Bryan Lanza, a senior advisor to the Trump 2024 campaign, said that the media-led criticism of former President Trump's rhetoric following a second assassination attempt has made him a target of victim shaming.
"Listen, I would say, as we sort of observed over the last 24 hours with respect to the shooting, there has been a lot of victim shaming," Lanza said.
On Sunday, there was another attempt on Trump's life by a gunman as the former president was golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Authorities have said the suspect, later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, was 300 to 500 yards away from Trump before the Secret Service spotted him and opened fire. He fled but was arrested soon afterward.
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"This is the only place where Donald Trump is the victim, it’s okay to shame him," he said. "He has been shot at once, there‘s been another assassination near attempt, and [but] for the grace of the Secret Service getting ahead of it, we stopped another direct assassination attempt."
"The rhetoric gets hot," Lanza said. "You have to remember when Donald Trump jumped into this race, he‘s probably the most insulted presidential candidate in American history. He has been called Hitler. He's been called antisemitic. He‘s been called all these things for sharing the same opinions that he had 20 years ago, but it's not politically convenient to the Democratic Party."
"So, yeah, he gets frustrated from time to time, the rhetoric gets hot, we probably do need to cool it a little bit," Lanza said. "But there‘s no off-ramp."
Lanza also called out billionaire and Democratic Party megadonor Reid Hoffman for comments that he made about Trump being a "martyr."
In response to an audience member who said that the lawsuits against Trump made him into a "martyr" during a panel in July, Hoffman reportedly said: "Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr."
Hoffman later explained those comments on X following the first assassination attempt on Trump's life.
"I am horrified and saddened by what happened to former President Trump and wish him a speedy recovery," Hoffman wrote in July.
Fox News' Landon Mion contributed to this report.
