Verdict with Ted Cruz - July 14, 2024


God Bless President Trump-Immediate Reaction to Horrific Shooting-Pray for Our Nation, Pray for President Trump

Topics
assassination attempt on Trump
Hosted by
Ted Cruz
Mentioned
Donald Trump Ronald Reagan Heidi Cruz Martin Luther King Jr. Teddy Roosevelt Bobby Kennedy Ben Ferguson Nancy Reagan Biden Anna
How Long Can Media Attack Biden, plus 'Do Not Disturb POTUS' & Can Cabinet Invoke 25th Amendment Week In Review How the Hell did the Trump Assassination Attempt Happen？ Catastrophic Security Failures-What went wrong？

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

155.8

Word count

1,818

Sentence count

141

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Ted Cruz reacts to the reported assassination attempt on President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, and offers his thoughts and prayers for those injured or killed in the attack, and calls for a return to civil discourse.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.500 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.500 Ben Ferguson with you, Senator Cruz with you, and the headline says it all.
00:00:08.260 Trump rushed off the stage after assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.
00:00:14.400 Thank the Lord.
00:00:15.060 The president is fine, that coming from his spokesperson, but there are others who have
00:00:21.540 lost their life.
00:00:22.980 Senator, your reaction to this shocking news?
00:00:25.760 Well, it is shortly after 8 p.m. East Coast time on Saturday, and the entire world just
00:00:32.600 witnessed what appears to have been an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.
00:00:41.060 All of the world is reeling.
00:00:44.440 I am sitting here, Heidi and I watched it together.
00:00:48.020 We are filled with anger and horror and shock.
00:00:53.080 I can tell you that Heidi and I have been praying for Donald Trump.
00:00:58.200 I don't know that there has been a moment when more people have prayed for Donald Trump
00:01:02.840 than in the last hour, lifting him up.
00:01:06.180 It appears that he was struck in the ear at this point.
00:01:09.400 There are conflicting reports, whether it was a bullet or a fragment of glass or something
00:01:13.840 else.
00:01:14.740 But he was bleeding from his ear.
00:01:16.260 And we are praying, praying, number one, for protection, number two, that he is all right.
00:01:24.540 But we're also praying for, for the reports are right now, that at least one person in
00:01:31.380 attendance of the rally is dead and that another is in critical condition.
00:01:35.760 And the report is also that the suspected gunman is dead as well, presumably at the hands of
00:01:42.840 the Secret Service or local police.
00:01:45.120 It is so recent that we recognize that the facts are going to come out in hours and days
00:01:54.180 to come.
00:01:55.760 As to who exactly this shooter is, there are all sorts of reports on the Internet, but
00:02:00.760 I'm not going to speculate right now because I don't know if those tweets are accurate or
00:02:04.200 not.
00:02:04.500 But I am sure we will find out more about the shooter or if there was more than one shooter.
00:02:11.480 There have been conflicting statements on that and what their motivation is.
00:02:16.780 But I will say, sitting here, I am horrified.
00:02:19.840 I am grateful for the Secret Service agents and for law enforcement who presumably stepped
00:02:24.800 in and took out the shooter.
00:02:27.020 However, I am incredibly grateful for God's providence that Donald Trump appears not to
00:02:36.140 be seriously injured.
00:02:38.220 And I'm praying at this point, we don't know how many people at the rally may have been injured
00:02:44.720 or worse.
00:02:45.240 So I'm certainly praying for everyone there who was in harm's way.
00:02:49.820 This is a horrific and dark moment in American history.
00:02:54.880 We have not had an attempted presidential assassination since Ronald Reagan, since I was 10 years
00:03:03.060 old.
00:03:04.300 That was a horrific moment in American history.
00:03:08.600 And now, 24 years later, we're once again in a comparable moment.
00:03:16.060 Thankfully, then as now, the president survived.
00:03:20.160 There are emotions that so many people listening to this are having.
00:03:23.940 One is thankfulness that the president is okay.
00:03:28.500 There's also sorrow that we hear that others have not survived.
00:03:32.720 And then there's also this anger and frustration.
00:03:36.580 And people look to leaders for advice, for wisdom, for comfort.
00:03:41.540 I ask you the same question that my kids ask me.
00:03:45.140 Why did this happen?
00:03:46.800 And what happens next?
00:03:49.500 And it's a question that all three of my boys asked me as I was watching this unfold on TV.
00:03:54.180 And I said, I don't know why this happens.
00:03:57.060 There are bad people in the world and there's good people.
00:03:59.180 And sometimes evil comes after good.
00:04:01.040 Well, that's right.
00:04:02.820 And I hope what comes of this is that everyone counts to 10 and exhales.
00:04:09.820 I hope that the political anger and rhetoric that it ratchets down.
00:04:17.840 There is so much vitriol.
00:04:19.780 There is so much hate.
00:04:21.100 There's been so much hate directed at Donald Trump.
00:04:24.180 So much just vile bitterness. 0.97
00:04:27.800 You and I and many others have worried for some time that some lunatic would attempt to harm the president.
00:04:37.280 And, you know, there is zero place for political violence on any side of the aisle.
00:04:44.820 This has no place, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the officeholder.
00:04:50.340 If you disagree with the officeholder, you can make your views plain.
00:04:54.000 That's why we have debates.
00:04:55.120 That's why we write op-eds.
00:04:56.540 That's why we vote the ballot box.
00:04:58.880 But political violence has no place.
00:05:01.940 And I hope the overheated and in far too many instances unmitigated hate, my prayer is that some of that is diminished,
00:05:14.280 that we move in the direction of having a civil and real public discourse rather than just screaming at each other.
00:05:30.500 I will tell you, Ben, I fear things are going to escalate, that there's going to be anger on both sides of the aisle.
00:05:37.260 I don't want to see this happen.
00:05:38.260 I will tell you, I sat there, you know, my immediate thoughts were thinking back, thinking back to the 1960s,
00:05:48.240 thinking back to when in rapid succession, JFK and Martin Luther King Jr.
00:05:56.400 and Bobby Kennedy were all assassinated, and the horrors that brought this country through.
00:06:04.080 We're not at that moment in time, and I pray that we are not.
00:06:08.120 But it is going to take leaders de-escalating for a moment, and I hope that's what we see.
00:06:15.600 Finally, I just want to humanize the president for a second, because I think sometimes people forget that not only is he a husband, he is a dad, he is a grandfather.
00:06:28.340 I've spent time with President Trump.
00:06:31.480 You've spent a lot of time with President Trump.
00:06:34.740 I know personally that he is, when I see him, I don't always see him as this guy that was the president.
00:06:42.120 I see him as a genuinely sincere and kind man.
00:06:45.940 I remember when he found out we were having twins, he said he wanted to talk to Anna and try to convince her for 10 minutes to name one of the boys Donald,
00:06:55.340 saying it was presidential, and he was so happy that we were going to have kids.
00:07:00.280 And he called, and he said, I hear you're expecting twins.
00:07:03.120 I said, yes, sir, Mr. President, I am.
00:07:04.440 And he said, well, you've got to name two of them.
00:07:07.240 What are they?
00:07:07.820 I said, they're boys.
00:07:08.360 He goes, well, you need a good name.
00:07:09.880 Donald is a pretty good name.
00:07:12.620 And I laughed.
00:07:13.620 He said, well, you'd have to talk to my wife about that.
00:07:15.720 And he goes, well, where is she?
00:07:16.860 And I said, she's downstairs.
00:07:18.080 And he goes, put her on the phone.
00:07:19.820 That is the human side of him.
00:07:21.740 He also called after they were born.
00:07:23.880 It wasn't done that day.
00:07:25.560 He called after they were born.
00:07:27.900 And that's the side of Donald Trump that I want people to understand.
00:07:31.160 And these are human beings.
00:07:32.800 You're a human being, Senator.
00:07:33.960 You're people that say horrible things about you and come after you.
00:07:37.220 And I remind people.
00:07:38.100 I try to remind them.
00:07:38.720 And they say it about me not at the same level as you get it every day.
00:07:42.000 And the president gets it every day.
00:07:43.240 But we're still people.
00:07:45.860 Yeah, look, I spoke with President Trump on the phone.
00:07:48.420 I think it was three days ago.
00:07:49.800 He was in good spirit.
00:07:51.980 I have to say, watching the footage tonight of when the shots are fired, when he's hit, and then when he's surrounded by Secret Service and being escorted off,
00:08:08.020 and he clutches his fist and then pounds his fist into the air, it's extraordinary.
00:08:14.740 I mean, it is breathtaking after being shot.
00:08:18.100 The leadership he demonstrated, you know, it reminded me when Reagan was shot in 1981 and when he was going into the hospital and he said to Nancy Reagan, he said,
00:08:31.180 Honey, I forgot the duck.
00:08:32.960 And he also said to the doctors that he was being wheeled into surgery.
00:08:37.400 And a lot of people don't remember how close Ronald Reagan came to dying that day.
00:08:42.000 The bullet, had it been just an inch further over, would have killed him that day.
00:08:48.100 And he said to the doctors, I hope you all are all Republicans.
00:08:52.340 And having the sense of humor and the presence to say that, even while going into surgery, is extraordinary.
00:09:02.700 President Trump, like, pounding his fist and standing up strong, it was a remarkable moment of leadership.
00:09:09.160 It also was reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt when he was shot giving a speech and kept on giving the speech.
00:09:14.780 I mean, it is a fighting spirit that is inspirational.
00:09:20.880 And I just want to call on everyone listening.
00:09:24.260 We're going to have time when we learn more about what exactly happened.
00:09:27.520 We learn more about the shooter and who he was and what his motivations were.
00:09:32.640 There's going to be time to figure out what went wrong, what could have been done to prevent this.
00:09:37.860 But right now, just as a country, I hope we have a moment, a moment, you know, I think back to after 9-11.
00:09:47.020 After 9-11, we had a moment where as a country we came together and we had unity and we hugged each other and we just lifted our country up.
00:09:54.340 And I'm going to ask everyone in the country, pray for President Trump, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, pray for President Trump, that he is all right now, but also that he be protected.
00:10:06.440 But also pray for President Biden and pray for all of our leaders, that they be protected from political violence, that we don't see crazed, angry zealots engaging in violence.
00:10:21.400 We have seen that. We have seen that tonight.
00:10:26.660 And my prayer is that our country steps back from this break.
00:10:32.500 And again, I just want to express my incredible thanks for Secret Service and law enforcement.
00:10:40.020 And also pray for the people who may have been shot today, the bystanders, the families of anyone injured or killed.
00:10:51.400 And just pray for our nation. I really believe America needs God's grace right now.
00:11:00.700 That's my prayer, and I hope it shares as well.
00:11:03.920 It is. Hug your family, hug your kids, call your friends and tell them you love them.
00:11:09.880 And I just think this is, like you said, a very pivotal moment in our country's history.
00:11:15.780 And I hope that we all take that deep breath and pray for the president and especially those at that rally.
00:11:21.800 Senator Cruz and I will be back with you.
00:11:23.820 I can promise you in a couple of days we'll have a lot more to talk about.
00:11:27.300 But I thought it was important that we come on here and have this conversation now.
00:11:31.580 Senator, take care of the fam, and I will see you.
00:11:34.620 And to everyone listening, we'll see you guys soon.
00:11:36.440 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:11:39.240 Guaranteed Human.