Donald Trump stages first rally since apparent assassination attempt – US

Trump stages first rally since apparent assassination attempt

Ed Pilkington

Donald Trump on Wednesday night staged his first rally since he became the target of a second attempted assassination in as many months, telling his supporters in a sports venue outside New York City that what he called “these encounters with death” had only hardened him.

“God has now spared my life. It must have been God, not once, but twice,” Trump said to loud cheers from the ecstatic crowd.

The former president took his usual ragbag of lies, hyperbole, and dark and racist invective to the Nassau Coliseum in the suburbs of Long Island, just seven miles from the borders of New York City. It was an audacious choice of location, given that there are just 48 days til the election and New York is on neither main party’s list of priorities.

The state is reliably Democratic, having last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984 with Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Even Nassau county, where the arena is situated, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by 54% to Trump’s 45%, while the latest New York state polls show Kamala Harris comfortably ahead of him by double digits.

Yet Trump clearly saw method in his madness. Long Island, the leafy suburbs that stretch east from the city, has shifted towards the right in recent years, becoming something of an incubator for the Make America Great Again (Maga) upheaval.

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A government funding package championed by Republican House speaker Mike Johnson failed to pass on Wednesday, with less than two weeks left to prevent a shutdown starting 1 October.

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The final vote was 202 to 220, with 14 House Republicans and all but three House Democrats opposing the bill. Two Republican members voted “present”.

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The bill was not expected to pass, as a number of House Republicans had voiced criticism of the proposal before the vote. Given Republicans’ narrow House majority and Democrats’ widespread opposition to the bill, Johnson could only afford a handful of defections within his conference. Johnson delayed a vote on the funding package last week in the hopes of consolidating Republicans’ support, but those efforts could not get the bill across the finish line.

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Johnson’s proposed bill combined a six-month stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, a…