Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr has reacted to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump with an impassioned plea for President Joe Biden to help “end the vitriol” that is dividing the country, Report informs referring to Sky News.
Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks fired several shots at the former US President during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday (local time), with one of the bullets grazing the Republican candidate’s right ear.
Speaking to Fox News after the incident Robert F. Kennedy Jr called on President Joe Biden to address the nation alongside former President Trump in order to “change the tone” of the campaign.
I really hope that President Biden reaches out to President Trump and offers him a podium… (to) reassure the nation that they're both going to make an effort to change the tone of this campaign," he said, adding that that's what it would take to "inspire us all to start being kind to each other."
RFK said he hoped all Americans would take a step back after the shooting and realise “It's time to end the vitriol”.
“We have to start looking at each other as part of a big family. We can have differences with each other without despising each other… We can't allow our country to devolve into violence,” RFK said.
“We are better than that, and everybody on both sides – I'm not (just) talking about the other media, but also you and me – all of us are complicit in some ways in what happened tonight.
“The anger from both sides, and from the media, and people pointing to other political candidates and saying they're going to be the end of the Republic, they're going to be the end of democracy. That kind of poison feeds into this.
“And I think all of us have to sort of step back now and say, how do we change the tone of this whole campaign?”
RFK compared the shooting to the assassination of his uncle and father – President John F. Kennedy, who was killed in Dallas in 1963, and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, who was killed in 1968 at a campaign rally while running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination – saying the division that existed in America during the 1960s was “very much like today.”
“When my uncle was killed, I was 10 years old, and the morning that he landed in Dallas, there were posters all over Dallas and a front page of a newspaper which had his picture on it, saying wanted dead or alive,” he said.
“It was driven by anger, and in many ways, his murder was a product of that anger. When my father was killed, it was the same.
“It was the most divisive time in American history… since the Civil War. There were riots in over 100 cities that summer. Martin Luther King was killed two months before my father. People were being shot on college campuses. And that anger laid the foundation for my father's murder."
The son of Bobby Kennedy said after the violence of the 1960s there had been a time of regrouping where Americans had come together, and he said it was incumbent on everyone to now do the same.
“You know, after my uncle died, there was this moment of calm, there was a moment of peacefulness that Congress got together, both sides, and passed the Civil Rights Act guaranteeing the right to vote for black Americans," RFK said.
"It was a healing that took place. And I hope the same thing happens now."