What the attempt on Donald Trump’s life means for US politics, foreign policy and the Middle East

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With his fist raised in a salute of defiance, a wounded Trump entered the iconography of American history in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Evan Vucci/AP)
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Updated 15 July 2024
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What the attempt on Donald Trump’s life means for US politics, foreign policy and the Middle East

  • Presumptive Republican presidential nominee survived assassination bid at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday
  • Analysts say the attack may generate sympathy and votes for Trump, put Democrats further at a disadvantage

LONDON/ATLANTA: Saudi Arabia led the Arab world’s condemnation on Sunday of the assassination attempt on the life of former US president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, stressing its rejection of violence, sending condolences to the deceased, and wishing a speedy recovery for those injured.

The Kingdom affirmed its “complete solidarity with the US, the former US president and his family.”

The day before, the world was left in shock when Trump was shot during a campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.




Donald Trump is escorted by Secret Service agents away from the stage as his right ear bleeds after being hit by an assassin's bullet on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania. (AP)

The bullets wounded Trump in his right ear, killing a spectator and critically injuring two others. The former president was escorted off stage by a group of secret service agents while pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight!”

The shooter, who had positioned himself on a nearby rooftop, was reportedly killed by police snipers. But in that brief moment when he nearly assassinated the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Crooks succeeded in damaging the political future of Biden, placed the Democratic Party in a difficult dilemma, and possibly sowed the seeds of further political polarization.

World leaders immediately condemned the shooting. The leaders of dozens of countries and the UN denounced the assassination attempt and political violence overall.

Leaders from across the Arab world joined in these condemnations. The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the “extremist and criminal act,” and Bahrain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs labeled the attack as “a direct assault on democratic values.”

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi denounced the attack and hoped that the election campaigns would continue in a peaceful manner. Qatar’s foreign ministry also condemned the attack, stressing “the need to pursue dialogue and peaceful means and avoid political violence and hatred to overcome differences at all levels.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also condemned the shooting in a message from Ramallah.

Arab Americans from the left and right of the political spectrum spoke out against the failed assassination attempt.

“There is a lot we don’t know. But what we do know is that violent rhetoric can give rise to violent behavior. We need to take action and that violence is never the way to resolve political differences,” Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, told Arab News earlier on Sunday.

Current US president Joe Biden, who is also Trump’s opponent in the upcoming elections, posted on the social media platform X: “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.”




President Joe Biden speaks at the White House in Washington on July 14, 2024, to denounce the assassination attempt on his rival Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. (AP)

Multiple replies to Biden’s post accused him of stirring anti-Trump rhetoric, with many going so far as to blame him for the shooting.

Some are questioning how the shooter, whom the FBI have identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Pennsylvania, managed to carry out his attempt on Trump’s life in the presence of secret service agents and police snipers.

“There are serious questions that have to be answered on how the gunman was allowed an unobstructed line of shot, from a nearby rooftop, under 200 meters from the stage on which the former president was standing,” Oubai Shahbandar, a defense analyst and former Pentagon Middle East adviser, told Arab News from Washington, D.C.

Little is known about the shooter. State voter records show him as a registered Republican, though he had previously donated to a liberal political action committee as a teenager. Nothing is known about Crooks’ motives, and so far, law enforcement and Crooks’ own family have been silent on the subject.




Police snipers return fire after shots were fired while Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Penssylvania, on July 13, 2024. (AP)

Regardless of the motivations behind the shooting, many political analysts now believe that the assassination attempt will likely bolster Trump’s chances of winning the upcoming election.

“The image of President Trump, wiping the blood streaking across his face away, while defiantly raising his fist in the air and yelling ‘fight! fight!’ and the crowd roaring back ‘USA!’, is nothing short of historic. This will no doubt resonate with voters who contrast it with Biden’s apparent lethargy,” Shahbandar said.

Biden’s chances were already dampened by the June 27 presidential debate, where he was perceived widely to have performed very poorly. Biden appeared to ramble and struggle to speak at certain points, failing to match Trump’s energy and focus. A New York Times/Siena College poll found that after the debate, Trump led Biden 49 to 41 percent among registered voters.




Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives for the campaign rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania. As he was speaking, an assassin started firing and hit Trump on the ear. (AP)

“The assassination attempt targeting President Trump in fact struck the political future and the candidacy of President Biden and his campaign. The Democrats will be in a very difficult position moving forward. President Trump will garner a lot of sympathy,” Firas Maksad, senior director for strategic outreach at the Middle East Institute, told Arab News from Washington, D.C.

“It will be very difficult for the Democrats to continue to rely on attacking President Trump personally in their campaign. I also think that President Biden is mortally wounded. They will either have to replace him. If they are unsuccessful in doing so, they are heading to almost certain political defeat in the polls in November.”

According to Zach D. Huff, a Middle East expert and Republican political consultant who assisted President Trump’s 2020 re-election effort in Nevada, “Joe Biden’s loss is a given.”

“Regional powers now have time to try to factor in the impact of President Trump’s nearly guaranteed win,” he told Arab News from Dubai.




In this photo taken on May 21, 2017, US President Donald Trump (C-L), Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud (C-R), and other officials pose for a group photo during the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh. (AFP/File)

The impact of the assassination attempt may have ramifications far beyond Pennsylvania, or even the US.

Shahbandar, the defense analyst, said that “by all objective measures, the likelihood of a Trump return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is now incredibly high. And that will likely be met with wide support among senior leadership in the Middle East who are eager to engage a team they are well familiar with.”

Huff believes America’s rivals such as Iran and China will be “left guessing what Trump will do to repel their influence.”

“Hamas and Hezbollah could feel pressure to conclude their best possible deal while Biden is around, before Trump wins. They are unlikely to seek an escalation that could easily last into the next US administration,” he said.

As for Biden’s attempts to bring about a Saudi Arabia-Israel normalization, Huff said “the window has already closed, with no time left for the US Senate to ratify an agreement,” adding: “Saudi Arabia will probably find better terms under Trump and may feel less pressure to normalize ties with regional adversaries.”




This photo taken on Sept. 15, 2020 shows US President Donald Trump with Bahrain FM Abdullatif al-Zayani (left), Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and UAE FM Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan during the signing of the Abraham Accords. (AFP)

The history of Trump’s approach to US relations Middle East countries is a checkered one, sometimes focusing on diplomacy and deals and, at other times, focusing on military force.

His first foreign trip in office in May 2017 was to Saudi Arabia, and he maintained warm relations with the Kingdom throughout his term.

In 2020, he facilitated the signing of the Abraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements between Israel and the UAE and Israel and Bahrain. Morocco and Sudan followed suit the next year.

Trump faced criticism, however, for some of his Middle East policy decisions. In 2017 the then-president ordered a series of “precision” strikes on a Syrian airbase, drawing the ire of Russia and Iran. The decision was taken in retaliation for a chemical attack by the Syrian regime in which dozens of civilians were killed.




Children greet a US troop patrol in the Syrian town of al-Jawadiyah, in the northeastern Hasakeh province, near the border with Turkey, on Dec.17, 2020. (AFP)

Just two years later, in October 2019, Trump ordered the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria, where they had been supporting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

This decision was strongly condemned in a 354-60 vote in the US House of Representatives, as just days after the withdrawal, a Turkish incursion into the region led to the deaths of hundreds and displacement of 300,000 civilians.

Huff highlighted Trump’s 2024 policy platform, which calls for peace in the Middle East, support for Israel, and the rebuilding of “our alliance network in the region to ensure a future of peace, stability, and prosperity.”

“A key question is how far that alliance network will reach,” he said.




Kurdish fighters and veterans march on Oct.  8, 2019, in front of the UN office in the northern Kurdish Syrian city of Qamishli to protest against Turkish threats in the Kurdish region. (AFP)

“Will it include the Kurds, who hold the line against Iran, and who prevent a return of Daesh? Could it include Qatar and Turkey?”

Going forward, two US lawmakers intend to introduce bipartisan legislation providing President Biden, Trump and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. with enhanced Security Service protection.

The new law could give Donald Trump, Joe Biden and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr enhanced Secret Service protection. “Anything less would be a disservice to our democracy,” Congressmen Ritchie Torres and Mike Lawler said on Sunday.
 

 


The USAID shutdown is upending livelihoods for nonprofit workers, farmers and other Americans

Updated 5 sec ago
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The USAID shutdown is upending livelihoods for nonprofit workers, farmers and other Americans

  • More than 80 percent of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid

WASHINGTON: There’s the executive in a US supply-chain company whose voice breaks while facing the next round of calls telling employees they no longer have jobs.
And a farmer in Missouri who grew up knowing that a world with more hungry people is a world that’s more dangerous.
And a Maryland-based philanthropy, founded by Jews who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, is shutting down much of its more than 120-year-old mission.
Beyond the impact of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, some 14,000 agency employees and foreign contractors as well as hundreds of thousands of people receiving aid abroad — many American businesses, farms and nonprofits— say the cutoff of US money they are owed has left them struggling to pay workers and cover bills. Some face financial collapse.
US organizations do billions of dollars of business with USAID and the State Department, which oversee more than $60 billion in foreign assistance. More than 80 percent of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid.
President Donald Trump stopped payment nearly overnight in a Jan. 20 executive order freezing foreign assistance. The Trump administration accused USAID’s programs of being wasteful and promoting a liberal agenda.
USAID Stop-Work, a group tracking the impact, says USAID contractors have reported that they laid off nearly 13,000 American workers. The group estimates that the actual total is more than four times that.
Here are stories of some Americans whose livelihoods have been upended:
Crop innovation work facing closures
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — a lab that works with processers, food manufacturers and seed and fertilizer companies to expand soybean usage in 31 countries — is set to close in April unless it gets a last-minute reprieve.
Peter Goldsmith, director and principal investigator at the Soybean Innovation Lab, said the group has helped open international markets to US farmers and made the crop more prevalent in Africa.
For Goldsmith, that kind of steady partnership built on trade and US foreign aid offers the best way to wield US influence, he said.
Goldsmith said innovation labs at other land grant universities also are closing. Without them, Goldsmith worries about what will happen in the countries where they worked — what other actors may step in, or whether conflict will result.
“It’s a vacuum,” he said. “And what will fill that vacuum? It will be filled. There’s no doubt about it.”
A refugee mission is imperiled
For nonprofits working to stabilize populations and economies abroad, the United States was not only the biggest humanitarian donor but an inextricable part of the whole machinery of development and humanitarian work.
Among them, HIAS, a Jewish group aiding refugees and potential refugees, is having to shut down “almost all” of its more than 120-year-old mission.
The Maryland-based philanthropy was founded by Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Its mission in recent decades has broadened to include keeping vulnerable people safe in their home country so they don’t have to flee, said HIAS President Mark Hetfield.
Hetfield said the first Trump administration saw the wisdom of that effort. Hias experienced some of its biggest growth during Trump’s first term as a result.
But now, Trump’s shutdown of foreign assistance severed 60 percent of HIAS’s funding, overnight. The group immediately started furloughs among its 2,000 direct employees, operating in 17 states and 20 countries.
The administration calls it a “suspension,” rather than a termination, Hetfield said. “But we have to stop paying our leases, stop paying our employees.”
“It’s not a suspension,” Hetfield said. “That’s a lie.”
Tracking USAID’s effectiveness may fall by the wayside
Keith Ives, a Marine veteran who fell in love with data, has a small Denver-area nonprofit that brought a numbers-crunching relentlessness to his USAID-funded mission of testing the effectiveness of the agency’s programs.
For Ives’ teams, that’s included weighing and measuring children in Ethiopia who are getting USAID support, testing whether they’re chunkier and taller than kids who aren’t. (On average they are.)
Last week, Ives was planning to tell half his full-time staff of 28 that they would be out of a job at the end of the month. Ives’ Causal Design nonprofit gets 70 percent of its work from USAID.
At first, “it was an obsession over how can I fix this,” said Ives, who described his anxiety in the first days of the cutoff as almost paralyzing. “There must be a magic formula. ... I’m just not thinking hard enough, right?“
Now, Ives goes through all-staff call after call, breaking bad news on the impact of USAID’s shutdown. Being transparent with them, it turned out, was the best he could do.
He looks at the US breaking partnerships and contracts in what had been USAID’s six-decade aim of boosting national security by building alliances and crowding out adversaries.
For the US now, “I think for years to come, when we try to flex, I think people are going to go, ‘Yeah, but like, remember 2025?’” Ives said. “’You could just be gone tomorrow.’”
A supplier faces ruin
It takes expertise, cash flow and hundreds of staff to get USAID-funded food and goods to remote and often ill-regulated places around the globe.
For US companies doing that, the administration’s only follow-up to the stop-work orders it sent out after the money freeze have been termination notices — telling them some contracts are not only paused, but ended.
Almost all of those companies have been kept silent publicly, for fear of drawing the wrath of the Trump administration or endangering any court challenges.
Speaking anonymously for those reasons, an executive of one supply-chain business that delivers everything from hulking equipment to food describes the financial ruin facing those companies.
While describing the next round of layoff calls to be made, the executive, who is letting hundreds of workers go in total, sobs.
Farmers may lose market share
Tom Waters, a seventh-generation farmer who grows corn, soybean and wheat near Orrick, Missouri, thinks about his grandfather when he reads about what is happening with USAID.
“I’ve heard him say a hundred times, ‘People get hungry, they’ll fight,’” Waters said.
Feeding people abroad is how the American farmer stabilizes things across the world, he says. “Because we’re helping them keep people’s bellies full.”
USAID-run food programs have been a dependable customer for US farmers since the Kennedy administration. Legislation mandates US shippers get a share of the business as well.
Even so, American farm sales for USAID humanitarian programs are a fraction of overall US farm exports. And politically, US farmers know that Trump has always taken care to buffer the impact when his tariffs or other moves threaten demand for US farm goods.
US commodity farmers generally sell their harvests to grain silos and co-ops, at a per bushel rate. While the impact on Waters’ farm is not yet clear, farmers worry any time something could hit demand and prices for their crops or give a foreign competitor an opening to snatch away a share of their market permanently.
Still, Waters doesn’t think the uncertainty is eroding support for Trump.
“I really think people, the Trump supporters are really going to have patience with him, and feel like this is what he’s got to do,” he said.


Russian freedom depends on Ukraine winning war: Kasparov

Updated 9 min 20 sec ago
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Russian freedom depends on Ukraine winning war: Kasparov

  • “There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” the chess grandmaster told a press conference

GENEVA: Freedom in Russia and the end of President Vladimir Putin’s rule depends on Ukraine winning the war, Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov said Tuesday as Moscow and Washington held talks.
As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks in Saudi Arabia, former chess world champion Kasparov said any outcome that Putin could present as a victory would only extend his grip on power.
“There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” the chess grandmaster told a press conference after addressing the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy conference.
“Even a partial victory; inflicting defeat on Putin will lead to a change in Russia.
“If Putin wins, or presents the outcome as victory,” which could involve “keeping territories and lifting sanctions... he’ll stay there. A dictator is never in danger if he is still on the rise.”
Kasparov, 61, retired from chess in 2005 to focus on political activism and has lived in exile in New York for the past decade. The longtime Putin opponent was added to Russia’s list of “extremists” in March 2024.
Kasparov spoke as many in Europe fear that US President Donald Trump’s overhaul of US policy on Russia will upend Europe’s decades-long security structure.
Kasparov said Trump did “absolutely not” understand the complexity of the conflict, and those around him were too scared to tell him that his geopolitical knowledge was insufficient.
He expected Trump would have to make “massive concessions” to secure his objective of ending the war.
Kasparov said Rubio was “not an idiot — he’s spineless, but he still has brains,” and therefore understands that he can’t deliver “unless they have to give up everything to Putin.”
He said Putin was pretending he was in a strong position but the Russian economy “will probably collapse within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Meanwhile Ukraine could keep fighting if Europe provided the money to buy US weaponry — and “as long as money is being paid, I don’t think he (Trump) cares.”
“If Trump wants to end the war, it’s not difficult: just cut Russian oil exports,” Kasparov added.
The chess great said the West had sorely lacked a collective strategy since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Meanwhile “Putin has a very simple idea: stay in power. That’s it. There’s no other idea,” said Kasparov.
“The cause of the war is Putin and his imperial ambitions that will never disappear, because there’s nothing else that can justify him staying in power for life.”
Kasparov said Russia’s biggest problem was not what happens in Putin’s inner circle but that many average citizens still “live in imperial dreams.”
“The Russian empire must go, and the future of Russia may not be in the current borders of Russia. The way I see the future, Russia must return all the occupied territories — Crimea included.”


Florida man charged with attempted murder after shooting two men he thought were ‘Palestinians’

Updated 34 min 17 sec ago
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Florida man charged with attempted murder after shooting two men he thought were ‘Palestinians’

  • Brafman, 27, is being held without bond on second-degree murder charges at a county jail in Miami, records show

TALLAHASSEE, Florida: A Florida man has been charged with two counts of attempted murder after opening fire on two men in Miami Beach who he thought were Palestinians.
According to an arrest report, Mordechai Brafman shot at the men 17 times in the “unprovoked” attack, telling officers that while driving his truck, he “saw two Palestinians” and opened fire on their car, thinking he had killed the pair. But the men survived, one suffering a shot to the shoulder and the other grazed by a bullet.
Brafman, 27, is being held without bond on second-degree murder charges at a county jail in Miami, records show. He’s also been ordered to stay away from the victims, an Israeli father and son who were vacationing in South Florida, according to the Miami Herald.
Brafman’s attorney Dustin Tischler has said his client was experiencing a “severe mental health crisis” at the time of the shooting, which caused him to “fear for his life.”
“It is believed that his ability to make sound judgments was significantly compromised,” Tischler said in a statement to The Associated Press, adding that Brafman is seeking “necessary treatment” while cooperating with law enforcement.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has called for federal hate crime charges against Brafman, saying his alleged bias against Palestinians should warrant the charges regardless of the victims’ ethnicity.
___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

 


White House says Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE, but is advising the president

Updated 18 February 2025
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White House says Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE, but is advising the president

  • Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data
  • The Trump administration, on the other hand, says Musk is not a DOGE employee

WASHINGTON: The White House says billionaire Elon Musk is not technically part of the Department of Government Efficiency team that is sweeping through federal agencies, but is rather a senior adviser to President Donald Trump.
Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data as the Trump administration moves to lay off thousands of federal workers. Defining him as an adviser rather than the administrator in charge of day-to-day operations at DOGE could help the administration push back against a lawsuit arguing Musk has too much power for someone who isn’t elected or Senate-confirmed.
The declaration was filed Monday as the Trump administration fends off the lawsuit from several Democratic states that want to block Musk and the DOGE team from accessing government systems. The litigants say Musk is wielding “virtually unchecked power” in violation of the Constitution.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, says Musk is not a DOGE employee and has “no actual authority to make government decisions himself,” Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration, said in court papers. The documents do not name the administrator of DOGE, whose work Musk has championed in posts on his social-media platform X and in a public appearance at the White House.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined Tuesday to say who is leading DOGE. Layoffs are up to individual agency heads rather than DOGE, she said.
The DOGE team has roamed from agency to agency, tapping into computer systems, digging into budgets and searching for waste, fraud and abuse, while lawsuits pile up claiming Trump and DOGE are violating the law. At least two are targeting Musk himself.
Last week, Musk called for the US to “delete entire agencies” from the federal government as part of the push to radically cut spending and restructure its priorities.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan seemed skeptical in a hearing Monday when Justice Department lawyers asserted that Musk has no formal authority.
“I think you stretch too far. I disagree with you there,” Chutkan said.


Ethiopia and Somalia hold a first round of technical talks in Turkiye toward resolving their dispute

Updated 18 February 2025
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Ethiopia and Somalia hold a first round of technical talks in Turkiye toward resolving their dispute

  • Tensions have simmered since landlocked Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland last year to lease land along its coastline
  • Somaliland seceded from Somalia over 30 years ago but is not recognized by the African Union or the United Nations as an independent state

ANKARA, Turkiye: Top diplomats from Ethiopia and Somalia on Tuesday held a first round of technical talks aimed at resolving a dispute sparked by a deal between Ethiopia and Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, Turkiye’s Foreign Ministry said.
Turkiye has been mediating between the Horn of Africa countries after concerns about potential conflict in an already volatile region. Tensions have simmered since landlocked Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland last year to lease land along its coastline to establish a marine force base.
In return, Ethiopia would become the first country to formally recognize Somaliland’s independence. Somalia says the deal infringes on its sovereignty and territory.
In December, the leaders of Somalia and Ethiopia met in Turkiye and agreed to initiate technical talks aimed at reaching a potential agreement that upholds Somalia’s territorial integrity while allowing Ethiopia access to the sea.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry said delegations led by Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos and Somalia’s state minister for foreign affairs, Ali Mohamed Omar, held a first round of technical negotiations in the Turkish capital, Ankara.
“Both delegations demonstrated their commitment to the letter and spirit of the Ankara Declaration,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in reference to their statement issued in December. “The delegations began the concrete work to transform this vision into reality.”
The next round of talks is in March, the ministry statement said.
Turkiye has significant investment in Somalia, including its largest overseas military base.
Somaliland seceded from Somalia over 30 years ago but is not recognized by the African Union or the United Nations as an independent state. Somalia considers Somaliland part of its territory.
With a population estimated at over 120 million, Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world.