Trump holds rally with Elon Musk at site of assassination attempt

Donald Trump was joined on stage by billionaire backer Elon Musk for a rally in the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt, as the neck-and-neck US election campaign heads into its final month.

Musk, the Tesla founder who has donated to a super Pac associated with the Republican campaign, leapt on to the stage to urge voters to support Trump, repeating the candidate’s claim that the November vote was the “most important election of our lifetime”.

“The true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire and we had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs, and another who was fist-pumping after getting shot: ‘Fight, fight, fight’,” said Musk, in his first appearance alongside the former president.

Musk claimed the Democrats were a threat to the American constitution, adding that if Trump did not win it would be the “last election”.

He said the Democrats wanted “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively.”

In an hour and half-long speech, Trump said that his return to Butler, where a shot from a would-be assassin almost killed him, showed that the gunman “did not break our spirit”.

“I return to Butler in the aftermath of tragedy and heartache to deliver a simple message to the people of Pennsylvania and to the people of America — our movement to make America great again stands stronger, prouder, more united, more determined and nearer to victory than ever before,” said Trump.

But since his first appearance in Butler, vice-president Kamala Harris has replaced Biden and the polls have narrowed. Harris leads Trump in the popular vote and the races in the seven swing states are practically a dead heat, according to an FT analysis of FiveThirtyEight polling data. Pennsylvania is the closest of all races, with Harris leading Trump by just an average of 0.6 percentage points.

“Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and, who knows, maybe even tried to kill me,” Trump told the crowd. “But I’ve never stopped fighting for you, and I never will.”

Tens of thousands of supporters, many of whom had been present at the July event, in which a Trump supporter was killed and two others were injured, gathered in Butler from the morning of the rally. They chanted “Fight, fight, fight” — the words proclaimed on stage by Trump in the moments after the shooting.

In front of the firefighter’s uniform belonging to Corey Comperatore, the supporter who was killed that day, Trump deployed his typical rhetoric, making overblown claims about immigration and crime rates, promising to allow fracking, a key industry in Pennsylvania, and repeating false assertions that the 2020 election was stolen. Comperatore’s family, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, and hedge fund billionaire John Paulson also attended the rally.

Trump also deployed his newest attack line against Harris — that she had bungled the response to tropical storm Helene.

Helene was a “Katrina for them”, he said, adding that “they say it’s the worst job ever done in helping people through the ravages of a hurricane” and falsely claiming that the only help the administration was offering those affected was a $750 emergency payment.

The candidates have been criss-crossing the country as the election race reaches its apogee. On Saturday, Harris visited North Carolina for an update on recovery efforts for tropical storm Helene, which has devastated the south-east of the US, leaving at least 223 dead at the latest count.