Washington, D.C
America’s toxic political climate faces calls to ‘tone it down’ after assassination attempt on Trump
WASHINGTON (AP) — “Tone it down!”
That was the plea from one Republican congressman as he came to grips with the assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a political rally in the Butler Farm area where he grew up.
“I am in a state of bewilderment of how and what has happened to the United States of America,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-PA., told The Associated Press early Sunday.
The shocking attempt on Trump’s life has brought into stark relief the toxic climate in America’s political life. While the details of the shooter’s motive remain unclear, the violence is a further gauge of how what was once unacceptable, if not unthinkable, in American society has become painfully commonplace.
As the 2024 election enters a crucial phase ahead of the national conventions, how the nation responds will test the first presidential contest since 2020, an election that became defined by efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
On Sunday, civic leaders, pastors and elected officials from President Joe Biden on down appealed to Americans for unity, urging an end to vitriol.
“We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said in an evening address to the nation from the Oval Office.
Under a charged atmosphere, the Republican National Convention opens this week in Milwaukee to renominate Trump to lead the ticket, while Democrats prepare for their own convention next month uncertain if the party will stick with the incumbent Biden in an expected rematch.
Trump’s rhetoric, though tempered in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, had taken on deeper and darker tones in this, his third campaign for the White House.
This spring, Trump who has accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the country” and vowed to launch the largest domestic deportation operation, told autoworkers there would be a “ bloodbath ” in this country if he is not reelected.
“If we don’t win, I think our country is finished,” he said during the New Hampshire primary.
Trump has promised retribution on his political rivals, particularly those in the Justice Department after he was indicted on federal charges of storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home and in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump also made make light of violence. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was attacked by an intruder looking for the former House speaker at the family’s San Francisco home in 2022 — beaten over the head with a hammer — Trump mocked the security fencing she had installed as insufficient.
Trump drew chuckles in a speech before California Republicans last year when he asked, “How’s her husband doing, by the way?”
Biden, in turn, has warned that Trump’s return to power poses a grave threat to the country’s civic traditions. He chose a location near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for his initial 2024 campaign event, portraying the likely rematch as “all about” whether democracy can survive.
Addressing the nation Sunday, Biden pointed to past examples of political upheaval, including Jan. 6 and more recently harassment of election workers, and said, “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever.”
Still, one of Trump’s potential vice-presidential picks, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, said on social media over the weekend that Biden’s earlier rhetoric against Trump “led directly” to the attempted assassination.
And House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said it’s time to “turn the temperature down in this country,” also singled out for blame Biden’s recent comments during a call with political donors in which the president said, “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.”
Johnson said he knows Biden didn’t literally mean Trump should be targeted, but added, “that kind of language on either side should be called out.”
Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Boston’s Northeastern University, said there is an opportunity now for political leaders to “start framing their critiques of the others in words that explicitly denounce violence.”
From the the 1968 killings of American leaders Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the 1981 attack on President Ronald Reagan, to shootings of Republicans and Democrats in the past decade, the violent strain has always been part of American politics.
Other violent incidents have intersected more recently with the nation’s political struggles in frightful ways.
Outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s suburban home, a man with a knife and gun who threated to kill the justice was arrested in 2022. Members of Congress have experienced increased security threats. And harassment against elections officials from cities and states across the nation has led to a wave of departures because of threats on their livelihoods.
Last summer, FBI agents fatally shot a Utah man who had threatened to assassinate Biden and had referred to himself as a “MAGA Trumper.” That followed a series of drive-by shootings earlier in the year targeting Democrats in New Mexico, a startling outburst that led to criminal charges against a failed state legislative candidate who had parroted Trump’s rigged-election rhetoric.
A gunman who died in a shootout in 2022 after trying to get inside the FBI’s Cincinnati office apparently went on social media and called for federal agents to be killed “on sight” following the search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who focuses on domestic terrorism, said, “The warning lights have been blinking red regarding violence in this election cycle for months, if not years now.”
As Trump took the stage Saturday evening, he had opened the rally in Pennsylvania as he often does, marveling at the “big beautiful crowd” gathered to see him — and demeaning Biden’s own crowds as paltry in comparison.
The former president had just started his speech, launching into his mass deportation agenda and complaints of a nation in decline.
“Our country is going to hell,” Trump said.
Minutes later, shots rang out.
Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, who was sitting with other Republican officials behind Trump, called it all just a terrible tragedy. “The level of lack of civility and hostility, maybe this will send a ringing signal to all those to cool it,” he told the AP.
As Americans took stock Sunday, the common message was a call for unity.
The Rev. Chris Morgan, senior pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park, which is a few streets away from where the shooter lived, urged his congregation during a morning service to pray for the country.
“Clearly there’s a lot going on and a lot that is causing people to have great anxiety and great struggle,” he said. “I want to encourage you to be praying for those that have been involved that they too can find what it means to show kindness to others.”
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Associated Press writers Ali Swenson, Brian Slodysko and Holly Meyer contributed to this report.
Washington, D.C
The director of the Congressional Budget Office—known for its gloomy national debt data—is very optimistic that a crisis will be avoided entirely | Fortune
Dr Phillip Swagel is an optimist, both by nature and when he looks at the U.S. economy.
This fact is perhaps at odds with what one might assume: Swagel is the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that offers independent budgetary and economic analysis to Congress.
Very often—an inevitable occupational hazard—the subject of national debt and the interest the U.S. Treasury pays to maintain is its central focus. The numbers are eye-watering: Public debt stands at more than $39 trillion. The interest expense on that borrowing now exceeds $1 trillion a year. Indeed, the latest budget update from the CBO highlights that the government—according to preliminary estimates—paid out nearly $530 billion between October 2025, when the fiscal year starts, and March 2026. This equates to more than $88 billion in interest payments a month, or more than $22 billion a week.
The CBO’s figures are routinely cited by policymakers, think tanks, and lobbyists as alarming evidence that the U.S. needs to find a more sustainable fiscal path or risk dire straits.
Swagel doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the U.S. will face a crisis of its own making. His justification is simple: He was at the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, and joined the CBO months before the COVID pandemic began. He has watched as the U.S. economy, seemingly against all odds, has clawed its way out of economic crises before.
That’s not to say Swagel isn’t a staunch advocate of setting the U.S. on a more sustainable fiscal path—rather, he trusts the people in power to do so when the time comes.
Why the optimism?
Among those concerned about national debt are notable names: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also worried about federal spending and has endorsed a plan floated by Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett that would render members of Congress ineligible for reelection if they allow deficits to exceed 3% of GDP.
On the other hand, optimistic economists suggest that, despite the value of the debt, it’s not actually an issue: the bond market is holding steady, indicating a reliable market of buyers. Likewise, the U.S.’s own central bank buys huge swaths of the debt, meaning, in the simplest of layman’s terms, the economy can essentially print its own money. There are holes in this argument, not least the fact that Fed chairman nominee Kevin Warsh has suggested he would like to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet and may therefore be less inclined to finance borrowing.
Swagel’s positive outlook doesn’t rely on the argument that a crisis hasn’t happened yet, so therefore it never will: “[My optimism] is rooted in my experience,” Swagel tells Fortune in an exclusive interview in Washington D.C. “First being at Treasury during the financial crisis and seeing very difficult times and the country coming together with an effective response—not saying it’s perfect, lots of controversy—but it was effective.”
“The second thing is policymakers are smart, they’re thoughtful. Interacting with members of Congress makes me optimistic. I know you read about all the squabbles … I’m completely aware of this, but the policymakers that are thinking about these things are thoughtful and effective. Not necessarily always effective at passing legislation, but that’s part of our political system, it was set up to make it difficult ot pass legislation.”
Decisions on the horizon
Swagel’s optimism that Congress will be pushed into action will be tested sooner rather than later, likely at some point in the next six years, he told Fortune. This is partly due to the fact that, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) both Social Security and Medicare will become insolvent within that time period.
“Making progress to address the fiscal trajectory would be a positive for the U.S. economy,” Swagel said. “Credible steps would lead to lower interest rates that would make the subsequent adjustment easier, there is a reward to virtue. It’s a positive thing, we can’t go on [with] the scolding narrative. My sense is that members of Congress understand the fiscal situation, it’s not that everyone single one has looked at our one-pager of numbers and understands the debt to the third decimal point, but they understand something needs to be done.”
“It doesn’t have to be done immediately, but at some point reasonably soon.”
Swagel is of the opinion that bond investors haven’t increased risk premiums not because they’re not worried about a fiscal crisis, but because they have priced in preventative action from Congress—in his mind “a vote of confidence that my optimism is not misplaced.”
“As a country, we face up to these problems. It’s not happening now, I’m not sure it’s going to happen in the rest of this year or even the next year, or the next two years. But we will face up to it, and the market in some sense expects us to, because otherwise interest rates would be higher,” he explained.
The Cheesecake Factory
The role of the CBO, to some extent, is to provide policymakers with their options if and when they do choose to take action on federal deficits. It’s a menu not unlike the Cheesecake Factory, Swagel says: Large, inclusive of a range of modifications and options, and delivered without judgement.
“Right now it’s maybe a pick three, and you’re looking at a six or seven course menu,” joked Caleb Quakenbush, director of fiscal policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, in an interview with Fortune. “The longer you delay, the more you’re gonna have to add to your tab, and those options become more expensive.”
Indeed, economists and analysts aren’t necessarily worried about the absolute level of government debt, rather the debt-to-GDP ratio. Depending on whom you ask, the debt-to-GDP ratio stands at around 122% of GDP at present. This measure demonstrates an economy’s spending versus its growth, and the risk associated with lending to a nation that isn’t growing fast enough to handle its spending. To rebalance that ratio, an economy could either cut spending or increase growth—the latter being by far the less painful option.
The growth option is becoming less feasible, Michael Peterson, CEO of fiscal think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, told Fortune in an exclusive interview: “I think it requires government action because we’ve waited so long. We’ve added so many trillions, and the current deficit is so big at 6% that the level of growth you would need really exceeds what is feasible.
“Growth needs to be a part of it, but it’s sort of a vicious cycle. The longer we delay, the more debt we have, the slower growth is going to be. The more we get this under control, I think the greater optimism there is, interest rates go down, more growth comes from that. It’s sort of a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on your policy response.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – Seventy-two veterans took a trip Saturday to our nation’s capital to visit memorials honoring their service in the armed forces.
This year marks the 12th trip to Washington, D.C. for Honor Flight Tallahassee.
Early Saturday morning, veterans and their guardians met to take a charter flight up to D.C.
Throughout the day, veterans were taken to the World War II memorial, as well as the Korean and Vietnam War memorials. The veterans also visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
More Tallahassee news:
The day ended with a wonderful welcome home celebration.
Our Jacob Murphey, Julia Miller, Taylor Viles, and Grace Temple accompanied the veterans, capturing moments from throughout the day.
The team will have live coverage from Washington, D.C. on Monday to share more from the day’s events.
We will continue to have coverage throughout the month of May, leading up to our Honor Flight special on Memorial Day.
To keep up with the latest news as it develops, follow WCTV on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Nextdoor and X (Twitter).
Have a news tip or see an error? Write to us here. Please include the article’s headline in your message.
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4 things to know about the weather:
- Chances of rain in the morning
- Gusty Sunday
- Chilly Monday
- Temps will rise again through the work week
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.
The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.
Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.
However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.
QuickCast
SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s
MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
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