TRANSCRIPT

Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.

Someone tried to assassinate and take out Donald Trump. There have been numerous assassinations and attempted assassinations in our country. I remember a lot of them individually when I was younger, what I felt when John F. Kennedy was gunned down, and when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Robert Kennedy, different times.

And while we’ve always had a divided nation, in many ways, something about this time seems different. The closest I can get to that feeling is the feeling I had when I was a Civil Rights worker in Cambridge, Maryland, Mississippi, and further south. It was terrifying at times. It’s as if that spirit now dominates the entire country, and our divide seems to run deeper than ever.

So let’s take a look at these assassinations — And attempted assassinations —Then and now, with my good friend and colleague, Real News editor Max Alvarez, joining me in studio.

Max?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man, brother, it’s wild to be speaking to you from a very different world than the one that we all inhabited just last week. But as always, it’s an honor and a pleasure to be with you, brother, and to be doing the work that needs to be done.

I know that we are all reeling from the political reality that we were thrust into this past weekend, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, as you said, attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle. He opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, this Saturday, July 13. He did not fatally wound the president, but he did kill one attendee, Corey Comperatore, and he critically wounded two other people who were attending the rally.

Now, I want to really emphasize for folks listening that we are going to be doing everything we can in the coming days and weeks to get y’all the coverage that you need to know how to act in this moment. We are here to use our journalism, our tools, our skills, our resources to get you the information you need to act, and we’re here to provide you with the context and perspectives that will motivate all of us to act with well-informed purpose, conviction, courage, and love, and that’s our real goal.

And so right now, at this very moment, our incredible colleagues Taya Graham and Stephen Janis are literally on the ground in Milwaukee covering the Republican National Convention, where, as we’re recording this on Monday afternoon, July 15, Donald Trump just named J.D. Vance his vice presidential candidate. We’ve got Stephen and Taya on the ground covering the RNC, covering this political scene as it is being reshaped in real time in the wake of Saturday’s failed assassination attempt.