Trump’s Pennsylvania town hall, interrupted by medical emergencies in crowd, turned into an impromptu concert

(PHILADELPHIA) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump debated for the first time on Tuesday, a consequential matchup with just eight weeks until Election Day.

The debate was hosted by ABC News at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The 90-minute showdown was filled with animated zingers and tense exchanges on key policy issues facing the American people.

Harris sought to portray herself as a new generation of leadership with a track record of results, while Trump tried to paint her as a radical Democrat and continued to criticize the Biden administration.

Here are some key takeaways from the debate:

Harris put Trump on defensive early on

The vice president didn’t waste any time in going on the attack against Trump.

“What we have done and what I intend to do is build on what we know are the aspirations and the hopes of the American people,” Harris said minutes into the debate. “But I’m going to tell you all, in this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”

She later took a dig at his rallies, claiming people leave them early out of “exhaustion” as he gives long speeches that sometimes include references to windmills causing cancer or to fictional characters such as Hannibal Lecter. Trump immediately defended his events and crowd sizes, saying he has the “biggest” and “most incredible” rallies in political history.

After Trump railed against crime in the nation, Harris said she thought the comments were “so rich” coming from someone who has been criminally charged multiple times. Trump has denied all wrongdoing in each of the cases against him.

Trump continues attacks on — Biden

Trump, who had a difficult time changing his message when Harris succeeded President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee, continued to criticize Biden and continually tried to tie Harris to Biden’s record — most notably on the economy, immigration and leadership abroad.

“She is Biden,” he said. “The worst inflation we’ve ever had, a horrible economy because inflation has made it so bad, and she can’t get away with that.”

Harris, who has supported many of Biden’s stances while also offering her own economic proposals, quickly responded, “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”

In the “spin room” with reporters after the debate, Trump continued to blast the Biden-Harris record.

“She’s trying to get herself away from Biden, and she wasn’t able to do that tonight,” he said.

Did Harris succeed in introducing herself to viewers?

A key question heading into the debate was whether Harris would be able to define herself to voters who say they don’t feel they know her or what she stands for well enough.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found a sizable share of likely voters (28%) and registered voters (31%) feel they need to know more about Harris as a candidate. Those numbers were even higher among independent voters: 41% of registered independents and 38% of likely voters who identified as independent said they needed to learn more about her.

Harris began her first response to a question on the economy by saying she was raised by her mother in a middle-class family. Later, she highlighted her background as a prosecutor who has taken on transnational criminal organizations. She also noted that as a senator, she was at the U.S. Capitol when it was attacked by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6.

She also hit on some of her signature policy proposals, including her support for reproductive freedom and economic plans like expanding the Child Tax Credit and assisting first-time homebuyers. She also noted that both she and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, are gun owners and wouldn’t take people’s guns away.

While neither candidate went too deep into policy specifics, Harris did try to paint a clear contrast between what she is offering and what she believes Trump is proposing if elected.

“What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging the American people,” she said.

Meanwhile, Trump argued Harris is a “radical left liberal” and pressed her on some of her shifts on police funding, fracking and more since her 2019 Democratic primary campaign.

Trump still refuses to concede he lost the 2020 election

Trump tried to explain his own remarks recently in which he appeared to accept he lost the 2020 election, including his comment last week that he “lost by a whisker.”

“I said that?” Trump said on the debate stage when it was read back to him.

“Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?” ABC News moderator David Muir asked.

“No, I don’t acknowledge that at all,” he said. “That was said sarcastically.”

Asked about the peaceful transfer of power, Trump did not say that he regrets anything about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. He claimed he had “nothing” to do with what happened that day, which culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Race comes up, but not gender

For the second time, Trump is campaigning against a woman for president. Harris’ gender was not broached during the debate, though her race was.

Asked by moderators about his previous false comments on her racial identity — including that Harris, who is Black and South Asian, “happened to turn Black” — Trump said he “couldn’t care less.”

“I don’t care what she is. I don’t care,” he said. “Whatever she wants to be is OK with me.”

When pressed, Trump doubled down, saying he read that she was not Black, and then that she was.

“And that’s okay. Either one was okay with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her,” he said.

Asked for her thoughts, Harris went on the attack — but didn’t focus on herself. Instead, she focused on Trump’s falsehoods about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace and noted “he was investigated because he refused to rent property to Black families” to cast him as divisive and unfit.

“Honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” she said. “I think the American people want better than that, want better than this.”

“This is the most divisive presidency in the history of our country,” Trump responded.

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(WASHINGTON) — From the June 28 debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump to the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, at least 134 people were killed in 148 mass shootings across the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

But during those roughly three months and since, the issue of gun violence prevention, according to some advocates, has been overshadowed by a flurry of hot-button campaign topics: The state of the economy, abortion rights, wars raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, two assassination attempts on Trump and the shifting political landscape in which Vice President Kamala Harris succeeded Biden as the Democratic nominee.

“Gun violence is still one of the most important issues facing our country. We still have an ongoing epidemic,” said Nicole Hockley, the CEO of Sandy Hook Promise — a gun violence prevention group she co-founded following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 children, including her son, and six adult staff members dead.

In an interview this week with ABC News, Hockley cited a Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions report that said for three straight years gun violence has been the leading cause of death in the United States for adolescents under the age of 19.

In an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released in August, gun violence was ranked eighth in importance among voters after the economy, inflation, health care, protecting democracy, crime and safety, immigration and the Supreme Court.

According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 61% of Americans say it’s too easy to legally obtain a gun in this country and 58% believe U.S. gun-control laws should be stricter.

“I do appreciate that there are many other large issues and hot topics like the economy, like abortion, like foreign wars that are of interest to voters as well,” said Hockley, whose nonpartisan group does not endorse candidates nor donate to campaigns.

She added, “Perhaps there is an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that everyone already knows what each candidate’s opinion is and what they are likely to do in terms of gun violence prevention, whereas they might not be as clear on things like policies around the economy.”

Debates over gun violence
During the three national debates in the presidential campaign, the subject of gun violence prevention appears to have received less discussion compared to the other contentious topics, some advocates said.

In the Sept. 10 debate between Harris and Trump, hosted by ABC News, gun violence came up when Trump — who was shot in the ear during a July 13 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left one campaign rallygoer dead and two others wounded — alleged, “She wants to confiscate your guns.”

The accusation prompted Harris, who oversees the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, to respond, “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away. So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”

Harris, the former California Attorney General, also said, “I’m the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs and human beings.”

Ten days after debating Trump, Harris reiterated that she is a gun owner during a televised sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, adding, “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”

The most extensive conversation on guns during the debates came during the vice presidential debate when Walz touted his record in Minnesota on combating gun violence, saying his administration had passed an assault weapons ban and enhanced red-flag gun laws to keep weapons out of the hands of people poised to harm themselves or others.

“These are reasonable things that we can do to make a difference,” Walz said about gun violence prevention during the debate.

Vance and Trump oppose most gun-control laws, including an assault weapons ban and national red-flag laws proposed by Harris. The National Rifle Association has endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket.

“Now, more than ever, freedom and liberty need courageous and virtuous defenders,” Doug Hamlin, executive vice president and CEO of the NRA, said in a statement in July. “President Trump and Senator Vance have the guts and the grit to stand steadfast for the Second Amendment.”

During the debate, Vance said on gun violence prevention measures, “Governor Walz and I actually probably agree that we need to do better on this.”

Addressing school shootings, Vance said at the debate, “I, unfortunately, think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger. And of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it just doesn’t fit with recent experience.”

‘The lockdown generation’

Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures, said that despite the myriad issues in this campaign cycle, gun violence prevention still resonates with voters nationwide.

“First and foremost, I get to travel all across this country and meet with our volunteers and partners and candidates running up and down the ballot, and there are so many people that are not running away from this issue but running on it and actually winning,” Ferrell-Zabala told ABC News. “This is a priority for many folks.”

She said that from her experience, young people, who have grown up in the era of school lockdowns and active shooter drills, are particularly energized over the issue of gun violence prevention and plan to vote their conscience.

“This is a big issue. This is a top three for all voters and for young people, this is particularly hitting them because they are the lockdown generation. Many of them are survivors of gun violence themselves,” said Ferrell-Zabala, whose group has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket.

According to the 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 88% of respondents also favored preventing mentally ill people from buying guns and 79% wanted the minimum age for buying guns raised to 21.

Ferrell-Zabala said most aspects of gun violence prevention should not be considered political, including requiring gun owners to secure their weapons to prevent them from falling into the hands of children or people intent on harming others or themselves.

“They are being used as political issues, but they are not. The majority of people, polls show time and time again, are for common sense gun laws because they know they are going to save lives in this country,” Ferrell-Zabala said. “And what you’re seeing is a product of a gun industry and extremist politicians that are trying to back this guns-everywhere culture, where guns are everywhere for anyone anytime. That’s unacceptable, frankly.”

Hockley said that many of the children who survived the Sandy Hook massacre that claimed the life of her 6-year-old son, Dylan, have now reached the age of 18 and will be voting in their first presidential election.

“I believe that they will be very much voting to stop this epidemic,” Hockley told ABC News. “I’m sure they’ll have other concerns as well, women’s rights, human rights. Gun violence prevention is also a human right, the right to live to your full potential. These students have seen the worst of what our country can offer in terms of school violence and I very much believe and hope that they will be voting that as one of their main issues.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Secret Service failed to make clear decisions and did not communicate properly with local law enforcement or provide necessary resources that caused “foreseeable, preventable” security failings on July 13, when a would-be assassin opened fire on former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a new Senate committee report.

The highly anticipated interim report was released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee by both Republicans and Democrats and reflects the work of the committee since it opened its probe following the Butler attack.

This report focuses on the Butler shooting and does not extend to investigatory efforts launched after a separate second assassination attempt on the former president at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, earlier this month.

Since the Butler attack, acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has acknowledged that the event was a “failure” by the agency, but the committee, which interviewed multiple Secret Service personnel, found that individuals “declined to acknowledge individual areas of responsibility for planning or security as having contributed to the failure to prevent the shooting that day, even when as an agency, the USSS has acknowledged ultimate responsibility for the failure to prevent the former president of the United States from being shot.”

On a call with reporters, Senate Homeland Security Chairman Gary Peters pointed to several failures by the Secret Service.

“Every single one of those failures was preventable and the consequences of those failures were dire,” Peters said. “This was the first assassination attempt of a former president and the presidential candidate in more than four decades.”

Peters was joined on the call by committee ranking member Rand Paul, R-Ky., Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., ranking member on the investigations subcommittee.

“Whoever was in charge of security on the day of Butler, whoever’s in charge of security during the recent assassination attempt, those people can’t be in charge. They there’s so many human errors,” Paul said. “No amount of money that you give to Secret Service is going to alleviate the human errors if you leave the same humans in charge who made these terrible, dramatic mistakes with regard to security.”

On Friday, the Secret Service released a four-page Mission Assurance Report, which affirms many of the findings in the committee’s report, but the committee report offers additional details from interviews with USSS and local officials. ‘

In a statement to ABC News, the Secret Service’s Chief of Communications said “many of the insights” gleaned from the Senate report “align with the findings from our mission assurance review and are essential to ensuring that what happened on July 13 never happens again.”

“We have reviewed the interim report on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump,” Chief of Communications for the U.S. Secret Service Anthony Guglielmi said. “The weight of our mission is not lost on us and in this hyperdynamic threat environment, the U.S. Secret Service cannot fail.”

He said in addition to the mission assurance report their efforts include cooperating with Congress, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security Independent Review, DHS Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office.

“We take the work of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee seriously and have begun to implement many of their proposed enhancements,” Guglielmi said.

As part of the investigation, the committee interviewed Secret Service agents, as well as the Secret Service counter-snipers that were at the rally.

A closer look at the roof of the building where shots were fired from

The Senate report pays special attention to the American Glass Research building from where Thomas Matthew Crooks fired, and unveils new details about the timeline of events on that day.

In the lead-up to the event, local law enforcement raised concerns about the building. The report finds that the line of sight from the AGR building plagued rally planning and that it was identified as a concern, but that no steps were taken to mitigate the threat. Trees obstructed the view of the sniper team that was positioned atop one of the nearby roofs.

The Secret Service initially began planning for the rally in early July with state and local law enforcement. The planning meetings lacked answers or a general plan, according to the report.

A Butler County Emergency Services Unit commander told the committee the July 11 site walkthrough was “incredibly disorganized” with “no coordination,” and said he felt like “there was really no plan.”

When the USSS counter-sniper team leader did a walkthrough of the area, he told the committee he “wasn’t independently looking at the threat areas,” but rather making sure the roofs were safe for law enforcement to stand on.

The leader assumed that if there were an issue with one of the lines of sight with a sniper position, that counter-sniper would have told the head of the unit.

Agents from the Secret Service were notified of a suspicious person with a rangefinder 27 minutes before shots were fired, but that information was not relayed to senior Secret Service leaders on the ground.

Three minutes before shots were fired, local law enforcement communicated over the radio that someone was on the roof of the AGR building. The information was passed to the Secret Service two minutes before Crooks fired. A local officer said there was someone armed on the roof 22 seconds before shots were fired, but that information wasn’t passed on to the Secret Service.

Secret Service counter-snipers did see local law enforcement running towards the AGR building with their guns drawn, but “the thought did not cross” the counter-sniper’s mind to alert the former president’s protective detail, because they were trying to figure out what was going on.

“[W]hen we looked, just plain eyes, no optics or anything, you could see police running towards the building with their hands on their pistols. I think one actually had a pistol facing towards the ground, out of a holster,” the counter-sniper told the committee. “That’s a pretty big deal for us, so immediately we turned and faced our guns towards the threat area. We didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed pretty serious, especially with the locals’ response.”

The counter-sniper told the Committee “police running, guns out, and there were a couple of people just running away from the AGR building, that looks like citizens, I guess you would say, just normal people.”

He said, “something was wrong” and the “police were the main identifier that something bad was happening.”

“At that time, we didn’t know what we were working with,” a USSS counter-sniper told the committee.

Though counter-sniper efforts ultimately failed to prevent Crooks from firing, the Senate report finds that Trump’s Butler rally was the first time that a USSS counter-sniper team was assigned to a protectee who was not the president, vice president, or formally nominated party nominee. Snipers were only at the rally in response to “credible intelligence” of a threat. Though the committee did not identify what that threat was, sources have told ABC News that Iran has targeted the former president since the killing of General Soliemani.

When the Secret Service sniper took his shot at Crooks, he did so “mere seconds” after identifying him, his partner told the committee.

Officers told the committee they didn’t get resources they needed

Rowe has repeatedly asserted publicly that no assets were denied for the Butler rally. But some of the committee’s findings suggest otherwise.

The operator of the USSS counter drone measures, known as C-UAS, told the committee he requested additional C-UAS equipment and personnel in the11 days before the rally. However, these requests were denied, at times without explanation, according to the report.

The USSS lead advance agent told the committee Trump’s Secret Service detail requested counter assault team liaisons to help coordinate tactical assets in advance of the July 13 rally, but USSS denied this request, the report found.

When the CUAS system went down, the agent who was responsible for it called the manufacturer hotline to start troubleshooting the problem, delaying the deployment of the system for hours.

Previous testimony from the acting director stated that Crooks flew a drone over the rally site during the few hours the CUAS system was down.

Secret Service communications and those of local law enforcement were “siloed” in real time, according to the committee’s report.

Those issues included inoperable radios — in one instance, the head of the Pittsburgh Field Office gave his radio to the lead advance agent on the ground because his radio wasn’t working. These types of problems were commonplace, according to the report.

At one point, some of the agent’s communications were getting crossed with those of the detail of first lady Jill Biden, who was nearby.

Blumenthal called the Secret Service’s lack of accountability an “Abbott and Costello” routine, making reference to the infamous “Who’s on First” skit.

“It was really truth being stranger than fiction,” Blumenthal said of the finger-pointing as to who was responsible and who was in charge of the Butler event.

Committee leaders stress that the report is an interim set of findings meant to be expanded upon by further lines of questioning.

Blumenthal also called for new leadership at the Secret Service.

Peters told reporters last week that there have been instances in which agencies were not as responsive to committee requests as he would’ve liked.

Though the committee staff examined “over 2,800 pages” of documents provided by USSS and transcribed 12 interviews with USSS personnel, the report does reflect instances in which agencies did not meet committee requests.

“The majority of documents provided by the USSS and DHS are heavily redacted. This has unnecessarily hindered the Committee’s ability to carry out its constitutional authority to investigate and acquire information necessary to identify needed reforms,” the report says.

Guglielmi said the Secret Service has “been and continue to work cooperatively, transparently, and in good faith with Congress.”

“The U.S. Secret Service has implemented changes to our protective operations including elevating the protective posture for our protectees and bolstering our protective details as appropriate in order to ensure the highest levels of safety and security for those we protect,” Guglielmi said.

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