Trump ‘to announce VP choice today’ — follow latest

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Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the House of Commons Speaker, has told Times Radio that he has written a letter to Donald Trump to offer his support against those who “don’t believe in our values”.

Speaking to John Pienaar, he said he’s also written to the Speaker of the House of Representatives to say “we are at war” in response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

“This is another attack on democracy. This is trying to see people influence the democratic process. Because they don’t believe in the ballot box, they go to extreme measures, which is my biggest worry about the future of democracy. We’ve got to protect democracy. We’ve got to protect the candidates who put themselves forward. And the first thing I wanted to do was express my worries and concerns in sending a letter to the former President, also to the Speaker as well, to say, look, we are at war. We believe in the democratic process. We must never give in to the others who don’t believe in our values.”

On whether the incident will influence preparations for Wednesday’s State Opening of Parliament he said: “Security measures are looked at all the time. There is a lot more than what you see. I never discuss the security measures that we do have. I’m always happy to talk in general terms and we’re always looking. We don’t stand still because we think we’ve got it right. That would be the wrong thing.”

A new survey for The Times — undertaken before Saturday’s assassination attempt — suggests Donald Trump is on course to win the presidential election, as the YouGov poll puts the former president ahead of Joe Biden in seven swing states.

The states where voters were surveyed — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — were won by Biden in 2020, and the incumbent president cannot reclaim the White House without winning at least three of them.

• Read more: Donald Trump on course to win 2024 election, Times poll suggests

Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, told Times Radio on Monday that Trump had willingly put his life on the line to run for re-election out of love for his country.

Speaking to John Pienaar at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Johnson said he hoped the US would use the attempted assassination “as a catalyst to unify and heal”.

“Put yourself in the position of somebody who just got a bullet grazing by their head and you survived and you’re running for president of the United States,” said Johnson, the highest ranking Republican on the senate subcommittee on investigations.

“You understand the responsibility that job carries with it and your life was just spared. At the same time, a wonderful human being’s life was lost and other people were grievously injured. So that’s not some little thing that you just move on and move into a Convention. That has to shake you to your core.”

Trump has said that Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent presidential candidate, should “immediately” receive Secret Service due to the increased threat of political violence.

“In light of what is going on in the world today, I believe it is imperative that Robert F Kennedy Jr. receive Secret Service protection — immediately,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Monday.

“Given the history of the Kennedy Family, this is the obvious right thing to do!”

On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was reviewing the latest request by the Kennedy campaign for additional protection.

Kennedy’s father, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968, and his uncle, president John F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspect identified by the FBI as the Trump rally gunman, was a member of a local shooting club.

A lawyer for the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club in Clairton, Pennsylvania, said the organisation condemned the shooting and was co-operating with the authorities.

Crooks, 20, graduated with an associate’s degree in engineering science from the Community College of Allegheny County in May. He worked as a dietary aid at a local nursing and rehab clinic.

The FBI said on Sunday that an analysis of Crooks’ social media accounts did not show any extremist political ideology or mental illness. Officials are investigating the attempted assassination as an act of domestic terrorism, and are trying to unlock Crooks’ phone to uncover more about his plans and motives.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, described the Trump shooting as a “failure” of security. However, Mayorkas, whose broad portfolio includes oversight of the Secret Service, pushed back on claims that the agency had rejected requests for additional security for Trump.

He told CNN: “When I say that something like this cannot happen, we are speaking of a failure. We are going to analyse, through an independent review, how that occurred, why it occurred, and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I couldn’t be clearer.”

The Secret Service has come under intense scrutiny for failing to prevent the gunman from accessing a rooftop with a direct line of sight to a stage where Trump was speaking.

Investigators found a transmitter next to the body of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman believed to have tried to assassinate Trump.

Law enforcement searched Crooks’ car parked nearby and found a receiver with wires going into a metal box that contained possible explosives, a source told CNN.

The officials are working to establish whether Crooks, 20, planned to detonate a bomb. He used an AR-15-style automatic rifle to shoot approximately eight shots at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, grazing the former president’s right ear.

He was shot dead by Secret Service snipers. His father legally owned more than 20 guns, according to the same report.

Trump plans to announce his selection for the Republican vice-presidential nomination today, according to a report.

Bret Baier, the Fox News anchor, said he had spoken on the phone with the former president, who told him a decision will be revealed sometime on Monday, the first day of the four-day Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

JD Vance, the Ohio senator, Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, and Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota are the three favoured candidates.

• Who will be Trump’s VP pick? Read more on the top contenders

Trump has described the dismissal of the classified documents case as “just the first step” in uniting the country.

In a Truth Social post moments ago, Trump called for all of the criminal and civil court cases against him to be withdrawn. “As me move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step,” he wrote.

“The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!”

Trump is due to be sentenced in September after being found guilty of 34 charges of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election.

A decision to throw out Trump’s classified documents case has been described by one legal scholar as a “seismic development”.

Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointee, tossed the case on Monday after determining that special counsel Jack Smith had not been improperly appointed.

Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, wrote that Cannon’s rationale for dismissing the case had already been rejected by the eight of the nine justices on the Supreme Court.

“Judge Cannon just did the unthinkable,” Tribe wrote on X. “This finally gives Jack Smith an opportunity to seek her removal from the case. I think the case for doing so is very strong.”

Jonathan Turley, professor at George Washington University Law School, called the decision a “seismic development”.

“The decision is another example of how Smith misplayed his hand in piling on charges in Florida,” Turley wrote. “If he had simply gone forward with the obstruction charge, he could have had a trial before the election.”

A judge in Florida has dismissed Trump’s criminal case over his alleged mishandling of classified information, ruling that special counsel Jack Smith was not lawfully appointed.

The ruling by judge Aileen Cannon hands a major victory to Trump, marking the first time one of his four criminal cases has been dismissed entirely.

“The Superseding Indictment is dismissed because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution,” Cannon wrote in a 93-page ruling.

The judge said that her determination is “confined to this proceeding.”

• Read more: Judge dismisses Trump’s classified documents case

MSNBC, the left-leaning US cable news network, pulled its flagship Morning Joe breakfast show on Monday.

The network, owned by NBC Universal, decided to air breaking news coverage instead due to concerns that one of its liberal guests would make an inappropriate comment about the attempted assassination of Trump, a source told rival news network CNN.

Morning Joe is hosted by husband-and wife broadcasters Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who clashed frequently and bitterly with Trump throughout his first term and 2024 presidential campaign.

NBC Universal did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson told CNN that they decided to simulcast rolling news coverage across all of their news channels to reflect the “gravity and complexity of this unfolding story”.

There has been heightened security outside the home of one of the top contenders to be named Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, since the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

JD Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, is the clear favourite on US betting markets to be Trump’s choice for vice-president. An announcement could come as early as Monday night.

Officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Ohio State Highway Patrol were spotted outside of Vance’s home in Cincinnati on Sunday. Local law enforcement sources told WKYC that the detail was a precautionary move and did not include a detail of Secret Service agents. A confirmed vice-presidential candidate would automatically receive Secret Service protection.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Vance took to social media to directly blame Biden’s public statements for stirring up hatred of Trump.

After months of teasing a decision, Trump could announce his running mate at the Republican National Convention, according to Politico.

Donald Trump has rewritten his Republican nomination speech to “bring the whole world together” following the attempt on his life at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Trump had promised the speech he will deliver in Milwaukee on Thursday would be a “humdinger”.

“Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches,” he said. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

He told the Washington Examiner that the “reality” of how close he came to death was only just “setting in”. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”, he said.

Trump said his speech to the Republican National Convention, which begins on Monday, represents a “chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance”. He gave thanks to God for saving him. Previously on Truth Social he thanked God for preventing the “unthinkable from happening”.

Jill Biden has spoken to Melania Trump following an attempted assassination of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The first lady’s office confirmed that they spoke on Sunday afternoon but have not released any details on the conversation. President Biden spoke with the former president following the attack at a rally in Pennsylvania.

I’d like to kill the lot of you,” the voter said fiercely (Edward Lucas writes). “I’ll try not to take that personally,” I responded, as pleasantly as I could. “No, I mean it,” came the reply, followed by a stream of abuse about politicians in general and me in particular. Would you rather live in a dictatorship like Russia, I parried. “Yes,” she replied forthrightly.

I was not frightened. Life has thickened my skin, and my interlocutor was a diminutive octogenarian. But I was upset. Crazed assailants have in recent years murdered Sir David Amess and Jo Cox, and gravely wounded Sir Stephen Timms: public service should not be a death sentence.

My three-year experience of politics in this country is that it is still overwhelmingly safe and even friendly. Voters may be bemused or exasperated but they are rarely hostile. Other candidates are rivals not enemies. During the final weeks of my parliamentary campaign (for the Lib Dems in central London), I got to know my Labour and Conservative counterparts as we faced the voters at public events. We could lip-synch each other’s stump speeches. I suggested that we swap. “I could certainly do all your jokes,” said my Tory counterpart. At the count I gave quiet thanks for the absence of sleaze and menace. But our gentle, honest culture is fragile. This weekend’s failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and the blizzard of disinformation and partisan rancour surrounding it, reflects a trend that should worry us here in Britain too.

Read the full story: Political violence simmers in Britain too

The US Secret Service said that it would participate fully in a probe announced by President Biden after agents were not able to stop former president Donald Trump from being injured in an apparent assassination attempt.

The FBI said it was investigating the incident and Biden has ordered an independent review after the agency was criticised for not doing enough to prevent the attack.

In her first major statement since the shooting, which killed a rally attendee, Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, said that the agency was increasing security for Republican presidential candidate Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which begins on Monday.

Shares in Trump’s Truth Social media company have surged after the attempted assassination as investors mull whether the incident will boost the former president’s chances of re-election.

The share price rose 70 per cent in trading ahead of the opening of New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange.

I know nothing about Thomas Matthew Crooks other than his age, 20, and that he is the prime suspect in the attempted assassination of the once and probably future president of the United States, Donald Trump (Trevor Phillips writes). But his 15 minutes of fame may go down in history as the moment that liberal democracy looked into the abyss of unreason and stepped back. Or it may not. We have a choice.

As I watched the footage from Butler, Pennsylvania, and shots crackled across the arena, I was thrown back a quarter of a century. On September 11, 2001, I stood alongside the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone watching in disbelief as a second plane flew into the World Trade Center. We looked at each other as we reached the same dreadful conclusions: this was no accident, and our world would never be quite the same again.

It took me a moment on Saturday evening to grasp that Trump’s gesture was more than the instinctive swatting of an irritating insect. Fifteen seconds of gunfire, and the astonishing bravery of the secret service detail who placed their own bodies in the line of fire, dispelled any doubts. Whatever the motives of the shooter, the context and the identity of the target make this an inescapably political act, one freighted with significance for open societies such as our own.

Read the full story: This is a warning shot about tribal politics

Four sitting presidents have been shot dead, and there have been failed attempts to shoot several more. It is the product of the toxic combination of two persistent themes in American history: the availability of guns and the fear that political opponents are existential threats to freedom.

In 1835 Andrew Jackson was shot at on the steps of the Capitol building, but survived because the would-be assassin’s gun misfired. Trump has encouraged comparisons between himself and Jackson, a populist slaveholder from Tennessee who shocked the east coast establishment and framed himself as a spokesman for the common man.

Jackson, who had made his name fighting the British and Native Americans and whose most important legacy was the forced dispossession of indigenous people from Georgia, already had a bullet permanently lodged in his chest from a duel.

Read the full story: What we can learn from American history and the four presidents shot dead

Agencies are investigating Crooks’s motive and whether anybody else was involved.

“We do not currently have an identified motive,” Kevin Rojek, the FBI agent in charge of the case, said at a briefing on Saturday night.

The inquiry into what took place could last for months and investigators would work “tirelessly” to identify the motive, Rojek said.

Crooks was a registered Republican, but in 2021 made a $15 donation to ActBlue, a political action committee that raises money for left-leaning and Democratic politicians, according to a Federal Election Commission filing.

The donation was earmarked for the Progressive Turnout Project, a national group that encourages Democrats to vote.

Crooks’s father told CNN that he was trying to figure out “what the hell happened” and would wait until he spoke to law enforcement before speaking about his son.

Trump has wasted no time in converting the attempt on his life into a fundraising opportunity.

The photograph of the former president raising his fist while his face is covered in blood is featured on the homepage of his website as he tells supporters to “fear not”.

“I am Donald J. Trump. FEAR NOT! I will always love you for supporting me. Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again,” a message on the site reads.

The Secret Service denied reports that it had rejected a request by Trump’s team for more security before the rally. Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said it had added “protective resources and technology and capabilities” to Trump’s security detail as his campaign to retake the presidency stepped up a gear.

The agency was founded in 1865 to fight rampant counterfeiting of the United States currency. Since the assassination of the president William McKinley in 1901, its role has included the full-time protection of presidents.

In recent years it has been beset by scandals amid claims it is understaffed and underfunded. Among the biggest controversies was the revelation that agents protecting President Obama during a 2012 summit in Colombia had brought prostitutes back to their hotel.

Fake news and conspiracy theories proliferated online after Saturday’s night shooting.

Media analysts tracked accusations against the Biden administration, Trump himself, and the government of China in a flurry of online speculation. There were also false suggestions that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was transgender or Jewish.

The extreme-left Antifa organisation were also identified, without supporting evidence, as being responsible. “You’ve got the usual suspects being trotted out. And then on the more QAnon channels you’ve got ‘this is the left trying to bait us into a civil war’,” said Amanda Rogers, a researcher at the Century Foundation think tank.

In Rome, Marco Violi, an Italian sports journalist was woken in the middle of the night by notifications on his smartphone flagging online posts with his picture suggesting that he was the shooter.

Violi blamed two Italian Twitter/X users for spreading the rumour, saying that they had been persecuting him for the past six years. “The incredible thing is that it went viral in an instant. Media from all round the world pick up this fake news without anyone trying to verify the basis of the report.”

Attacks that kill or wound an American president leave an indelible impression on the national psyche. These “Where-were-you-when?” moments are horrific, mesmeric, consequential and immediately become the stuff of conspiracy and legend.

Was this one the day Donald Trump that won the 2024 presidential election?

Ronald Reagan was the last president to be struck by a bullet, just two months into his first term. The mythologising began soon after John Hinckley Jr shot him outside the Washington Hilton hotel and he came close to death as the bullet stopped about an inch from his heart.

Trump came similarly close to death on Saturday. Another inch would have meant catastrophic injuries and a story more like the shot that struck John F Kennedy in the head.

Read the full story: Trump’s blood-spattered face will be a defining image

Donald Trump has an “aura of indestructibility” following the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, the former UK ambassador to the US has said.

“It was another extraordinary example of the indestructibility of Donald Trump,” Lord Darroch of Kew told Sky News. “For a bullet to hit his ear, for others to whizz past him … he actually captured the moment at the end by raising his fist in that iconic photograph. He really does have an aura of indestructibility about him.”

By Sunday afternoon Trump was said to be in “really good spirits”, with Brett Baier of Fox News relaying what the former president had allegedly told him in a 15-minute call. Baier said Trump had also “praised President Biden” for having phoned him after the attack.

Trump told Baier that he had just turned his head to look at a big screen displaying immigration figures at Saturday’s rally before he felt “the biggest mosquito of his lifetime”. Trump was quoted as saying that if the bullet’s trajectory “was a quarter of an inch” different, he would not have survived the assault.

When a bullet flew by Donald Trump’s ear at a speed near 2,000mph, it was not clear to Doug Mills, who was standing a few feet away taking photographs, that he had just captured one of the most remarkable images of the 21st century.

In that instant, as the shutter clicked on his Sony AI camera at 20 frames per second, the New York Times lensman once described by Trump as a “genius” unwittingly captured the round fired by the suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks. The shot, from an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, showed as a streak of white smoke against the blue sky to the president’s left.

“Oh my gosh, you won’t believe it, you got the bullet flying past his head,” his photo editor told him over the phone as she worked through the hundreds of images sent directly from his camera. “I said, ‘What?’” Mills recalled. “When I had my laptop later and saw them I said something to the effect of ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t f***ing believe it’.”

Read the full story: How ‘Trump’s genius photographer’ captured the would-be killer bullet

Donald Trump spent much of the day following the shooting on the phone with friends, news hosts and local and foreign officials.

Darrell Scott, an Ohio pastor and longtime ally, said Trump was in great spirits when they spoke on Sunday morning, hours after the shooting.

“He was great, like he always is. He didn’t even make a big deal of it,” Scott said. “He was actually trying to downplay it somewhat, asking how I was doing,” he said.

Reince Priebus, former RNC chairman, who also served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, told ABCs This Week that Trump was “grateful for the miracle of what happened, in his case … One quarter inch turned the other direction and were obviously talking about something very different this morning.”

The suspected shooter lay on the roof of the warehouse, dressed in camouflage shorts and a grey T-shirt, his long brown hair draped over his face, which was streaked with blood. Videos and photographs published online showed that he was thin and young, with a patchy goatee.

The man, named as Thomas Matthew Crooks by the FBI, had been killed less than an hour earlier. Witnesses claimed they saw him “bear crawl” on to the roof with a rifle and fire at least five bullets towards a stage roughly 200 yards away where Donald Trump was speaking to a crowd of tens of thousands of people in Butler, Pennsylvania.

It was about 6.08pm and Trump had been speaking for about four minutes when a witness who was standing in a shaded area just outside the rally perimeter spotted the alleged attacker.

Read the full story: How the rally shooting unfolded

Sir Keir Starmer will ensure a “reset moment” to draw the toxicity out of politics after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a cabinet minister has said.

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, said that this month’s general election was “the most toxic election that I can ever remember participating in” after repeated incidences of harassment of candidates.

Under Starmer “we’re going to have a reset moment in politics where we have far less heat, far more light, where we can disagree agreeably and we can set a better tone for the political debate that we have out in the country,” she told BBC Breakfast.

“What we need is real leadership across the political spectrum. But you can rest assured that you’ll find that from this government.”

Donald Trump has arrived in Milwaukee as the Republican Party prepares to officially nominate him this week as he said he would not allow the assassination attempt to change his plans.

“Based on yesterday’s terrible events, I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and the Republican National Convention, by two days, but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else,” Trump posted Sunday on his social media site Truth Social.

“Business as usual,” Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, told the New York Times when asked about the plan for the week. Chris LaCivita, a Trump adviser, said the shooting “changes nothing”.

American and Chinese entrepreneurs have already started selling merchandise referring to the attempted assassination of Trump. Featuring pictures of the Republican candidate just after he was shot, T-shirts with slogans such as “Bulletproof”, “Legends Never Die”, “Grazed but not Dazed”, and “Shooting Makes Me Stronger” have been posted online priced between $9-$40.

“[The sales] exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect that Trump would have so many fans,” said Zhong Jiachi, 28, the owner of Paxinico, a clothing merchant on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, who sold about 40 Trump T-shirts within 24 hours.

Li Jinwei, 25, who sells goods on Alibaba’s Taobao platform told Hong Kong media that it took roughly just half a minute to produce a Trump T-shirt at her factory in China.

“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the United States,” she said.

The gunman who fired at Donald Trump was described on Sunday night as a “loner” obsessed with weapons who used his father’s semiautomatic rifle in the attack.

The authorities identified Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, a registered Republican who had donated to the Democratic Party on the day Joe Biden was inaugurated. He was shot and killed by Secret Service agents after he fired a volley of shots towards a stage where the former president was speaking at a campaign event.

Law enforcement officials said they retrieved an AR-15-style rifle from next to Crooks’ body and later discovered two explosive devices in his vehicle and bomb-making materials at his residence.

Read the full story: Trump shooting suspect ‘was bullied loner’

The United States Secret Service is facing criticism over its failure to protect Donald Trump from an attempted assassination.

Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the service that provides security for presidents and their families, will face a congressional inquiry after a 20-year-old gunman wounded Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

The authorities who spotted Thomas Crooks behaving suspiciously near metal detectors at the venue, near Pittsburgh, passed on the information to the Secret Service, according to CNN.

Read the full story: Secret Service accused of ‘epic failure’

When the first shots rang out, there was silence. Then, the screaming started (Tom Newton Dunn writes).

It was just after ten past six on Saturday evening at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. We and tens of thousands of others had been waiting for hours in the 35C heat to hear Donald Trump speak.

When he finally took to the stage, at 6.04pm, the crowd, many of them dressed in red Maga hats, cheered and whooped as he started speaking, about 50 metres from us.

Then a volley of jarring sounds cut through the summer air: high-pitched rattles that sounded like firecrackers. Everyone looked around, and just for a moment, there was a deadly quiet.

Read the full story: I was at the Trump rally shooting — there was silence, then chaos

The King has written privately to Donald Trump after he survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign event, Buckingham Palace said.

The contents of the letter will not be published, royal officials added.

It is understood that Charles’s message was in keeping with the prime minister’s conversation with Trump, in which he condemned the violence, expressed his condolences for the victims and their families and wished him a quick recovery. The King’s message was delivered on Sunday via the UK embassy in Washington DC

More images have been released of the man killed during the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Corey Comperatore, a father of two, died a “hero” after he dived on his family to try to shield them from the bullets, Josh Shapiro, the state governor, told reporters.

Randy Reamer, president of the Buffalo Township volunteer fire company, paid tribute to Comperatore, 50, as a “stand-up guy” and a “true brother of the fire service”.

Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative shadow foreign secretary, has called the assassination attempt “dreadful” and criticised violent rhetoric in politics.

“On both sides of the Atlantic during my 35 years in politics, the tone of the debate has coarsened, and I think there’s too much playing the man and not the ball”, he told Times Radio. “And I do think of my 11 general elections which I’ve now fought in, the last one hit a particular low in terms of the abuse that candidates on all sides of the political discourse in the UK had to put up with.

“So I think there is some truth in that, and I think that the sensible comments that have been made, again on both sides of the Atlantic since the dreadful attempted assassination of President Trump, I think the call for a better quality debate and also the call from the Speaker of the House of Commons when he said just before the weekend that we should respect politicians more, but that they need to respect each other more. I thought he put it very succinctly and very well.”

President Biden urged Americans not to make assumptions about the incident or the motives of the gunman. He said the FBI had been ordered to carry out a swift and comprehensive investigation, and that security at the Republican convention was being reviewed.

Biden addressed the nation on Sunday night from the Oval Office, only the third time he has done so. Such remarks are usually reserved for important moments and the last time Biden made such a speech was after the October 7 attacks on Israel.

He said the shooting offered a chance to reflect on how divisive and fraught American politics had become. “I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, when we disagree, we are not enemies, we are neighbours, we are friends, co-workers, citizens and, most importantly, we are fellow Americans,” the president said. “It’s time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do that.”

A former FBI special agent has said that there would have been an opportunity for a second assailant to shoot Donald Trump again if there had been one.

Speaking to the Today programme on Monday, Ken Gray, a retired FBI special agent, said: “My own opinion is that by virtue of the fact that the shooter was able to get as close as he did, remain undetected long enough to be able to get off his shots, nearly killing former president Trump, killing one of the rally attendees and critically wounding two others — that in itself shows a failure in security.”

He later added: “After the shooting occurred, there was a period of time where they were getting ready to move former president Trump from the stage to the vehicle to get him out of the area. That seemed to take an awful long time.

“If there’d been another shooter at this venue, that shooter would have had time to get off a shot at president Trump, especially as he is standing there defiantly raising his fist.”

Trump will accept the Republican presidential nomination for the third time in Milwaukee and announce his running mate after months of speculation.

After a process that has drawn comparisons to The Apprentice, the reality show in which the former president starred, Trump’s choice for vice-president will be unveiled to the party faithful and an audience of millions.

Several contenders, who have vied all year to catch Trump’s eye, are set to speak. The frontrunner, however, is JD Vance, an Ohio senator, venture capitalist and author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

The Milwaukee convention is very much a family affair, with Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, and the former president’s two eldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, due to take the podium. Melania Trump, the former first lady, is also set to make a rare appearance, but is not scheduled to speak.

Hours after the assassination attempt, Donald Trump posted a series of statements on Truth Social.

Confirming he would attend the Republican National Convention, he said: “I cannot allow a ‘shooter’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else.”

He added: “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand united, and show our true character as Americans, remaining strong and determined, and not allowing evil to win. I truly love our country, and love you all, and look forward to speaking to our great nation this week.”

Trump’s latest post said simply: “UNITE AMERICA!”

Read the full story: ‘Don’t let evil win’: Trump makes plea for unity