PITTSBURGH (100.1 FM/AM 1020 KDKA Radio) – In high school, US Representative Mike Kelly vividly remembers the day President Johnh F. Kennedy was assassinated. On Saturday, Kelly was feet from an assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler and called into KDKA Radio to say it’s a problem with the United States.
“I watched the absolute chaos and then the disbelief at what just happened at the Butler Farm Show grounds where 4-H kids show their animals,” Kelly told Larry Richert and Marty Griffin on KDKA Radio. “This is something that is too far from what we believe we are as Americans. Today America truly showed up as a Third
“This has got to stop.”
A former businessman in Butler, the 76-year-old Kelly has been in Congress since 2011. He had his wife and a few of his 10 grandchildren with him at the rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds that took the life of one unidentified person, wounded two others along with President Trump.
“They experienced something that no child should ever have to experience,” Kelly told KDKA Radio. “There is something wrong. There is something dramatically wrong with this country right now.”
Kelly was one of a number of politicians joining Mr. Trump at the rally. He said he was in the bleachers just to the right of the President, about 60 feet from him when shots were fired apparently from a metal building outside of the rally perimeter.
“He brings up something,” Kelly said of what Mr. Trump was saying, “‘why are people upset with us being MAGA, Make America Great Again, that can’t possibly bother anybody’. Then all of a sudden ‘pop, pop, pop, pop, pop’. I see him go down and I say ‘oh my God, he’s been shot’.”
Kelly was passionate in describing the scene and his belief that the United States is broken and needs fixing.
“If you have a political opponent you don’t like, don’t vote for him,” Kelly told KDKA Radio. “The attempt today to assassinate the 45 th President, Donald Trump, if you don’t want to vote for him, don’t vote for him. You don’t have to kill him. I think we need to wake up in this country. We need to get beyond wherever we think we are in this country.”
Kelly recalled being on a baseball field where members of Congress were practicing for a softball game in Alexandria, Virginia, when a gunman shot House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Kelly said it’s a reminder to him to be vigilant and for others at the Butler Farm Show grounds on Saturday, a potential life-changing event.
“Most of us at one time or another, people made some threatening comments,” Kelly explained on KDKA Radio. “I’ve always said they’re just nuts you have to dismiss it. Now I’m starting to think, don’t dismiss anything. There are too many radical people.”
“What happened to the America we grew up in. We have to come together as the greatest nation ever known.”
“It’s become real now. For the people that were there today, it’s become real.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0