This is not an official government website.
© 2026 PLEJ LC. All rights reserved.
Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a floor statement or debate entry. It mentions members such as Marsha Blackburn.
Issued
April 29, 2026
senate side of the record
People
1
Linked members mentioned in this section
Legislation
0
No linked legislation in this section
Committees
0
No linked committees in this section
Senate Holds
0
No hold activity linked here
Source Document
Connected Data
People mentioned
Source Control
Reader mode is for comprehension. The linked government PDF is the official published source.
Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, every American should be grateful that President Trump, Vice President Vance, the Cabinet, and thousands of other attendees were not harmed during Saturday's disturbing shooting that took place at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.
and this was the third assassination attempt we have seen on his life in the past couple of years.
this—some have claimed that we don't have details about the suspect's motives, but we do have plenty of details, and we know that the shooter actually laid a good bit of this out. He did a manifesto, and he sent that manifesto to his family shortly before the attack. The shooter said he was going to target administration officials “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” It shows you he thought this through. Now, his reason for this, he said President Trump is—and I quote his wording here again—“pedophile, rapist, traitor.”
Now, this is unhinged rhetoric. It is completely in line with the lies that the Democrats have repeated on just about a daily basis every day regarding President Trump. We have heard it on TV, on podcasts, on social media, in their speeches, and it is something else that they continue with this rhetoric.
And Gov. Tim Walz who, of course, was the VP nominee in the last election once said:
No one has ever been more dangerous to this country than
Donald Trump, and he is a fascist to his core.
Again, that was Gov. Tim Walz.
the President an “existential threat to democracy,” “the most significant threat to American democracy since the Civil War,” and an “authoritarian.” And some of them have chosen to compare him to historical figures, and that historical figure they usually use is Hitler. And, of course, Kamala Harris once compared him to a “communist dictator.”
This is reckless rhetoric. This is the kind of rhetoric that needs to stop because this places a target on our President, and this is the type of rhetoric that has no place in civil public life.
Nation has remained strong and free. Indeed, I think that as you look at our history, those tenets of faith, family, freedom, hope, and opportunity have served us well. And how do we achieve that American dream? Well, we have kept ourselves free and focused on achieving that dream for each and every person. They all look different. Everybody's dream is different of what they want, what their goals are, the type of community they want to live in. They are all different.
what kind of country we will have—those issues of importance—we arrive there through robust, respectful, bipartisan debate. We don't get there by exercising reckless rhetoric, some of which I have quoted. It is so disappointing to hear this from some of our colleagues and then to see the type of vitriol that this spurs.
opinion; someone else shares their opinion—what this does is to empower not only us, but the people that we represent, to enter into that debate, to be a part of the public square, to defend our freedoms, to build consensus, and to serve the American people and to preserve the freedoms that we enjoy.
that robust, respectful debate that leads to exchange and asking: What if we did this? What if we did that? If we did not have that, then this Nation would head to a very dark place. And this latest assassination attempt on President Trump is another reminder of what can happen when Americans abandon the possibility of working together and instead of settling their differences by debate in the public square, they choose to settle these differences by violence, by reckless rhetoric.
that it is this exchange of ideas and this robust, respectful debate that has helped to sustain the freedoms that we enjoy in this country.