‘We’ve got to turn the rhetoric down’

• Mike Johnson denounced the tenor of political rhetoric in the US following the Trump rally shooting.

• “We’ve got to turn the temperature down in this country,” the speaker said Sunday on NBC’s “Today.”

• Johnson described the assassination attempt of Trump as “a horrific act of political violence.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday strongly condemned the shooting at former President Donald Trump‘s Pennsylvania rally Saturday evening, decrying the “horrific” violence that occurred while also urging political leaders to “turn the rhetoric down.”

During an interview on NBC’s “Today,” the Louisiana Republican addressed the deep political divide in the US, which has seemingly grown wider as the expected general election rematch between President Joe Biden and Trump quickly approaches.

“We’ve got to turn the rhetoric down,” Johnson said. “We’ve got to turn the temperature down in this country.”

“We need leaders of all parties, on both sides, to call that out and make sure that happens so that we can go forward and maintain our free society that we all are blessed to have,” he added.

The speaker on Sunday also lamented what he described as a “surreal” experience for Americans as one of the country’s major-party presidential candidates just hours earlier was targeted in an assassination attempt.

“This is a horrific act of political violence. It ought to be roundly condemned,” he said. “Obviously, we can’t go on like this as a society.”

Trump on Saturday was speaking to supporters when gunshots rang out at his rally, and the former president was subsequently swarmed by members of the Secret Service.

The former president emerged from the assassination attempt with a bloodied ear.

Trump in a post on his Truth Social account wrote that a bullet had “pierced the upper part” of his right ear and thanked the agents who came to his aid during the incident.

Johnson, a political ally of Trump, said hours after the shooting that the House would hold a “full investigation” into the events surrounding Saturday’s shooting. The lawmaker added that officials from the Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, and FBI would be called to speak before Congress over the incident.

President Joe Biden on Saturday strongly denounced the shooting and later that night spoke with Trump.

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” the president said. “It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons we have to unite this country. We cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

In the 2020 election, a major goal in Biden’s platform was to unify the country, especially after the tough campaign that year.

But after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, a 2022 midterm cycle which saw both Democrats and Republicans tussle over the issue of defending democracy, and an already tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, divisions within the US remain raw.

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