Courtesy of JTA. Photo credit: Anadolu/Getty Images
In a screen grab captured from a video, Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump appears to be injured after gunshots were reported at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024
(JTA) — Jewish and Israeli leaders and lawmakers condemned what officials are investigating as an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, as did Gabrielle Giffords, a Jewish former congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt.
A gunman who authorities say was positioned outside a stadium in Butler, Pennsylvania where the former president was leading a campaign rally opened fire on Saturday evening, wounding Trump. Trump emerged from the attack with a bleeding ear and at least one rally goer was reported dead.
The Secret Service returned fire and killed the gunman. Trump’s campaign says he is in good condition.
A number of top Jewish lawmakers, many of them Democrats who oppose Trump’s bid to return to the presidency, immediately condemned the attack.
“I am horrified by what happened at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania and relieved that former President Trump is safe,” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, said on social media. “Political violence has no place in our country.”
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat who received national attention in 2018 when a gunman in the district he then represented in the state legislature killed 17 people at Parkland High School, said he was “praying for the former President.”
“This is not how we settle our differences,” he posted. “This is why crazy people shouldn’t have guns.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is set on July 24 to address Congress about Israel’s war with Hamas, also weighed in online. “Sara and I were shocked by the apparent attack on President Trump,” Netanyahu said. “We pray for his safety and speedy recovery.”
Giffords, who in 2011 was shot in the head at a meet-and-greet in her Arizona district, suggested that the attack triggered memories of that event.
“Political violence is terrifying. I know,” Giffords, who now leads a gun control group and whose husband is Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, said online. “I’m holding former President Trump, and all those affected by today’s indefensible act of violence in my heart. Political violence is un-American and is never acceptable — never.”
President Joe Biden, who will face Trump in a bitterly contested election in November, spoke to the nation and said he had tried to reach Trump to assess how he was, and condemned the violence, calling it “sick.”
Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, said the state’s police were assisting in investigating the attack.
“Violence targeted at any political party or political leader is absolutely unacceptable,” he said on social media. “It has no place in Pennsylvania or the United States.”
One of the first Jewish organizations to weigh in was the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has pledged $15 million to help elect Trump, and an additional $5 million to be raised from donors and an affiliated political action committee.
“We pray for refuah shlema — a complete recovery and healing — for President Trump,” the RJC said in a release attached to an Associated Press photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist in defiance after the shooting. “We know President Trump will return stronger and more determined than ever to Make America Great Again.”
“Make America Great Again” is the Trump campaign slogan. The RJC CEO, Matt Brooks, is set to speak next week at the Milwaukee convention where Trump will be formally nominated, a first for the organization.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America said it was “alarmed by the shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania this afternoon,” and wished Trump a “speedy” recovery. “Political violence has no place in our country.”
Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee and former Florida Democratic congressman whose district in 2018 encompassed Parkland High, said online that “we are all shocked and traumatized by what happened. We must come together to condemn political violence. We are all Americans. Whatever our politics.”
He was joined by an array of Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, J Street and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations among others in condemning the attack and wishing Trump a speedy recovery.
Trump and Biden have each said that the other’s election could portend the end of America as we know it. A number of Republicans singled out statements by Biden and others to that effect to say that Democrats and Biden created the atmosphere for the assassination attempt.
“The entire campaign message of the Democrat Party has been the vile and monstrous lie that Trump and the GOP are trying to end democracy,” Stephen Miller, a Jewish senior adviser to Trump who on Friday likened Democrats to the Chinese Communist Party, said on social media. “This mammoth lie, this sinister poison, this terrible hate and defamation, must stop. It must stop.”
