A CBS News anchor and a former counterterrorism official in the Biden administration condemned former President Donald Trump and Republicans in the wake of the shooting that left Trump wounded Saturday night.
CBS anchor Margaret Brennan condemned Trump for insufficiently “lowering the temperature” in his statement following the shooting.
“This was a traumatic event no doubt for him, but I did notice there was no call for lowering the temperature, condemning all political violence, and really trying to signal to his supporters as well not to retaliate or to have any kind of escalation here,” Brennan said while reporting on Trump’s statement.
After suffering a wound to his right ear as a result of a gunshot, Trump thanked the Secret Service, expressed condolences to the family of the rallygoer who died in the shooting, and mentioned that the shooter had been killed. He concluded his remarks with “GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
After faulting Trump for failing to condemn all political violence, Brennan spoke with Samantha Vinograd, a commentator who served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism, threat prevention, and law enforcement policy at the Department of Homeland Security in the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term, from July 2021 to August 2022.
“The biggest threat that officials are telling me tonight is in the form of retaliatory violence,” Vinograd said.
Brennan condemned “some Republican lawmakers” whom she said were “directly drawing the line between the shooter” and “some connection to the government.”
Vinograd called it “frankly unpatriotic” for anyone to be “stoking the flames when we know that we are sitting on a cauldron of tensions.”
“The counterterrorism officials and homeland security officials that I’ve spoken to in the last few hours are deeply concerned that this event will be used as a rallying cry to launch attacks against individuals associated with the Biden campaign and lead to broader domestic distress,” she said.
“It is unpatriotic in the sense in that we know that this kind of rhetoric has a nexus to violence,” Vinograd added. “We saw that on Jan. 6, we saw that in the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and in multiple other instances.”
Biden unequivocally condemned the shooting.
“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it,” the president said Saturday night.
Vinograd served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council before joining Goldman Sachs in 2013. She was a senior adviser at the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware before joining the Department of Homeland Security after Biden’s election as president.