enforcement that led up to the incident.
Several days prior, Kimberly Cheatle stepped down as director of the Secret Service. Her resignation was preceded by an acrimonious congressional hearing that saw lawmakers accuse her of withholding information and refusing to take responsibility for security failures at the rally.
She was forced to acknowledge that “on July 13, we failed” in a manner not seen in decades.