(The Center Square) – The cascading security failures that let a would-be assassin shoot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally Saturday look like “nothing more than incompetence” to Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity.
“I think that we will see that with the reports come out because it was a failure to have a sniper on the building, failure to just shut down the rally,” she told The Center Square during an interview at the Republican National Convention on Thursday. “So, I think we will get answers.”
Garrity, a decorated military veteran, said “the temperature has gone down” on divisive rhetoric after the shooting in Butler, Pa., that left one man dead and two more wounded. Trump narrowly survived the attack after a bullet grazed his ear.
She doesn’t think it signaled weakness to adversaries, either. The Biden administration’s economic and immigration policies have done more damage, she said.
“We have two clear choices,” Garrity said. “Do we want to keep this decline day after day after day, or do we want to put in the Trump-J.D. Vance ticket and have a chance to turn our country around?”
The refrain is common on the convention floor in Milwaukee: Trump has grown the Republican Party’s tent by historic margins. The trend has only strengthened after the assassination attempt, according to U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa.
“I think a lot of people, and I got all kinds of calls coming in, that wow if that’s what President Donald Trump is made of, he’s my guy,” he said.
Garrity went on to say that inflationary pressure weighs top of mind for Pennsylvania voters and will play in Trump’s favor. As will his repudiation of the administration’s border policies, which critics say have worsened the opioid crisis.
Pennsylvania has been particularly hard hit by the crisis. The commonwealth ranked fourth nationally in drug overdose deaths with 5,449 in 2021, and ninth in death rate. Nationally, more than 321,000 children lost a parent to a drug overdose between 2011 and 2021.
“We had 4,000 deaths from fentanyl last year alone, which is more deaths than we’ve had of soldiers in the entire Afghanistan War,” she said.
Anthony Hennen contributed to this report.
