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      Focus on Bethel Park as classmates describe suspected Trump gunman

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      In Bethel Park, where the man who is suspected of opening fire at a Donald Trump campaign rally on Saturday lived with his mother and sister, the houses are small and built of brick, Walmart and Target form central social hubs, and moms watch over their children at a junior league baseball park next to a tributary of the Allegheny River.The attempted assassination of the Republican former president just 45 miles north has put a focus on Bethel Park, as investigators attempt to establish the motivations of the 20-year-old shooter.Authorities on Sunday identified the suspect as Thomas Matthew Crooks. Officials said they believe Crooks acted alone. But so far, they have not been able to uncover a motivation that drove the young man to unleash a hail of bullets at Trump, wounding the former president and killing a former fire chief who was shielding his daughters.The FBI said it would continue to investigate the attack as an attempted assassination and an act of domestic terrorism.“The information that we have indicates that the shooter acted alone,” said Kevin Rojek, supervisory special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office. “At present, we have not identified an ideology associated with the subject, but I want to remind everyone that we’re still very early in this investigation.”The FBI said Crook had not been on their radar. Since his identification, a fragmentary portrait has emerged, almost by virtue of its omissions. He was employed as a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The nursing home’s administrator Marcie Grimm said Crooks “performed his job without concern and his background check was clean”.View image in fullscreenNor have there been significant clues found in his political affiliations. He had registered Republican but had also donated $15 to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on Joe Biden’s inauguration day. He had no past criminal cases against him, according to public court records.Claire, a young woman who had known Crooks through his elder sister and who did not provide a last name, said she could not quite believe the boy she had once knew had attempted to assassinate a US president.“He’s so young to want to go do that,” she said.She said Crooks had had a difficult time socially. “He wasn’t the most attractive-looking and I don’t think he did sports that can add appeal,’” she said.Former classmates who spoke to other news outlets filled in other memories. Some described Crooks as smart and shy. Others spoke of a long history of being bullied. An unnamed former classmate told the New York Post that Crooks was “a loner”. He said: “He probably had a friend group, but not many friends.”View image in fullscreenJameson Myers said that Crooks had tried out for the school rifle team but had not made the roster. “He didn’t just not make the team, he was asked not to come back because how bad of a shot he was, it was considered, like, dangerous,” Myers told ABC News. Jameson Murphy told the Post that Crooks was “a comically bad shot”.Max R Smith said to the Philadelphia Inquirer that Crooks “definitely was conservative”. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate,” Smith said.With a nation on edge, establishing Crook’s motives is seen as a key to unlocking larger issues of deep political discord.“We’re looking into his background, his day-to-day activities, any writings and social media posts that might help us identify what led to this shooting,”, the FBI’s Rojek said. “We have not seen anything threatening at this time”. More

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      Ex-Secret Service agents say ‘massive realignment’ warranted after Trump rally shooting

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      Former US Secret Service agents spent the early aftermath of what authorities say was an attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at a political rally on Saturday speaking out about what might have prevented their previous employer from failing to halt the shooter before he opened fire.Evy Poumpouras, who served in the Secret Service’s presidential protective division during Barack Obama’s time in the White House, told NBC’s Today show that rallies like the one this weekend – in a relatively exposed rural tract of Butler county, Pennsylvania – “are the most anxious you’re ever going to be as an agent because you’re trying to secure all of it”.In her remarks Sunday, the author and journalist suggested local- and state-level law enforcement officers who collaborate with the Secret Service for such events were likely the first line of defense in the area surrounding the Trump rally venue – a position reportedly confirmed by agency spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi.At Saturday’s rally, a man with a rifle was able to climb atop the roof of a bottle manufacturing plant and fire several shots at the former president at a distance of only about 165 yards.Multiple people who were outside the venue but near that building – listening to Trump campaign for another presidency – reported trying to point out the gunman to police officers stationed there. But Poumpouras said a key question to answer moving forward is to determine whether those people were directly speaking to officers or if they were unsuccessfully trying to get their attention.“When you’re doing these rallies, you’re looking at thousands of people,” said Poumpouras, who surmised the shooter waited to get into position until after Trump began speaking and commanded the bulk of rally goers’ attention. “How much law enforcement do you have? Do you have one law enforcement official to – what – 1,000 [attendees]? And are they able to get that person’s attention?”The Associated Press said it was told by two law enforcement officials that a local police officer tried to confront Crooks on the roof before the shooting. But the officer retreated after Crooks pointed a rifle at him, and within moments the attacker fired toward Trump.One ex-commander of the Long Beach, California, police department’s special tactics team told NBC it was “a fundamental security failure” to allow someone on a rooftop so near the rally Saturday.Poumpouras also said government officials are in store for difficult conversations about whether they provide enough resources to adequately secure such gatherings. She said it wasn’t uncommon for her to solicit a certain number of agents to protect a certain occasion only to be told there wasn’t enough money or manpower to fulfill that request.“This all costs something,” she said.Once the shooting erupted, former Secret Service agent Jeff James said agents largely responded appropriately with respect to shielding Trump, who had a bullet wound to the tip of his right ear. Counter-snipers fired back at the gunman, mortally wounding him after he apparently killed one spectator and badly injured two others.Agents quickly draped themselves over Trump after he fell on the stage, prepared to put themselves between the former president and any other gunshots aimed at him.In an interview with Pennsylvania news station WTAE, James faulted agents for how long it took them to whisk Trump away and into an armored vehicle. Trump put his shoes back after they had been knocked off his feet, took a few moments to defiantly raise his fist and then repeatedly mouthed the word “fight” to his supporters before agents managed to get him out of view.“There may have been four more gunmen who were going to start opening fire,” James – who estimated that Trump came within three inches of being shot squarely in the face – told WTAE. “We always treat that attack as if that is just the precursor, and the real attack is still to come.”Ultimately, Saturday warranted “an intensive review” of Trump’s security along with “a massive realignment”, ex-Secret Service agent Joseph LaSorsa – who protected former presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush – told Reuters.To that end, Joe Biden said Sunday he had ordered the Secret Service to ensure that Trump has adequate security, including at the Republican national convention beginning Monday in Milwaukee. The president also said he had ordered an independent review of security at the Trump rally.Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director, has been invited to testify before Congress on 22 July.Trump’s assassination attempt was arguably the low point of a tumultuous last decade for the Secret Service. As documented by the Washington Post, the agency had previously drawn scrutiny after high-ranking members allegedly drove drunk through the White House grounds, struck a barricade and sped past a package dropped by a woman who had claimed to be “holding a … bomb”.The package contained a book, but that hardly quelled outrage, with other scandals ensnaring the Secret Service, which also investigates certain financial crimes.There were agents who purportedly hired prostitutes in Colombia and allowed a fence-jumper at the White House to get well into the building. Agents also took four days to realize a sniper fired shots at the White House, and they somehow allowed a man carrying a gun to share an elevator with Obama.Saturday was the first time a president or leading party Oval Office candidate had been shot since the 1981 attack on Ronald Reagan outside a hotel in Washington DC.The most recent of four assassinated US presidents was John F Kennedy in 1963. The assassination of his fellow Democrat and brother Robert F Kennedy in 1968 while he pursued their party’s White House nomination resulted in presidential candidates being afforded the protection of the Secret Service.Pleas from Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to be provided Secret Service protection himself as he runs an independent presidential campaign ahead of November’s election received an infusion of support after the attack at Trump’s rally Saturday, as Politico reported. More

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      Biden urges US to reject ‘extremism and fury’ after Trump assassination attempt

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      Joe Biden on Sunday forcefully condemned political violence and appealed to a nation still reeling from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to reject “extremism and fury”.In a primetime address from the Oval Office, Biden said Americans must strive for “national unity,” warning that the political rhetoric in the US had gotten “too heated” as passions rise in the final months before the November presidential election.“There is no place in America for this kind of violence – for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception,” the president said. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”Biden’s plea for Americans to “cool it down” came as Trump said that he would use his speech at the Republican national convention to bring “the whole country, even the whole world, together.”“The speech will be a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” Trump told the Washington Examiner, adding that the reality of what had happened was “just setting in.”Biden ordered an independent review into how a gunman was able to get on to a roof overlooking a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, and fire multiple shots at the former president from an “elevated position” outside of the venue. The FBI warned on Sunday that online threats of political violence, already heightened, had spiked since the shooting.The attack, which is being investigated as an attempted assassination and a potential act of domestic terrorism, left Trump injured at the ear, but it killed a spectator, identified as a former fire chief, and critically injured two others.“We cannot, we must not go down this road in America,” Biden added, citing a rising tide of political violence that included the assault on the US Capitol, the attack on the husband of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.Biden also praised Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old former fire chief who was killed as he dove to shield his wife and daughter. Comperatore, Biden said, was a “hero” and extended his “deepest condolences” to his family.Investigators were still searching for the motive of the 20-year-old suspect, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.More than 24 hours after the attack, the investigation into how Crooks managed to open fire, reportedly using a AR-15 bought legally by his father, at the rally remained fluid. Investigators have seized several of Crooks’s devices and are starting to piece together his communications before the event. Authorities said they had discovered potential explosive devices in Crooks’s car.Meanwhile, details have begun to emerge about the suspect, who was shot and killed by Secret Service counter-snipers.As a junior in high school, Crooks donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee aligned with the Democratic party, but eight months later he registered to vote as a member of the Republican party.Former classmates described the man as a smart, and quiet student. One former classmate told Reuters that Crooks had not shown a particular interest in politics in high school, and would rather would discuss computers and games.“He was super smart. That’s what really kind of threw me off was, this was, like, a really, really smart kid, like he excelled,” the classmate told Reuters. “Nothing crazy ever came up in any conversation.”Another young man who described himself as a former classmate of Crooks at Bethel Park high school spoke with reporters on Sunday, recalling how his ex-companion “was bullied almost every day” on campus.View image in fullscreenThe president, who was at church in Delaware during the time of the shooting, cut short his weekend and returned to Washington to confront the situation, arriving at the White House after midnight. He and Trump spoke late on Saturday.Biden spoke briefly from the White House earlier on Sunday, delivering a similar message from the Roosevelt room after receiving a briefing on the investigation in the Situation Room.In those comments, Biden asked the public not to “make assumptions” about the shooter’s motives or affiliations, as conspiracy theories and misinformation swirl online.The Republican national convention will begin on Monday in Milwaukee, where Trump is expected to receive a hero’s welcome by the party’s rank and file, rattled but defiant. Trump, who arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday evening, is not scheduled to address the convention until Thursday evening, after he is formally nominated as the party’s nominee.Speaking to the New York Post while en route to Milwaukee, Trump said he was “supposed to be dead”, adding: “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle.”Biden’s remarks came at a fragile moment in the election, a re-match between the president and Trump already defined by exceptional tumult and deep political polarization.For weeks, the president has been fighting calls from elected officials in his own party to abandon his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate performance last month that underscored concerns about his age and fitness for office. The 81-year-old Biden has insisted he will not be pushed out as the party’s nominee, but has done little to quell the swirl of doubt that he is the best candidate to defeat Trump in November.Trump earlier this year became the first former president to be convicted of felonies, and faces several more legal challenges related to his role in the 6 January Capitol attack and efforts to overturn the results of a lost election. At least one Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, has called for the criminal cases against Trump to be dropped in light of the assassination attempt.In his remarks on Sunday evening, Biden was realistic about the challenge of heeding his words, accepting that national unity was “the most elusive of goals” in an America deeply divided into camps. Already, Republicans were blaming the violence on the president, arguing that Biden’s attempts to portray Trump as a threat to American democracy helped fuel a toxic political environment.Yet the attack has drawn condemnation from Republican and Democratic officials across the country as well as world leaders.“We need to turn the temperature down,” House speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday, in an interview on CNN.The president acknowledged that he and Trump offer drastically competing visions, and that their supporters diverged sharply. In Milwaukee, Republicans would offer sustained critiques of Biden’s record, the president said, while he planned to travel on Monday to Nevada, where he would rally supporters around his agenda. Because of the attack, he postponed a trip to Texas, where he was scheduled to speak at the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B Johnson presidential library.“We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America,” he said, arguing that the contest should be settled at the “ballot box” and “not with bullets”.After the attack on Saturday night, the Biden campaign reportedly moved to pull down its television ads “as quickly as possible” and pause all “outbound communications”.“Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, god forbid, a literal killing field,” Biden emphasized in his address on Sunday night. He urged Americans to “get out of our silos” and echo chambers where misinformation is rampant.“Remember: though we may disagree,” he said, “we are not enemies.” More

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      Did Donald Trump just win the election? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      You’ve almost certainly seen the pictures by now. You’ve probably seen them a hundred times. A fist in the air, blood dripping from his ear, an American flag above him, a defiant expression on his face. Trump quickly jumping up from an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally and appearing to mouth the words: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” If you fed “all-American tough guy president” into an AI image generator, it wouldn’t spit out anything half as powerful. Obviously, there’s nothing remotely positive about a terrible act of political violence that left an innocent bystander and the shooter dead. But in terms of optics for Trump’s presidential campaign? Well, as Trump himself told The New York Post on Sunday: “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen”. He added: “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”There’s still a lot we don’t know about what happened on Saturday. We know who the suspected shooter is – the FBI has identified him as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – but we don’t know why he did it. Crooks was a registered Republican but records show that when he was 17 he made a $15 donation to ActBlue, a political action committee that raises money for Democratic politicians. With the information we have right now, it’s hard to paint Crook as an extreme leftwinger.That won’t stop Republicans, though, who are already blaming Joe Biden and the Democrats for the shooting. Again, there’s still a lot we don’t know about what exactly happened, but the one thing we can definitively say is that Trump’s allies will wring every possible drop of political capital out of the shooting.“This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse,” Senator Tim Scott tweeted on Saturday, for example.“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the Ohio Senator JD Vance similarly tweeted. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”View image in fullscreenVance is right on the first point. The central premise of Biden’s campaign is that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. That phrase has been repeated again and again. “There is one existential threat: it’s Donald Trump,” Biden said at a fundraiser in February. “Trump poses an existential threat to abortion rights in Pennsylvania,” the Democratic US representative Mary Gay Scanlon said at a press conference in April. The Democratic congressman Gregory Meeks called Trump an “existential threat to democracy” this month on MSNBC.All of that is still true. But now that there’s been a dramatic threat to Trump’s very existence, that talking point loses its potency. Every time a Democrat raises it, Republicans can claim they are putting Trump’s life at risk again. Expect that phrase to start fizzling out. The assassination attempt on Trump has made it a lot harder for Democrats to emphasize how dangerous his policies would be. Instead they’ll spend the next couple of weeks talking about civility and denouncing violence. (And, of course, violence of any type should always be roundly condemned. It’s just a shame the same politicians denouncing political violence right now have no problem raining hell down on kids in Gaza. Violence, it seems, is only condemned when it affects certain people.)Another big Democratic talking point is January 6. Biden has been blistering about Trump’s election “big lie” that incited the breach of the Capitol by his supporters by a “violent mob”. Biden has asked people to recall the violent scenes and reflect on how “democracy was attacked” that day. Again, all that remains true, but that particular narrative also loses its potency when Trump has been attacked; when the democratic process has been attacked. If January 6 is mentioned again, Republicans can simply point their fingers at Democrats and accuse them of inciting violence on 13 July.While the Democrats’ key talking points have been weakened, Trump’s characterization of himself as a brave martyr has been strengthened. From the very beginning of his political career, Trump has painted himself as an outsider, taking on the elites. He’s repeatedly characterized his many legal battles as a politically motivated “witch-hunt”. DC insiders and the deep state, he keeps saying, are out to get him. He’s claimed that his enemies have tried to lock him up and have tried to steal the election. Now he can claim they’ve tried to kill him. Trump already has a cult-like base. After his brush with death, they will be even more devoted to their hero.All of this could not come at a worse time for Biden. His campaign, I don’t need to tell you, is in complete disarray. Day after day there has been headline after headline about the president being too frail and feeble for office. Biden already looked like a weak old man compared to Trump (who is only three years younger than him). Now that contrast has been extraordinarily heightened. Trump is the guy who jumps straight up after being fired at by an assassin; Biden is the guy who stumbles up the stairs. If you’re an undecided voter swayed by which candidate looks more presidential, your mind just got made up.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden embraces role as healer – but Trump remains king of the spectacle

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      Donald Trump has the stagecraft but Joe Biden still commands the biggest stage.A day after the former US president displayed his preternatural genius for spectacle – forcing the Secret Service to pause so he could show bloody defiance after a near-death experience – the spotlight turned back to his beleaguered election opponent.On Sunday, Biden delivered an Oval Office address for only the third time in his presidency, having previously done so when a deal was reached to avoid a breach of the debt ceiling and to comment on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.The set piece allowed him to demonstrate the power of incumbency, sending a message to Democratic rebels who want the 81-year-old to step aside amid concerns he lacks the mental agility to beat Trump.The familiar trappings of the Resolute Desk against a backdrop of family photos, window, flags and curtains also sought to project the image of Biden as president rather than candidate, an elder statesman rising above the fray to call for national unity after a traumatic moment.It was a solemn duty that came with relative ease to a man who, during 36 years in the Senate, made bipartisanship a cornerstone of his political identity.There is a need to “lower the temperature in our politics”, said Biden, his voice more solid and less throaty than during a recent debate and press conference. “And to remember: while we may disagree, we are not enemies.”The president urged everyone to take a “step back” and recognise the chilling pattern of the January 6 insurrection, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the intimidation of election officials, the kidnapping plot against Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the assassination attempt against Trump.“We cannot allow this violence to be normalised. The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do this.”Biden, embracing his role as repairer of the breach, made a plea: “In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box – you know that’s how we do it, at the ballot box, not with bullets. The power to change American should should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”Biden nodded towards a return to politics as usual soon, noting that the Republican convention starts on Monday and highlighting his own campaign efforts.But some of the old glitches did not disappear. While Biden showed his generous spirit by saying he had called his opponent and prayed for him, he referred to “former Trump” instead of “former President Trump”.The cold, dispassionate reality is that the failed assassination of Trump has strengthened the hand of both presidential candidates. Biden had been desperate to change the post-debate narrative and that happened in a way he would not have wished.Democrats have privately admitted that this is not the time to mount a challenge to his leadership, when they are concerned about the safety of their staff. But in the mind of the electorate, the perception of Biden as doddery and declining is likely to persist.For Trump, the gain is greater. What happened on Saturday turned the old maxim – what does not kill him makes stronger – literal. The circus master’s presence of mind, raising a fist and shouting “Fight!” to his supporters, produced a photograph for the ages and guaranteed his status as both messiah and martyr.This week the spotlight will turn firmly back in his direction. Come Thursday, instead of the august setting of the Oval Office, there will be the kitsch theatrics of a primetime speech at the Republican convention.Trump could do something truly historic by echoing Biden’s address, insisting that violence has no place in politics, accepting that his own narrow escape is a cathartic moment and now America must pull back from the brink. The rest of the election campaign could be one of decency and grace.Commentators would gush that Trump had become “presidential” and of course it wouldn’t last. Biden might have the bully pulpit but Trump remains the bully to beat. More

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      Donald Trump shooting: authorities attempt to determine motive as suspect’s devices seized

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      FBI officials said on Sunday they were assessing the shooting of Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday as a possible domestic terrorism attack and assassination attempt, as federal investigators executed a flurry of warrants in trying to determine a motive.The officials said there was no evidence that the 20-year-old suspected gunman, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was operating as part of a larger group. But his reasons for scaling the roof of a building overlooking the rally to shoot at Trump remained unclear.By Sunday evening, dozens of federal investigators with the FBI, the ATF and all three US attorney’s offices in Pennsylvania were involved in an expanding investigation that had seized several of Crooks’ devices and started to piece together some of his communications before the rally.The other major development was the discovery of potential explosive devices in Crooks’ car. Former prosecutors suggested that those could indicate Crooks expected to survive the shooting.The devices and the AR-15-style rifle, which officials said was bought legally, were sent to the bureau’s lab in Quantico, Virginia.The ATF identified the owner of the gun through its national tracing center and using business records from a gun dealer. The results of the trace were provided to the FBI within 30 minutes, the agency’s spokesperson Katrina Mastropasqua said.The shooting at the campaign rally has raised the stakes and the significance of Trump’s appearance at the Republican national convention starting Monday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he will formally accept the GOP nomination for president and will unveil his running-mate.It also cast the 2024 presidential race into uncertainty. The campaigns for both Trump and Joe Biden pulled back on political functions over the weekend, as they moved to grapple with the immediate fallout of the situation.View image in fullscreenIn Washington, Biden spoke with Trump on a call described by a source familiar as “brief and very respectful” before receiving a briefing from top US officials including the attorney general, Merrick Garland, the FBI director Christopher Wray, the Secretary for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.In brief remarks to the nation from the White House, Biden called the assassination attempt “contrary to everything we stand for us as a nation, everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not American. And we cannot allow this to happen”.Biden said he had demanded a national security review that he would share publicly, and that he had directed the US secret service to review security arrangements for the Republican convention.Later, in a primetime address, the president called for unity. The shooting “calls on all of us to take a step back,” Biden said. “We stand for an America of decency and grace … politics must never be a killing field.”Trump, for his part, huddled with senior advisers at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, keeping to his planned schedule as he prepared for the Republican convention, The Guardian previously reported. Trump’s next appearance is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday in Milwaukee, where he arrived on Sunday evening.“Based on yesterday’s terrible events, I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and The Republican National Convention, by two days, but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or a potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else,” Trump wrote.The assassination attempt placed the secret service under intense scrutiny, with lawmakers from both parties moving to open investigations into the security arrangements and calling for the agency’s director, Kimberly Cheatle, to account for the decisions.At issue remains how a single man with a semi-automatic rifle managed to access a roof 140 yards away from the stage where Trump was speaking at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.The House homeland security committee ordered the secret service’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to produce documents and communications related to the security apparatus for the rally and whether any requests for more resources had been rebuffed. More