Trump, Donald J

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      Butler County, Where Trump’s Rally Was Held, Is a Republican Stronghold

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      The city of Butler, a blue-collar town that was built on steel, has been trying to get a foothold economically in recent years after struggling to reinvent itself following a loss of industry in recent decades.Home to about 13,000 people, the city is perched on the banks of Connoquenessing Creek, about a 50-minute drive northeast of Pittsburgh. It retains a relatively high poverty rate compared with the nation and the rest of Pennsylvania.But the county that the city sits within has been changing over time, becoming both more educated and more prosperous.Broader Butler County’s population of nearly 200,000 remains about 95 percent white, according to the Census Bureau, but the nonwhite share of the population has been slowly growing. The county has been becoming more heavily educated — about 38 percent of adults there now have a bachelor’s degree, slightly higher than the 34 percent average nationally.The county’s unemployment rate is well below the national level: just 2.8 percent. And per capita earnings in Butler County surpassed the state average in 2007, after being below it ever since records had begun to be kept.In fact, professional and business services are now the county’ largest employer. The southern part of the county is accessible to Pittsburgh, which makes it popular among commuters into the city, and it has seen new housing developments and businesses spring up in recent years.But even as it changes, Butler county retains large swaths of rural farmland and wooded forests. Gun ownership in that corner of Western Pennsylvania is pervasive, and hunting is such a major pastime there that local schools long took off the first day of deer season.The area skews heavily Republican, and Trump signs dot local roadsides. Voter registration data from the local Bureau of Elections shows that just under 40,000 Democrats are registered in the country, and nearly 80,000 Republicans. About 20,000 voters are registered as members of neither party.True to those trends, Trump voters outnumbered Biden voters nearly two to one in the 2020 election. More

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      Two Attendees Describe the Moment Trump’s Rally Erupted Into Chaos

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      Corey Check, a local conservative activist and Republican committeeman in Butler, Pa., and his friend Nathan Rybner were sitting in a section of seats to the right of where former President Donald J. Trump was standing onstage on Saturday evening when they heard a series of loud pops. The sounds seemed to be coming from over their heads in the section where they were sitting, they said.“I heard what I thought was firecrackers,” said Mr. Rybner, a Republican committeeman from Erie County, Pa. “It did not sound like a typical gunshot.”They were sitting close enough to the stage that as Mr. Trump spoke, they could take photos of themselves with the former president in the background. They watched in shock as Secret Service agents rushed toward Mr. Trump.Some of the other attendees in their section tried to flee the chaotic scene that followed, Mr. Check said, but a Secret Service agent ordered everyone to get down.“The first thing I thought to myself was, America’s under attack,” Mr. Check said. “I grabbed the hands of a couple of people I didn’t even know. We said the Lord’s Prayer. I called my family and told them I loved them.”When they were allowed to stand up, Mr. Rybner said he saw what appeared to be blood on a higher level of the seating section behind them. “There was a lot of blood,” he said.Before the rally devolved into chaos, while Mr. Rybner was still waiting for Mr. Trump to arrive onstage, he said he passed the time by looking at the crowd in the section. “I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” he said.Mr. Check, speaking by phone minutes after the shooting, was still struggling to process what he had just experienced.“We chanted ‘U.S.A.’” after all this happened, he said, adding that the country will live on “despite what some maniac did to Trump.”“We’re alive. And we will never stop. America has been here, we will always be here, chanting ‘U.S.A.’ Because we’re not done. These people will not destroy our country,” he said. More

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      Tiroteo en mitin de Donald Trump: esto es lo que sabemos

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      Un espectador también murió después de que una persona disparara contra el expresidente durante un mitin en Pensilvania, según personas informadas sobre el asunto. El candidato parecía tener sangre en la cara cuando lo sacaron del escenario.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Una persona armada disparó un arma contra el expresidente Donald Trump el sábado en su mitin en Butler, Pensilvania, según un funcionario de EE. UU. y dos personas informadas sobre el asunto, el cual está siendo investigado como un intento de asesinato.Un asistente al mitin falleció y el presunto tirador fue neutralizado por el Servicio Secreto, mientras Trump fue escoltado fuera del escenario con la cara y la oreja ensangrentadas, según tres personas informadas sobre el asunto.El presidente Joe Biden se dirigió a la nación poco después del incidente y condenó la violencia como “enfermiza”. Trump se encontraba “bien”, según Steven Cheung, portavoz de su campaña, y un portavoz del Servicio Secreto dijo que Trump estaba “a salvo”. Cheung no proporcionó más información sobre si Trump había resultado herido ni cómo, y los funcionarios no proporcionaron más información sobre si otros asistentes al mitin resultaron heridos.Esto es lo que hay que saber:We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Biden, a Race Against Time

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      When my mom got into her 80s, we had to deal with periodic medical issues. Fainting. Falls. Broken bones.Luckily, she was in good stead with the local rescue squad because she faithfully attended their crab feast fund-raisers.Each time, my siblings and I would move heaven and earth to get her home from whatever hospital she had landed in.In 2003, I tried to talk one emergency room doctor into releasing her after 11 hours.“I’ll let her out if she can tell me who the president is,” the doctor said.We both looked at my mom, expectantly.“George,” she said.I was thrilled; W., it was.“George Washington,” she finished.After each episode, I’d proudly tell her internist, Dr. Simon, how we had nursed her back to health.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More