As Piers Morgan sees it, the United States’ “very liberal, skewed mainstream media” is unwilling to “focus on these assassination attempts on Trump,” the British commentator said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” Tuesday, despite the fact that “they are the biggest news story that I can think of.”
“When has there been a presidential candidate who, within a space of a few weeks, has had two attempts on his life?” Morgan continued. “One where he’s hit by a bullet, and one where he comes from three to four minutes of having an AK-47 bullet smashing into his brains.”
“So this is an enormous story, and yet already everyone’s keen to move on,” Morgan added. “And already what they’re trying to do is say, ‘This had nothing to do with the rhetoric that we spewed about Trump for years, that he is the new Hitler, that he is a clear existential threat to democracy in America and the world.’”
The men who attempted to shoot Trump in Pennsylvania in July and again in Florida on Sunday might have been influenced by such discourse, he added. Many have called Trump a threat to democracy for a variety of reasons, with the most prominent being his hostility toward the peaceful transfer of power after losing in the 2020 election, as exemplified by the insurrection he helped provoke on Jan. 6, 2021.
Kelly agreed with Morgan and specifically accused NBC’s Lester Holt of shifting “from ‘Trump was almost killed’ to ‘Trump is basically almost getting others killed in Springfield, Ohio’” in his coverage Sunday night, also criticizing CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell. They had reported on bomb threats to hospitals in the midwestern state following Trump and running mate JD Vance popularizing unsubstantiated claims about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs.
Morgan and Kelly also took issue with the Secret Service’s actions Sunday and the organization’s subsequent statements. “You would have thought that the Secret Service had a had a perfect day on Sunday. That they heard this guy talking about showing up at Trump’s golf course to do this, and they got him sitting in his apartment, still unarmed. As we all know, that’s not what happened,” Kelly said.
Morgan agreed and said he spent part of Sunday “chucking stuff at my television” in response to a news briefing given that afternoon.
“And my question for the Secret Service is this: Two months after you nearly lost Donald Trump to an assassin’s bullet, if he decides to go off the record and wants to suddenly have a round of golf at his own golf course in his own name, at a place he plays that with almost weekly regularity, the very least I expect you to do before he steps foot on that golf course is check the perimeter,” Morgan argued.
“I don’t think that’s too much to ask, but the Secret Service, you have one job, which is to protect the president of the United States, the vice president, and other dignitaries, but primarily the president or people who served in that office,” Morgan insisted.
The Secret Service itself has noted that it’s a resource issue due to the size of Trump’s golf courses and the fact that there are sightlines to the course from public roads. Trump was previously warned by the Secret Service of the dangers of golfing at his own courses. Other presidents have golfed, but have usually done so on a less predictable schedule and often at more private golf courses, including former President Barack Obama golfing on military bases. Trump himself has also praised the Secret Service’s work in protecting him from the would-be assassin on Sunday.
Kelly insisted that on her show, “we told you we don’t know the truth” about repeatedly debunked claims that immigrants in Ohio are capturing and eating animals, including pets, “but we’re showing you the evidence that’s on the one side. And we’re telling you about what the city officials are saying on the other side. The rest of the media wants to pretend that they have affirmatively settled it, and they haven’t,” Kelly claimed. However, there has been scant evidence provided in support of the viral claims promoted by the Republican presidential ticket.
Another issue facing the people of Ohio, Kelly continued, is “the deaths caused in Springfield, by these migrants and the murders of Americans, caused by illegal immigrants who are literally everywhere.” There have been no reported murders by immigrants in Ohio, either legal or not. The Haitian community cited in the pet-eating claims are legal migrants.
One death that did occur happened in 2023, when 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed when a minivan driven by Hermanio Joseph, an immigrant from Haiti, collided with Clark’s school bus. Clark’s father Nathan has demanded that Trump, Vance and their allies cease using his son’s death for political gain, acknowledging that it was an accident.
“This needs to stop now,” he said at a Springfield City Council hearing in September. “They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio. I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.”
Trump and Vance appear to have picked up racist rumors about Haitian immigrants to Springfield from self-described neo-Nazis who initially targeted the community — which has been credited with reviving the struggling city — in August. Immigrants from Haiti began arriving in Springfield in 2017, a boon to a city that had lost a quarter of its population since the 1960s.
Many of the immigrants initially worked at Springfield’s Dole Fresh Vegetables; since then, they’ve opened restaurants and filled empty neighborhoods.
