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All I’ll say is that the vibes on this one are very strange. On Saturday night, Donald Trump was making a rare public appearance at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the middle of his speech, shots rang out. New agencies say the shooter, a 20-year-old registered Republican named Thomas Matthew Crooks, got off as many as eight rounds from an AR-style rifle. Trump was hit… in the ear. One Trump supporter is dead, as is Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Former President Donald Trump says he was shot in the ear after a gunman perched on the roof of a nearby building opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday — a harrowing incident that the FBI called an assassination attempt.

The shooting, which set the country on edge on the eve of the Republican National Convention, left one spectator dead, two others critically injured, and sparked chaos at the event. As the former president spoke, shots crackled and Trump, hand to his ear, dropped to the ground where he was surrounded by agents before behind hustled off the stage into a waiting car amid the screams and confusion of the crowd.

The shooting, which is being investigated by the FBI overseen by the Justice Department’s National Security Division, as well as the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh, comes amid a heightened threat environment.

The Secret Service, in a statement, said that a shooter “fired multiple shots toward the stage from an elevated position outside of the rally venue” after which agents “neutralized the shooter, who is now deceased.” The shooter fired as many as eight rounds from an AR-style rifle while perched on a rooftop adjacent to the venue and was 200-300 yards away at the time of the shooting, law enforcement sources told ABC News. It was “surprising” that the suspected gunman was able to get off as many shots as he allegedly did, law enforcement said, adding that the gunman was a “very determined attacker.”

[From ABC News]

I’m including some footage below. I’ll choose my words carefully… before all of this, I would have never believed that the Secret Service would allow their primary to lift his unprotected and already-bloody head and raise a fist to his supporters just seconds after gunfire. The Secret Service agents who covered Trump on the stage gave him enough space to do all that before they even had a handle on who was shooting, whether the shooter had been neutralized or whether there were multiple shooters. It’s odd, that’s all I’ll say.

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