Harris calls Trump as assassination scare sparks tensions

File: Illustration, school supplies.
WASHINGTON – Kamala Harris called Donald Trump on Tuesday after he faced another apparent assassination attempt, though she separately condemned him for “hateful” peddling of false stories about Haitian migrants eating pets.
As Trump prepared to return to the election campaign for the first time since a gunman was found near his golf course in Florida, Democratic candidate Harris said she had reached out to the former president.
“I checked on him to see if he was OK. And I told him what I have said publicly — there’s no place for political violence in our country,” Harris said in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
The White House described it as a “cordial and brief conversation.”
But the call came as the two camps trade accusations about stoking division and violence in a tense presidential election that is just seven weeks away.
Harris used the interview, conducted in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, to give her first reaction to a row over false stories spread by Trump that Haitian immigrants were eating residents’ cats and dogs in Ohio.
Dozens of bomb threats were made against the community in the town of Springfield after Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance publicly boosted the fake story, forcing the closure of some schools.
“It’s a crying shame, literally, what’s happening to those families, those children in that community,” Harris said.
“It’s got to stop. We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States engaging in that hateful rhetoric,” she added.
Trump has blamed Harris and President Joe Biden’s “rhetoric” about him being a threat to democracy for the two attempts on his life in as many months.
It comes despite Trump himself using similar language, painting Harris as an “evil” radical turning America into a “failing nation.”
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden and Harris had “never encouraged violence in any way.”