Trump, modest: “Only important presidents get shot!”

“Only important presidents get shot!” Always remarkably modest, Donald Trump appealed to the fervor of his supporters on Tuesday, two days after being targeted by a supposed second assassination attempt.

The former Republican president linked the effort to his plans for heavy tariffs on auto imports from Mexico and China, speaking in Flint, Michigan, a city reeling from auto plant closures.

“And then people wonder why I’m being shot,” said the 78-year-old candidate.

Her Democratic rival Kamala Harris, who is traveling in Pennsylvania – which, like Michigan, is a decisive state for the November 5 election – called the former president on Tuesday “to tell him directly that she was happy that he is safe and sound,” said a White House official.

The conversation was “cordial and brief,” according to the same Source.

“I told him what I’ve said publicly before: There is no place for violence in our country,” the 59-year-old Democrat later reported during an interview in Philadelphia with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

The Democrat was “very kind” during the call, Donald Trump said on Tuesday.

On Monday, he judged that the suspect arrested Sunday in Florida for the alleged assassination attempt against him, “adheres to the speech of Biden and Harris and acts accordingly.”

“Because of this rhetoric from the communist left, bullets are flying and it’s only going to get worse,” said the Republican candidate, who did not repeat these accusations on Tuesday in Flint.

His supporters say they are galvanized by the attacks on their champion.

“They want to kill Trump so he can’t run for a second term,” Donald Owen, 71, who attended the public meeting, told AFP, adding: “If someone were to shoot Trump, I would be the first one to dive into the middle of the bullets.”

During the town hall meeting, Donald Trump presented himself as the savior of the auto industry in the face of foreign competition, saying, “If a tragedy happens and we don’t win, there will be no auto jobs, no manufacturing jobs.”

He also responded to attacks from the opposing camp on his sometimes incoherent digressions: “I respond with long and sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but everything holds together.”

“This is not rambling, this is genius,” the Republican said, shortly after launching into a rant about hydrocarbon exploitation in which he mentioned a deposit at “Bagram in Alaska” which is said to be “bigger than all of Saudi Arabia.”

Donald Trump apparently confused Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with an area in Alaska called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are crisscrossing the six or seven “swing states”, the pivotal states, while the Democrat seems to benefit from a slight rebound in the polls since the debate of September 10, during which she generally dominated her opponent.

The candidate, already supported by star Taylor Swift, received the support of an immensely popular pop artist, Billie Eilish, on Tuesday.

In her interview in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris condemned Donald Trump’s role in spreading false information about Haitian migrants eating dogs and cats in a small Ohio town, Springfield.

“It’s an absolute outrage,” she said of the turmoil in the city, which has been plagued by bomb threats and closures of public places. “You can’t be entrusted with the responsibility of being president of the United States when you’re participating in this kind of hateful rhetoric.”

Tensions around this already extraordinary campaign rose another notch this weekend, following an assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July.

He was on his golf course in Florida on Sunday afternoon when several Secret Service agents “opened fire on an armed man” who was standing near the edge of the course. The man, identified as Ryan Routh, did not shoot, according to police, nor did he aim at the former president, and was subsequently arrested.