The Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is back on his election tour after the assassination attempt.
Last week, I took a bullet for democracy, said Trump at a campaign meeting in Michigan, the first after the attack, and also praised China's and Russia's leaders.
He repeated, to the audience's jubilation, that it was "God's mercy" that saved him from the bullet that hit his ear.
Trump, wearing a slightly smaller bandage over his ear than the one he wore at the Republican Convention last week, took the opportunity to talk about the internal pressure on President Joe Biden within the Democrats.
Right now, the Democratic Party leaders are frantically trying to overturn the result of their own party's primary election to get rid of crooked Joe Biden from the ballot, said the former president.
He then called the Democrats "the enemy of democracy" and dismissed the notion that he himself was an extremist.
Donald Trump also said that China's President Xi Jinping "wrote a beautiful letter to me the other day when he heard what had happened" after the assassination attempt.
In his speech in Michigan, Trump described Xi Jinping as a "brilliant man who controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist" and added that the Chinese leader makes people like Joe Biden seem like "infants". The presidential candidate described Xi Jinping and Russia's President Vladimir Putin as "smart, tough" leaders who "love their countries".
Trump, who had appeared somewhat toned down in his vocabulary and called for unity after the attack, has now found his way back to his usual rhetoric, notes the Biden camp.
"He spews out the same lies and runs the same campaign based on revenge and retaliation, praises the same failed policies, and, as usual, focuses only on himself", says Biden's campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa in a statement.
