BUTLER, Pa. — U.S. Rep Mike Kelly couldn’t wait to have former President Donald Trump back in his congressional district Saturday.
Since Trump’s political emergence in 2015, Kelly has played host to Trump in the key battleground state a half-dozen times, including twice in his hometown.
When he learned of the former president’s plan to return to Butler on Saturday, Kelly initially expected that Trump would speak at the Butler Regional Airport, as he did Oct. 31, 2020. And when he was told what venue had been selected, the Butler Farm Show Grounds, he expressed concern that it might not be large enough to accommodate the tens of thousands of supporters Trump drew four years earlier.
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Rep. Kelly: Day ‘going so well’
His worries about the venue’s capacity limitations were quickly put to rest.
“The day started off so well. We were going to the Butler Farm Show Grounds, and this is where I’ve taken my grandchildren before to ride ponies and look at all the different animals that children in the 4-H Club raise,” Kelly said Sunday. “It was going so well. It was just going so well.”
Trump had taken the stage to vociferous chants of “U-S-A.” Kelly was seated to the right of the former president, about 50 feet away. His wife, three of his grandchildren and his son were also there. So were his brother and his brother’s grandchildren. Kelly was sitting in a different area of the venue than all of them.
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Trump began talking about the economy and inflation, he said. “And then those shots rang out,” Kelly recalled.
“It was pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” he said. “I looked up, saw the president and said, ‘Oh, my God. Somebody just shot the president. Behind me in the grandstands, I heard people say, ‘he’s been shot, he’s been shot.’ I looked back over my shoulder and about 12 rows up in the stands some people were surrounding somebody who was down on the ground. And it just kept going. People were yelling and screaming. Secret Service was on top of the president right away, within a second or two.”
It seemed surreal, he said, like a scene out of a bad dream. As the shooting stopped and chaos ensued, Kelly looked over the crowd to find his wife and other family members. They were OK.
“Everything was out of focus and everything was moving too slowly and too quickly at the same time,” Kelly said. “… When you watch it in real time in a place that you totally do not expect anything like that to happen — not at the Farm Show, not in Butler, Pennsylvania — it’s like, how did we get to this level? And you start to think that the United States has started to look like a third-world country.”
Kelly says security review needs full investigation
Kelly wants a full, independent investigation of the security lapses that allowed the man the FBI identified as the sniper, Thomas Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, to make his way onto the roof of a nearby building with a rifle and attempt to assassinate the former president. Trump’s ear was struck by one of the bullets. One rally attendee, Corey Comparatore, 50, of Sarver, in Butler County, was killed as he shielded his wife and children from the gunfire. Two other men were injured. Crooks was fatally shot by the Secret Service.
“I’m not blaming anybody,” Kelly said. “I’m hearing now people saying that the Secret Service didn’t do their job. Somebody else didn’t do their job. Let’s wait and see how this plays out before we start doing the criticism of who didn’t do what when they should have.”
But Kelly is also calling for a divided America to return to a time when people weren’t hostile toward one another. Everyone should look in the mirror, he said.
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“As a nation, the America I grew up in, the culture I grew up in, it’s pretty much gone,” Kelly said. “It’s time for us to go to our places of worship, thank God for being in the United States of America and then realizing things have to get back to what they used to be. That’s going to be up to each of us individually. There’s no way around this. People have become so polarized they don’t talk to each other anymore. Families don’t have Thanksgiving or Christmas together because they’re so divided politically. That’s totally unacceptable. We’ve got to cure whatever it is that’s ill about our society right now.”
Matthew Rink can be reached at mrink@timesnews.com or on X at @ETNRink.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Trump shooting attempt: Rep. Kelly calls for full security review
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