[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 75 (Wednesday, April 29, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2091-S2092]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS' DINNER SHOOTING

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, every American should be grateful that 
President Trump, Vice President Vance, the Cabinet, and thousands of 
other attendees were not harmed during Saturday's disturbing shooting 
that took place at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.
  We now know that the shooter was attempting to kill the President, 
and this was the third assassination attempt we have seen on his life 
in the past couple of years.
  Now, some Democrats--and I would include former President Obama in 
this--some have claimed that we don't have details about the suspect's 
motives, but we do have plenty of details, and we know that the shooter 
actually laid a good bit of this out. He did a manifesto, and he sent 
that manifesto to his family shortly before the attack. The shooter 
said he was going to target administration officials ``prioritized from 
highest-ranking to lowest.'' It shows you he thought this through. Now, 
his reason for this, he said President Trump is--and I quote his 
wording here again--``pedophile, rapist, traitor.''
  Now, this is unhinged rhetoric. It is completely in line with the 
lies that the Democrats have repeated on just about a daily basis every 
day regarding President Trump. We have heard it on TV, on podcasts, on 
social media, in their speeches, and it is something else that they 
continue with this rhetoric.
  And Gov. Tim Walz who, of course, was the VP nominee in the last 
election once said:

       No one has ever been more dangerous to this country than 
     Donald Trump, and he is a fascist to his core.

  Again, that was Gov. Tim Walz.
  Now, some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have called 
the President an ``existential threat to democracy,'' ``the most 
significant threat to American democracy since the Civil War,'' and an 
``authoritarian.'' And some of them have chosen to compare him to 
historical figures, and that historical figure they usually use is 
Hitler. And, of course, Kamala Harris once compared him to a 
``communist dictator.''
  This is reckless rhetoric. This is the kind of rhetoric that needs to 
stop because this places a target on our President, and this is the 
type of rhetoric that has no place in civil public life.
  Now, we are celebrating America 250, and we are looking at how this 
Nation has remained strong and free. Indeed, I think that as you look 
at our history, those tenets of faith, family, freedom, hope, and 
opportunity have served us well. And how do we achieve that American 
dream? Well, we have kept ourselves free and focused on achieving that 
dream for each and every person. They all look different. Everybody's 
dream is different of what they want, what their goals are, the type of 
community they want to live in. They are all different.
  But we arrive at decisions of what kind of communities we will have, 
what kind of country we will have--those issues of importance--we 
arrive there through robust, respectful, bipartisan debate. We don't 
get there by exercising reckless rhetoric, some of which I have quoted. 
It is so disappointing to hear this from some of our colleagues and 
then to see the type of vitriol that this spurs.
  Now, when we have robust, respectful, bipartisan debate--I share my 
opinion; someone else shares their opinion--what this does is to 
empower not only us, but the people that we represent, to enter into 
that debate, to be a part of the public square, to defend our freedoms, 
to build consensus, and to serve the American people and to preserve 
the freedoms that we enjoy.
  Now, without it, without having that marketplace of ideas, without 
that robust, respectful debate that leads to exchange and asking: What 
if we did this? What if we did that? If we did not have that, then this 
Nation would head to a very dark place. And this latest assassination 
attempt on President Trump is another reminder of what can happen when 
Americans abandon the possibility of working together and instead of 
settling their differences by debate in the public square, they choose 
to settle these differences by violence, by reckless rhetoric.
  So as we approach our Nation's 250th anniversary, we need to remember 
that it is this exchange of ideas and this robust, respectful debate 
that has helped to sustain the freedoms that we enjoy in this country.

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