The shots fired at Donald Trump will ring out until November

Donald Trump survived an apparent assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. A gunman fired several shots, hitting the former president once. He quickly rose to his feet, pumping his fist in the air as he was whisked to hospital by helicopter. He later said he had felt a “bullet ripping through the skin” and that it had “pierced the upper part of my right ear”. Others were not so lucky. One spectator was killed and two more were injured, according to the Secret Service.

The shooter was killed at the scene. The FBI identified him as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man from Bethel Park, a town in Pennsylvania around 70km from the site of the attempted assassination. It is unclear what his political views were, although he was at one point a registered Republican. He appears to have shot at the former president from a roof outside of the rally with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

Joe Biden described the incident as “sick”, saying that there was “no place in America for this kind of violence”. Politicians on both sides of the aisle echoed that sentiment. Kamala Harris, the vice-president, expressed relief that Mr Trump was not “seriously injured”. Steve Scalise, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives and himself the survivor of an assassination attempt, said he was “praying for President Donald Trump”.

The shooting is the most serious assassination attempt against an American president since a gunman seriously wounded Ronald Reagan in 1981. It comes amid an increase of political violence in America. Several high-profile politicians have been attacked in recent years, including Mr Scalise and Nancy Pelosi, a former speaker of the House, who is a Democrat. In 2020 an attempt to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, was foiled.

Mr Trump’s team said that he would appear as scheduled at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which begins on Monday. During the convention he will be formally declared the Republican presidential candidate. He will also announce his vice-presidential running mate. The assassination attempt will probably become the meeting’s defining talking point.

Is America entering a new era of political violence? That is the question our podcast team gathered to answer in 2022, after an FBI raid on Mr Trump’s Mar-a-lago home motivated an armed man to try to break into the agency’s office in Cincinnati. The attempted assassination of Mr Trump adds to evidence that the answer is yes. Listen to our correspondents’ discussion on how to prevent violence.

Political violence is not new in America. But the images of America’s 45th president shot as he stood on stage shook spectators to the core, wrote Farrah Tomazin in the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper. And it is clear this “will only ratchet up the intensity” of an “already fraught” election year in a “fiercely fractured nation”.

Nearly three-quarters, the share of partisans who view their opponents as threats to national security. Read the full story.