Later today Kamala Harris will participate in a Philadelphia forum organized by the National Association of Black Journalists. The event has been scheduled after the vice-president did not attend the group’s convention held in Chicago during the summer.
Donald Trump did appear at that event in July – with a typically contentious performance during which he repeated lies and attacked Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Some journalists were critical of the organisation for inviting him.
Reuters reports that, as Trump did, Harris will face a panel of three journalists in the session. The location is also significant – Pennsylvania is often regarded as a “must win” swing state in order to take the presidency.
My colleague Rachel Leingang has this report on misinformation and conspiracy theories that have sprung up in the wake of the apparent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump while he was playing golf at the weekend:
As details of his passion for Ukraine have emerged, some on the far right have claimed Routh may have ties within the US military, with some going even further to say the arrested suspect could have been part of a larger plot. There is no evidence to suggest either – and none of those spreading the rumors have put forth any proof.
“What are the odds that this shooter, who spent months fighting in Ukraine, has zero links to anyone in US military or intelligence circles?” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, wrote on X. “Find them.”
Questions surrounding how Routh knew Trump would be golfing that day, given that the round wasn’t on a public schedule, led some to suggest that those tasked with protecting the president could be in on the attempt. The former president praised the Secret Service in the aftermath of the apparent thwarted shooting.
Another conspiracy theory claimed Routh appeared in a video for the investment firm BlackRock. The video footage circulated along with the claim shows him at a protest in Ukraine, though the video is unaffiliated with the firm, the company said, adding that Routh “has never been an employee of BlackRock nor has he appeared in any BlackRock ads”.
The theory attempted to tie Routh to Thomas Crooks, the shooter in the first assassination attempt against Trump in July, who did appear in a BlackRock commercial when he was a student at Bethel Park high school in Pennsylvania.
Read more here: Far-right conspiracies abound after second apparent Trump assassination attempt
As far as the election campaign is concerned, this week the Kamala Harris team has its focus on youth turnout to coincide with today’s National Voter Registration Day.
In a statement campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez said “The stakes this November couldn’t be higher, and vice-president Harris knows our democracy is stronger when we all vote. We are focused on meeting young Americans where they are to drive home the stakes of this election on the issues they care most about.”
During the week Harris’ VP pick Tim Walz and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro will be among those campaigning on campus in battleground states.
Recent polling has shown that Harris has a significant lead over Trump in those all important swing states – provided people come out to vote. “When we vote, we win,” said Chávez Rodríguez
The charges facing Ryan Wesley Routh after his apparent bid to assassinate Donald Trump at the weekend are possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. Yesterday Ronald Rowe Jr, acting director of the Secret Service, confirmed that Routh did not fire any shots, and that he did not have the former president in his line of sight when a Secret Service agent opened fire at him.
The New York Times has spoken to Beth Celestini, a former Secret Service agent who previously protected President Barack Obama. She said she had concerns about “reports that the suspect allegedly was in the bushes for 11 hours,” adding “The Secret Service has protocols where if enacted, this suspect should have been discovered before the incident.”
Another retired security agent, Ronald Layton, said to the paper that the question for the agency was “Was this just luck that you caught this guy, or did you have the appropriate mechanisms in place for these kinds of things on the threat spectrum?”
During his appearance on a social media channel to promote a new cryptocurrency venture, former president Donald Trump had some conciliatory words president Joe Biden’s response to an apparent second assassination attempt on Trump in the space of a few weeks.
Trump said:
He was very nice today, he called up to make sure I was OK, to make sure, [and ask] do I have any suggestions. We do need more people on my detail, because we have 50,000, 60,000 people showing up to events, and, you know, other people don’t have that, but he couldn’t have been nicer.
It was in marked contrast to the inflammatory words earlier on Fox News Digital, where he had described Biden and his election opponent Kamala Harris as “the enemy within”. On that occasion Trump said:
Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out. These are people that want to destroy our country. It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.
Suspicious packages sent to election officials in at least six states on Monday
Suspicious packages were sent to election officials in at least six states on Monday, Associated Press reports, but there was no indication that any of the packages ultimately contained hazardous material.
Powder-containing packages were sent to secretaries of state and state election offices in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Tennessee, Wyoming and Oklahoma, officials in those states confirmed. The FBI and US Postal Service were investigating. It marked the second time in the past year that suspicious packages were mailed to election officials in multiple state offices.
The packages forced an evacuation in Iowa. A state office building in Topeka, Kansas, was also evacuated due to suspicious mail sent to both the secretary of state and attorney general.
Suspicious letters were sent to election offices and government buildings in at least six states last November, including the same building in Kansas that received suspicious mail Monday.
In his press conference on Monday, the acting director of the US Secret Service proposed that the agency needs a radical overhaul in order to meet the challenge of protecting presidents in the current climate.
“Coming out of Butler [where Trump was shot at in Pennsylvania], I have ordered a paradigm shift. The Secret Service’s protective methodologies work and they are sound, and we saw that yesterday. [But] we need to get out of a reactive model, and get to a readiness model,” Ronald Rowe Jr said.
The Washington Post is among those calling for tighter security around former president Donald Trump. In an editorial overnight the paper wrote:
Trump is not receiving the level of protection he did when he was president. This needs to change. Fifty days before a neck-and-neck election, after what are now two attempts on his life, Trump ought to get presidential-level coverage. Protecting Trump as he campaigns is as essential a part of ensuring political stability and continuity of government as one could imagine.
Elsewhere in its reporting, the paper says that Trump’s penchant for golf has long been a concern of the security services. It reports:
Trump aides and Secret Service agents have long worried about his possible exposure while golfing. The issue, they say, is twofold. He selects locations to golf – his own clubs – that are particularly difficult to secure. And then he follows a highly predictable routine on any given weekend.
Bill Gage, a former Secret Service agent, said the armed man probably didn’t need to do “very sophisticated surveillance”. “He just had to sit and wait for Trump to arrive,” he said. “You don’t have to do a lot of guessing to know where he is going to be, and that gives a bad guy time to prepare,” he said.
During his call on social media yesterday evening, the former president Donald Trump also had praise for the witness who led to the identification of suspected gunman Ryan Wesley Routh, who was subsequently arrested on I-95.
While promoting a new cryptocurrency business venture, Trump said:
The civilian did a phenomenal job. A woman. I mean, who would think … how many people would have the brainpower to follow him and take pictures of the back of his truck so that they end up getting, and the key was the license. So they got the license, and after they had the license, you know, there’s all sorts of technology where they can literally pinpoint where this truck is. I never knew something like that existed. And they pinpointed him on the highway.
It was quite something, but it worked out well and Secret Service did an excellent job, and they have the man behind bars, and hopefully he’s going to be there for a long time. Dangerous person, very, very dangerous person.
Donald Trump recounts events of shooting attempt
Here is how the former president Donald Trump recounted the events of the weekend while speaking on social media on Monday. He told listeners:
I was playing golf with some of my friends, it was on a Sunday morning and very peaceful, very beautiful weather, everything was beautiful, it’s a nice place to be. And all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five, and it sounded like bullets. But what do I know about that? But Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me.
Everybody just, we got into the carts, and we moved along pretty, pretty good. I was with an agent, and the agent did a fantastic job. There was no question that we were off that course. I would have loved to have sank that last putt, but we decided, let’s get out of here.
He started shooting at the barrel, started shooting in the bushes. Could only see the barrel. How good is that? Right? Could only see the barrel. Based on that, he started shooting and ran toward the target and was shooting a lot, I mean, those were the shots we heard. The other one never got a shot off.
The acting head of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr, has confirmed that the suspected gunman, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, did not fire any shots.
Trump was speaking as he launched a new cryptocurrency business, having previous derided cryptocurrencies, saying in 2021 “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam.”
Welcome and opening summary …
Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics, as the country comes to terms with a second attempted assasination bid aimed at one of the presidential election candidates in the space of a few weeks. Here are the headlines …
The suspect in the second apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump in as many months was charged in federal court on Monday morning with two gun-related crimes, as urgent investigations began into how he was able to get so close to the former US president
Cellphone records showed Ryan Wesley Routh camped out near the golf course for about 12 hours, with food, before being confronted by a Secret Service agent. Ronald Rowe Jr, the US Secret Service acting director, said Routh did not fire any shots
Trump added to the already tense atmosphere around the US election campaign by making highly inflammatory remarks, explicitly blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for inciting the attack and calling them “the enemy within”
Biden told reporters on Monday that he did not yet have a full report of the Sunday incident at Trump’s Florida golf course, and was thankful Trump was “OK”. He said: “There is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country
Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the state was launching its own investigation
