There is no place in America for this kind of violence, or any violence for that matter.
The central premise of the Biden campaign is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
He’s a beast and he’s ready to fight for this nation. He’s ready to fight for us and he’s in it to win it.
An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation. Everything.
There’s no doubt about the fact that we are a horribly divided nation right now politically.
The attempt on Donald Trump’s life on July 13th at the Pennsylvania rally is a stark reminder of the risks involved with representing an ideology to the masses.
So hearing this is a little jarring, especially with them saying they found explosiveness in his car. That being a block away is quite terrifying. It’s hard to think that someone that grew up and graduated from the school that I go to now could do something like this, and not only that, live across the street from me.
With this assassination attempt, I feel like it’s going to swing everything in his way. I think this is probably going to fire up a lot of people that support him, who were already pretty fired up.
Nobody should have to go through that. And so until he put his fist up, and even after, I was so concerned because you just didn’t know what was going on. So yeah, that was very heart-wrenching for America. I remember my mom going through the assassination of JFK and I just don’t think it’s something that nobody should experience.
Many people at the rally said while we were leaving, “Donald Trump won the election tonight.”
Extremists and militants feared that Pakistan would no longer be a safe haven for them. And they tried to prevent my party coming to power or prevent me from coming to power with this attack.
Long live Bhutto!
Today Bhutto is alive. Her killer must pay the price for her blood.
For me, peace is first the readiness of the Arab leaders to reconcile, and I stress to reconcile, with the existence of Israel. Because the essence of peace is reconciliation with the existence of one of the other.
It has been an extraordinary day for the Palestinians of Gaza City, but it is still not clear if the peace process has really advanced.
The prime minister went to Brighton Police Station to tell newsmen about her own escape. She was awake and had just completed work on her conference speech when the bomb went off.
Today for the first time in two decades, soldiers walk the streets of West Belfast with no need to fear the IRA. They’re not going home yet and may not for a long time, but it still must be hard to believe.
My husband was in bed and all the windows went, and the bathroom was extremely badly damaged.
Yes, we were. That’s enough. We were, we were very lucky. You hear about these atrocities, these bombs, you don’t expect them to happen to you, but life must go on as usual, and your conference will go on.
This government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.
There has been an assassination attempt on President Reagan.
But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom. So I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.
The president has been hit. He has a wound, we believe, in his upper shoulder. His condition according to the White House is stable. We do not believe that the president’s life is in any danger. His assailant is in custody, or his suspected assailant is in custody. For news on that assailant and for news of any possible motive, we’re still waiting.
How high is the price of freedom, but also how much it is worth that price?
I had the delusion back in 1981 that by shooting the president I could impress Jodie Foster, which me saying that now, it’s ridiculous. But that’s what I believe back then. It was, in ways, like a suicide attempt, just saying, ‘This is it. This is the end of my life.’
Did you have any knowledge then that those letters were forwarded to the FBI? When was the first time you knew the FBI was involved in an investigation of the Hinckley letters?
The first time I knew that the FBI was involved was when somebody called me up and said, “Please come over and talk to the FBI.” That was also at the same moment, I think maybe 10 minutes later, when I heard about the whole Reagan deal. I didn’t know anything about it until that point.
How do you feel? What are you going to do when you get home, Mr. President? What are you going to do when you get home?
Sit down.
The pledge we all made then is still true and we’re going to keep that pledge and that is to have a government that will be of the people of California. Partisanship ends as of today.
Under normal circumstances, President Ford could be expected to carry this state very easily. This is Michigan and this is his home state. But these are not quite normal times because Mr. Reagan is doing very well. And so President Ford is having to fight for every vote that he can get here.
I now solemnly reaffirm my promise I made to you last December 6th to uphold the Constitution, to do what is right as God gives me to see the right, and to do the very best I can for America.
He saw the hand of a woman come up between two people in the crowd and she was pushing her way through the crowd. And just about that time there was another person, a red-headed woman, moved toward him. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but all at once the president made a motion like this as if he’d been punched or pinched or something.
You’ve got it stuck in your brain that I murdered somebody. What do you want to call me a murderer for? I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t need to kill anyone. I think I have it here. You know, if I wanted to kill somebody I’d take this book and beat you to death with it, and I wouldn’t feel a thing. It’d be just like walking to the drugstore. Do you feel blame? Are you mad? Do you feel like wolves?
What drove you to want to try to assassinate President Ford?
Well, everybody asks that, and the thing is that everybody was talking about it. They say, “Where did you get the idea?” I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in San Francisco, people were saying this all the time. Number one, we elect our presidents, we don’t appoint them. And Gerald Ford was appointed and he was appointed by a crook, if you will pardon the expression.
I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.
I am obliged to do all that I can.
I think the tough thing would have been winning the Democratic nomination, but I think had he got it, he really would have had a very good chance against Nixon. He had all of that Kennedy glamour, Kennedy mystique.
With this faith, we will be able to transform the tangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
I do plan to stir up trouble in some of the big cities in our country this summer, but my stirring up trouble will be righteous trouble, trouble to bring about nonviolent solutions. There is no doubt about the despair in the Negro community, and I don’t think we deal with that despair by doing nothing. We’ve got to have outlets through which people can channelize their legitimate discontent.
I was deeply saddened last evening as all men of goodwill must have been by the senseless slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was a symbol of nonviolence, and I hope and pray that his end would in some way bring people together so that we could solve the many serious problems of human relations that face us in this country of ours today in a nonviolent manner.
The death of Martin Luther King is a great tragedy, not only for the people of the United States but for all of us throughout the world. I couldn’t foretell what the result will be, but we’ve lost a very wise counselor and a very constructive figure, a very constructive statesman.
I said, “Dr. King.” That was it. I said, “Dr. King,” just as he straightened up, said, “Dr. King,” and the bullet exploded in his face and evidently came from this direction because he was standing at an acute angle and the bullet knocked him up off of his feet in that direction against that ledger over there.
We turned around immediately because we didn’t know how many bullets were coming, but we turned around looking and we were looking to see where it come from because you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t tell there was a shot.
Until it hit his face.
It sounded like a stick of dynamite, large firecracker.
We ain’t what we ought to be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.
In America, I don’t think there’s any gradual coming together. There may be a gradual coming together at the top, a few handpicked upper-class bourgeois Negroes are coming together with the so-called liberal element in the white community, but at the mass level, I don’t think there’s any real honest, sincere coming together. If there’s anything, there’s a widening of the gap.
The events and decisions of the next 10 months may well decide the fate of man for the next 10,000 years. There will be no avoiding these events. There will be no appeal.
He’s been shot. He’s been shot. Oswald has been shot.
I think the Cuban Missile Crisis is an educative experience for him. It really changes him. He becomes much more conscious of and concerned about the dangers of the nuclear age.
I had a conversation with JFK. JFK said that he was under terrific pressure from intelligence people to okay a Castro murder.
Why does the assassination of an Archduke in Sarajevo necessarily result in people you know shelling each other in northern France just a few months later? What connects the dots is a series of treaties that have been signed over the past several years by lots and lots of different countries in Europe and elsewhere that promise each other that they’ll back them if they’re attacked by someone else.
The attempted assassination of candidate Trump does in fact affect how the world sees the US. There is some concern, rightly, about gun ownership in the US.
When Ronald Reagan was shot, he got a 22-point bounce in his polling numbers post the shooting. So I think it changes the game. It really puts the Biden campaign in a very, very tough position.
President Joe Biden has just announced that he is dropping out of the 2024 presidential race. He also thanks Vice President Kamala Harris for being “an extraordinary partner in all of this work.”
I believe and I think many others saw that the split second was intervention from God. Thanking God that it wasn’t worse than it could have been. Another inch or so and he’d be dead.
He’s shown clearly after the assassination attempt he’s got the heart of a lion. He’s got incredible courage and fortitude. And for him to get right back up, it, you know, he really did show his strength, his character.
Look, they’re all pointing in the Pacific. Yeah, someone’s on top of the roof. Look, there he is right there. Right there. You see him? He’s laying down. You see him? Yeah, he’s laying down. We have the roof. We have people right here on the roof. He went on the roof again.
One can only wonder if events such as this occur due to a lapse in judgment or whether something darker is afoot.
One of the concerns on the back of the attempted assassination is the degree to which the American democracy and the democratic process during our elections can be protected. Now whether the Secret Service or FBI did the job they were meant to do is another concern and another issue.
The Secret Service does have a problem. They did have a problem and still do. And that is why on Monday in Washington we will begin the hearings to not just determine what went wrong but what it’s going to take to fix this. When a person can get within 130 yards with a sniper rifle with the president of the United States and then point fingers at not knowing who is responsible is irresponsible for the Secret Service.
Perhaps we need a bit more legislation around gun control, which is certainly something that former President Obama attempted and is perhaps going to come back on the agenda.
