Rep. Dan Meuser says GOP convention speakers should 'tone it down'
Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), who was at the rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday in which former President Trump faced an assassination attempt, said Tuesday that Republican National Convention speakers should “tone it down” following the events at the rally.
In an interview on "CNN News Central," the outlet's Boris Sanchez said there were speakers the previous night at the convention that had called Democrats "dangerous" and President Biden "senile."
“Do you wish that that hadn’t been a part of the proceedings?” Sanchez asked.
“Absolutely,” Meuser responded. “I do my very best to not make that part of my vernacular, my vocabulary. Now, I’ll tell you this, sometimes it does, it gets a little hot out there in politics, but we need to all make a conscious effort to cool it down, to tone it down, and we need to see examples of it.”
Trump faced an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday evening, with Meuser saying he witnessed “panic and sadness” that day at the rally.
“People ducking, people hitting the deck, Secret Service coming out, telling everybody to get down. A panic and sadness,” Meuser said in the wake of the shooting in a phone call with The Hill. “A lot of people were just crying because they were afraid the president got shot.”
“We had someone, people calling for a medic because somebody else was shot right within the zone that I was in,” he added. “So, it was mayhem.”
In his Tuesday appearance on CNN, Meuser criticized Democrats for their rhetoric, stating, "There's also a lot coming from the left."
“I mean, just this past Friday, Biden was stating how Donald Trump was nothing short of [Nazi leader Adolf] Hitler,” Meuser said.
In remarks from the Oval Office on Sunday, Biden said that "political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated."
"It’s time to cool it down,” Biden said in the remarks. “This places an added burden on all of us that no matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.”