Reaction continues to pour in from across the country after the assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
That has included responses from political leaders based in North Texas, who are sharing how they believe the tragedy in Butler County will affect the country months before Election Day.
It was a moment that will reverberate in American history: Saturday’s attack at a Pennsylvania Trump rally was the first shooting of a current or former US president in more than 40 years and left one bystander dead and two others critically injured.
On Monday, NBC News reported investigators found more than a dozen guns at the home of the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, and that the FBI had been able to access Crooks’s phone – but no apparent motive for the assassination attempt has been found.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
“It’s just still stunning and shocking,” said Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare. “I think the thing that stands out, of course, is the man who lost his life, how horrible that is.”
O’Hare told NBC 5 he planned to attend the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week.
He believed the attack highlighted the need to tone down political rhetoric nationwide—a message he expected former President Trump to echo when he accepted the party’s nomination for president on Thursday.
“Enough is enough, we’re all Americans, let’s come together,” O’Hare said. “I think that’s the message you’ll see and I think it will be very well received.”
Congressional Democrat Rep. Marc Veasey also condemned the attack, calling to lower the temperature in national politics.
“We need to be able to have a republic where people can express different opinions without there being violence attached to that,” said Veasey, the representative for TX-33.
On July 4, Veasey told NBC 5 that Democrats were having conversations about potentially nominating someone other than Joe Biden as their presidential candidate.
Today, Veasey said the situation has changed.
“I think that he’s going to stay, I don’t think that he’s going to back down,” said Veasey. “And so that is what it is, we’re going to have a repeat of 2020, and that’s going to be Trump versus Biden.”
The Tarrant County Judge told NBC 5 that he planned to start Tuesday’s commissioners' court meeting by calling for a lower temperature of political discussions in future meetings.
