Eighty-four days later, former President Donald Trump returned on Saturday to the scene of an assassination attempt on his life in western Pennsylvania.
“As I was saying,” Trump said, turning toward a graph on a projector screen behind him. “I love that chart. I love that graph. Isn’t it a beautiful thing?”
He picked up right where he left off July 13, when bullets tore through the crowd killing one man, wounding two others and Trump surviving after being struck in the ear.
The graph showed the amount of illegal border crossings recorded on Trump’s last day in office in 2021. It’s also the one he was looking at when a bullet from 20-year-old Thomas Crooks’s rifle grazed his right ear.
Moments later, U.S. Secret Services agents tackled Trump, while a sniper shot and killed Crooks on the roof of the AGR building roughly 400 feet from the rally stage.
In his return, Trump thanked them as well as the local law enforcement and emergency responders who leaped into action in the aftermath of the shooting. He also devoted a moment of silence, at the exact moment shots rang out at 6:11 p.m., to 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, the retired fire chief who died that day shielding his family from bullets.
The poignant moment was one of many that unfolded during the rally at which Ohio U.S. Sen J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and his wife Laura, and Elon Musk all took the stage.
(This is a developing story and will be updated this evening.)
