It is "absurd" for Democrats to keep pushing the rhetoric that former President Donald Trump is a threat when there have been two assassination attempts against him, Sen. James Lankford said Wednesday on Newsmax.
"He is not a threat," the Oklahoma Republican told "Wake Up America." "He is a person who speaks his mind plainly, as millions of other Americans do. That's the nature of political discourse in the United States, to allow people to be able to have First Amendment rights to speak their minds."
He added that there is no place for political violence in America, on either side of the aisle.
"We don't want to have any threats on President Trump or on Vice President [Kamala] Harris or on President [Joe] Biden," Lankford said. "That's inappropriate. In America, we solve things at the ballot box … but to continue after two assassination attempts in two months, to call President Trump the one that's the threat is the wrong way to go."
Meanwhile, Lankford said he pushed Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Gary Peters, D-Mich., Tuesday for hearings on the assassination attempts, such as the House is holding on the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this summer.
"They're asking the hard questions," he said. "They're bringing the Secret Service and FBI in front of them. The Senate still refuses to do that."
A classified Senate hearing was held after the Butler incident, Lankford added, but "we need another hearing to be able to push, to be able to say 'what's the next step here to be able to make sure that this does not happen again?'"
The Secret Service has announced that Trump will have a level of security commensurate with the fact that he is a former president, but Lankford said he does not know why it took so long to get to that point.
"This is about American national security," he said. "If we have a presidential candidate, a former president, or a current sitting president with an assassination, that is worldwide global chaos. This is incredibly important that we allow political discourse to continue orally, and that we protect the individuals who are there from some unstable, irrational individuals who would actually take a shot at the president."
Meanwhile, if something were to happen with Trump, the party selection would go through to replace him on the ballot, much as it did with Harris after Biden dropped out of the race, said Lankford.
"The Constitution does allow for a way to be able to protect that," said Lankford. "In the meantime, let's be very, very clear. We're going to do everything we possibly can to be able to make sure that Donald Trump is protected through this race, that he's able to speak his mind, and the American people are able to speak their minds in November."
Lankford also discussed a hearing for Wednesday in which lawmakers will question officials from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe about the companies' efforts to protect the U.S. elections from foreign threats.
"The Iranians have made it very, very clear they plan to be able to put out all kinds of disinformation in the weeks leading up to the election against Donald Trump, and to try to be able to put that into the social media world," he said.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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