AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We are broadcasting from Milwaukee, from the Republican National Convention.

The FBI is continuing to investigate Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The former president was shot in the right ear during an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One attendee of the rally was shot dead, two others critically wounded. Video of the incident shows the bullet grazing Trump’s right ear as he was speaking to the crowd.

DONALD TRUMP: If you want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened over —

SECRET SERVICE: Get down! Get down! Get down!

UNIDENTIFIED: What are we doing? What are we doing?

AMY GOODMAN: Secret Service agents rushed the stage to protect Trump and help take him away. A photographer from the Associated Press an iconic photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist with an image of an American flag behind him.

Authorities have identified the gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who lived in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park. Investigators believe Crooks acted alone, but have not yet determined a motive. The AR-15 used in the attack had been purchased by his father. Secret Service snipers shot Crooks dead moments after he fired.

Part of the investigation centers on how the gunman managed to get on top of a nearby building located about 400 feet away from the stage. Some spectators said they spotted the gunman climbing to the roof of the building, but they said attempts to get law enforcement to take action failed.

On Sunday night, President Biden gave a primetime address from the Oval Office.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Disagreement is inevitable in American democracy. It’s part of human nature. But politics must never be a literal battlefield or, God forbid, a killing field. I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate, to pursue justice, to make decisions guided by the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. We stand for an America not of extremism and fury but of decency and grace.

AMY GOODMAN: Some Republicans directly cast blame on the Biden campaign. Republican Senator of Ohio JD Vance, considered a possible running mate of Trump, said, quote, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” unquote.

On Sunday, Donald Trump arrived here in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention begins today. There are reports Trump will take to the stage of the RNC tonight.

Joining us now is John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has a new piece headlined “Americans Know Political Violence All Too Well.” He lives in Madison. He’s a many-generation resident of Wisconsin, but he’s joining us today from Milwaukee.

Welcome back, John. It’s great to have you with us.

JOHN NICHOLS: It’s good to be with you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can respond first to the attempted assassination of President Trump?

JOHN NICHOLS: It’s horrible. Look, political violence, when it occurs in any country at any time, is an awful thing. And when it is in the context of a campaign, this has a real impact, because it causes people to question whether they might go to a campaign event — right? — whether they might participate in the democratic process. So, no matter what you think about Trump, no matter what you think about Biden or any of this, to have an incident like this occur at a campaign rally is a big deal. It’s a big deal for this country.

By the same token, I would tell you it’s not the first. This is very much something that we have seen really throughout our modern history and going backward. We’ve had four presidents assassinated, killed in office.

AMY GOODMAN: Name them.

JOHN NICHOLS: What?

AMY GOODMAN: Name them, if you can.

JOHN NICHOLS: I certainly can. Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy, killed while serving as president. We have had a prominent presidential candidate killed at a campaign event where he accepted his victory in the California primary in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy. We have had major candidates killed or harmed in other settings. We have had candidates for president badly injured. George Wallace was shot on the campaign trail in Maryland in 1972, permanently paralyzed. And in this city, in this city of Milwaukee, in 1912, October 14th, 1912, Teddy Roosevelt, the former president of the United States, was shot in the chest as he was coming out to campaign and deliver a speech, literally in one of the buildings adjacent to where this convention will be held.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, where the Hyatt is right now, where we got our press credentials.

JOHN NICHOLS: That’s where he was shot.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the new building that replaces the old hotel where he was speaking.

JOHN NICHOLS: That’s precisely right. And —

AMY GOODMAN: But he gave the speech anyway.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, it was a fascinating speech. In fact, I went back and read it over the weekend, because it was such an amazing moment. Remember, Roosevelt is a former president of the United States. He had already displaced the Republican Party. They didn’t nominate him for another term, and so he was running as a third-party candidate. It was a very intense campaign. And he knew that Wisconsin was a big state for him.

And so, literally, he assessed himself. He knew he had been shot in the chest muscle, but he had had a 50-page speech folded three times in his pocket along with a glasses case. The bullet went through the speech, hit the case and then lodged in his chest muscle. He determined that he could make it through. He wasn’t coughing up blood, as he said. So he went and gave a 90-minute speech. And incredibly, it was about the incident. And he talked about violence. He talked about political violence. And what he said at the end of the speech was that, as a country, we have to learn to get over economic and social divisions so that we don’t have more incidents like this. It was really quite a remarkable moment.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, he was a hunter, so he knew biology well and said, “No, it’s not in my heart or my lungs.” And he had that bullet in him for the rest of his life.

JOHN NICHOLS: Rest of his life. He made it through a 90-minute speech, though. And if you read the speech, it’s chilling, because he literally said to the people, “Look, I’ve been shot. But, I want you to understand, that doesn’t mean a thing to me.” He was a tough guy. He was a strong character.

AMY GOODMAN: “Bull Moose.”

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah. He said — in fact, that’s where — “A bullet doesn’t take down a bull moose.” But what he said was fascinating, because he says, “It doesn’t mean a thing to me because of the importance of what we’re talking about for this country and the importance of getting beyond violence, getting beyond the divisions in this country.” Remember, Roosevelt was running that year to the left of the Democrats and the Republicans in order to create what he referred to as a new nationalism, which was an effort to actually begin to address a lot of the economic inequality in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And ultimately, though, Teddy Roosevelt did not win that campaign.

JOHN NICHOLS: No, he did not. And nor was George Wallace, who was shot on the campaign trail. It’s a very interesting thing. There is a tendency after a shooting like this to assume it’s going to have a huge political impact — and it may. I’m not dismissing that. But what I will tell you is that there’s history that suggests that the country is horrified, the country reacts with sympathy, but it doesn’t necessarily say, “Oh, well, we have to elect this wounded warrior or this wounded candidate.”

AMY GOODMAN: And interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt had replaced McKinley, who was assassinated when he did become president.

JOHN NICHOLS: Who was killed, absolutely. In fact, Teddy Roosevelt was one of those — it was a remarkable story there, because he was assassinated — McKinley, his predecessor, was assassinated shortly after becoming the president in the second term. And so, Roosevelt ended up almost with two full terms as president because of an assassination. And again, this is one of the things I think people need to understand. It is not a good thing. It is a deep tragedy. It is a horrific reality that assassinations, political assassinations, and attempts have been a part of our history.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to read to you another columnist, Juan Cole, a piece that he wrote, the headline, “From 'Hang Mike Pence' to 'Paul Pelosi Hammered' to 'Shooting Trump' — Political Violence Is Deadly to Democracy.” He writes, “American politics has entered the most dangerous phase of its nearly 250-year existence. …

“Although the Right is blaming the political left for the violence, saying that its meme that Trump has dictatorial tendencies is responsible, the fact is that he did try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, and some of his acolytes, at least, brought guns and ammunition to Washington, D.C, for the purpose, including the Proud Boys. It seems clear that the lives of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and others in the Capitol had been in danger that day, had security not whisked them to safety.

“The mob called into being by Donald J. Trump chanted 'Hang Mike Pence,' which was a call for an assassination. Insiders have reported that Trump expressed support for the sentiment.

“As it was, a deranged follower of Trump came looking for Pelosi at her house in San Francisco and tried to kill her husband Paul with a hammer when he found she wasn’t there.”

And, of course, Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., mocked Paul Pelosi, as, ultimately, President Trump — President Trump has continually made fun of Pelosi around this.

JOHN NICHOLS: Mm-hmm. Look, I think the thing to understand is that after an incident like this, there’s often an effort to point fingers of blame, say, you know, that something Joe Biden said or something the Democrats said caused this to happen, and vice versa, right? This is the nature of our politics.

But one of the things that I think is important to understand is, we’re still very early in an investigation into what certainly looks like a security meltdown at that rally. Right? We don’t know what this young man was thinking. We don’t know much about him. We’re starting to get a little bit of it. And so, I think it is the height of irresponsibility to try and say, “Oh, something somebody said caused this to happen.”

The much better response — and frankly, I’ll remind you that we’ve been through moments like this before. 1968, you saw Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in April, you saw Robert F. Kennedy assassinated in June. Imagine that moment that we were in. And you saw people — liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans — basically saying, “Hey, let’s try and chill this out. Let’s try and calm this down.” And I think that’s the right place to go.

What I will counsel, though, is, we are in a very charged moment. You just read through a list of realities of our moment, things that have been said, things that have been done. I remember on January 6th, I was in Madison — right? — and watching that, you know, those events play out. And you do, you know, say, “Where are we at?” I remember that chill of, like, “Wow! What is going on here?” And I think a lot of Americans have been through that. In a sense, we have been through three years, or longer, maybe even 10 years, of incredible turbulence in our politics. This is an unstable period. And if we pause and think about that, you know, we ought to be careful about who we blame.

But this is one last thing I’ll say on this that I think is important, and that is that my sense is that the individual, the candidate, who can pull us back from this, who can actually say — as I think Biden tried to do last night — can say, “Hey, this isn’t who we want to be. This isn’t where we want to go,” has a real potential to connect with people, because I think people are feeling overwhelmed by the moment they’re in.

AMY GOODMAN: John Nichols, tell us where we are in Milwaukee. Fascinating — 

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — the Republican convention has come here to Milwaukee, a history, a proud history, of a socialist city.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah. I mean, I find it fascinating that the Republicans, who will during this course of this convention condemn socialism, I don’t know, 300 times, 500 times, a thousand times? It has become such a part of their political messaging over the last many years — this is even before Trump. This goes back, you know, a good 10, 15 years. Newt Gingrich was a big accelerator of this.

I find it fascinating they’ve chosen to come to Milwaukee, because Milwaukee is a city, as Alice Cooper told us in the movie Wayne’s World, the one major city in the United States that has elected three socialist mayors. Socialists ran this city from 1910 pretty consistently 'til 1960. I knew the last socialist mayor as a kid. He was still around, Frank Zeidler. In fact, his office was about a block or so from where the convention is being held. And the fact of the matter is, the Milwaukee socialists were very successful. This city was often seen as the best-governed city in the country, awarded as such. And yet they never — they didn't back away from their socialism.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain why they were called the “sewer socialists.” It was used as a pejorative, but, in fact, it wasn’t.

JOHN NICHOLS: No, it was a fantastic thing. Look, Milwaukee, before the socialists came to power, was a city with a lot of public health problems. And one of the things the socialists did was say, “We’re going to make this a healthy city.” And they did it. One of the things they proved, which is incredible, is the power of government. In a very short amount of time, they took Milwaukee from being one of the most unhealthy cities in the United States to being one of the most healthy cities in the United States. Literally, they had to retire the award for healthiest city in the United States because Milwaukee kept getting it every year. And so —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the sewer part.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, the sewers were part of it, right? You had to develop a sewer system. That’s infrastructure. You spend a lot of money to make your city have safe, healthy water. Simple thing. But the Milwaukee socialists loved that reality. They loved that they had done so well. So, in 1932, the Socialist Party had its convention in Milwaukee. Norman Thomas came here, a big — they came from all over the country. And the Milwaukee socialists were so excited, their mayor then, Dan Hoan — who the bridge across downtown Milwaukee is named after — their mayor was talking about the sewers so much that the New Yorkers said, “Oh, well, they’re just sewer socialists.” Well, so that’s —

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, they were cleaning up, they always said, after the impacts of the Industrial Revolution, bringing a sanitary sewage system to the city.

JOHN NICHOLS: And if I dare may say, having known a few of these in their old age, they also said they were cleaning up after capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you just showed me a headline —

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — about what we’re allowed to carry here in Milwaukee in the security zone, what we can’t carry and what we can.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes. There’s been a real fight in Milwaukee. It’s been a very interesting issue. Now, in the convention hall, you can’t have a gun, unless you’re a police officer or Secret Service, something like that. But in the area around it, in what is considered to be a — what they call the “soft zone,” and that’s a zone where you have a lot of security, a lot of oversight, and it’s right around the convention, the city has done, at the request of security folks in that — they’ve banned tennis balls, hard water bottles, tents.

AMY GOODMAN: So you can’t bring a water bottle?

JOHN NICHOLS: Not a hard water bottle, not the kind that, you know, like, you drink out of.

AMY GOODMAN: That you can throw.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah. And the list is really long. Tape is banned, because, you know, tape above — longer than six inches, things like that. All sorts of stuff banned. Not guns. In fact, very serious guns.

AMY GOODMAN: You can bring a gun?

JOHN NICHOLS: You can bring a gun, yes. Guns are not banned. And that is because the state of Wisconsin has preempted cities from banning guns, and all sorts of guns. And so, there’s been an ongoing battle here in the city of Milwaukee, where the City Council has literally said — because there’s a lot of residents in downtown. Downtown is a very developed downtown, a lot of apartments, a lot of condominiums. They’ve said, “Look, can’t we have an exemption here? Can’t we say, you know, ’Let’s keep guns out of this area. No, don’t be openly carrying guns,’ stuff like that?” And they have basically been told them, “You can’t do that.”

And so, it’s been a huge battle in this city. And the governor, just after this horrible incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin, over the weekend, reupped and said, “Can’t we do something to have tougher restrictions on guns?” Again, not in the convention hall, but in the area around it, for all sorts of good reasons. And as it was said in one of the news reports just this morning, doesn’t look like it’s going to go anywhere to actually do that, that ban.

AMY GOODMAN: So, no tennis balls, no hard water bottles, but you can carry guns.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Which takes us into our next segment. John, I want to thank you so much for being with us. John Nichols is The Nation's national affairs correspondent. We're going to link to his new piece headlined “Americans Know Political Violence All Too Well.” He’s the author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, co-written with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, titled It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.