Trump says he ‘took a bullet for democracy’

Former US President and Republican nominee for the November elections, Donald Trump, addressed a crowd of supporters in the swing state of Michigan, speaking alongside his newly announced running mate, J.D. Vance.

The Saturday rally in Grand Rapids was Trump’s first public campaign event since the attempt on his life last week when he narrowly avoided getting shot in the head. The gunman’s shots at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazed his ear and hit the crowd behind Trump, killing one person and injuring two others.

Michigan is one of several pivotal battleground states on which the outcome of the November presidential election is expected to hinge. In the 2020 election, incumbent US President Joe Biden flipped the state’s vote, despite Trump securing it in the previous 2016 election.

“At this very moment, Democrat Party bosses are frantically trying to overthrow the results of their own party’s primaries to dump Crooked Joe Biden from the ballot,” Trump, now wearing a skin-colored bandage on his ear, told the crowd.

“As you’re seeing, the Democratic Party is not the party of democracy. They’re really the enemies of democracy,” he added.

They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy…’ I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do for democracy? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy’

The Republican frontrunner took a jab at his political opponents, saying the Democrats “have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we.”

This comes amid a rising chorus of Congressional Democrats urging their presumptive nominee to step aside and make way for another party member to run. While the 81-year-old has faced public scrutiny over his mental and physical decline for some time, apprehension deepened since his disastrous performance in last month’s televised debate against Trump.

Biden, who is currently isolating in his Delaware home after contracting Covid-19, has insisted he’s still in the race and will be back on the campaign trail by next week.