Harris calls Trump as assassination scare sparks tensions

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (left) and US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)

FLINT, United States – Kamala Harris called Donald Trump on Tuesday after he faced another apparent assassination attempt, though she separately condemned him for “hateful” peddling of false stories about Haitian migrants eating pets.

As Trump prepared to return to the election campaign for the first time since a gunman was found near his golf course in Florida, Democratic candidate Harris said she had reached out to the former president.

“I checked on him to see if he was OK. And I told him what I have said publicly — there’s no place for political violence in our country,” Harris said in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

The White House described it as a “cordial and brief conversation.”

But the call came as the two camps trade accusations about stoking division and violence in a tense presidential election that is just seven weeks away.

Harris used the interview, conducted in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, to give her first reaction to a row over false stories spread by Trump that Haitian immigrants were eating residents’ cats and dogs in Ohio.

Dozens of bomb threats were made against the community in the town of Springfield after Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance publicly boosted the fake story, forcing the closure of some schools.

“It’s a crying shame, literally, what’s happening to those families, those children in that community,” Harris said.

‘Hateful’

“It’s got to stop. We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States engaging in that hateful rhetoric,” she added.

Trump has blamed Harris and President Joe Biden’s “rhetoric” about him being a threat to democracy for the two attempts on his life in as many months.

It comes despite Trump himself using similar language, painting Harris as an “evil” radical turning America into a “failing nation.”

When Trump spoke with the same NABJ group in July, he said Harris, who has an Indian mother and Jamaican father, “happened to turn Black” for political expediency.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden and Harris had “never encouraged violence in any way.”

On Sunday, Trump was whisked away by the US Secret Service after gunman Ryan Routh was discovered in a hedgerow at his Florida golf course.

It was the second such close call for the Republican nominee in as many months after a bullet grazed his ear in a shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania that left one man dead in June.

Trump said in an interview on social media site X said Secret Service agents “grabbed” him and bundled him into a golf cart after the sound of gunfire, adding that he “would have loved to sank that last putt.”

The billionaire said the shots were actually from federal agents who fired at a suspect when they saw a rifle sticking out from a treeline.

Harris ahead?

Trump is traveling to a town hall event Tuesday in Flint, a Michigan city hard hit by car plant closures and a decade-old water crisis.

The dueling visits of Trump in Michigan and Harris in Pennsylvania come as both focus on the half-dozen swing states critical to winning in the election.

A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today shows Harris with a slight 49-46 percent edge over Trump in Pennsylvania, thanks in large part to major support from women voters.

It confirms a large gender gap in the race, at least in Pennsylvania, with Harris leading with women by 56 percent to 39 percent, and Trump earning male votes by a slimmer 53-41 percent.

In appealing to women, Harris has pushed the issue of reproductive rights — a hot-button issue since the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn national abortion protections.

Harris on Tuesday condemned anti-abortion laws in Georgia after a woman there, 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman, reportedly died from delayed medical care caused by the state’s restrictive regulations.

“This is exactly what we feared,” Harris said.