Billionaire Elon Musk joined Donald Trump on stage for a rally in the Pennsylvania town where the presidential candidate survived an assassination attempt a few weeks ago.
The US election campaign is entering its final month.
Musk, a Republican campaign supporter, took to the stage to urge voters to support Trump, echoing the latter's claim that the November vote was "the most important election of our lifetime."
"The true test of someone's character is how they handle themselves under fire, and we have a president who can't climb a flight of stairs and another who raised his fist after being shot and said, 'Fight!'" Musk said in his first appearance alongside the former president.
The owner of social network X said that Democrats are a threat to the US constitution, adding that if Trump does not win, this will be the "last election".
Democrats want to "take away your free speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively," Musk said.
In the hour-and-a-half-long speech, Trump said his return to Butler, where he was nearly killed, showed the gunman "hasn't broken our spirit."
"I return to Butler after tragedy and grief to deliver a simple message to the people of Pennsylvania and to the people of America - our movement to make America great again stands stronger, prouder, more united, more - determined and closer to victory than ever before," Trump snapped.
But after the Republican's first appearance in Butler, Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden and the polls shifted. Harris leads Trump in the popular vote, and the races in the seven swing states are effectively in Harris' favor. According to a Financial Times analysis, Pennsylvania is the closest of all races, with Harris leading Trump by just 0.6 percentage points on average.
"Over the past eight years, those who want to prevent us from achieving that future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to remove me from the electoral rolls and, who knows, maybe even tried to kill me Trump told the crowd, and continued, "But I've never stopped fighting for you and I never will."
Tens of thousands of supporters, many of whom had attended the July event in which a Trump supporter was killed and two others wounded, had gathered in Butler since the morning of the rally. They chanted "Fight back," the words Trump said on stage moments after the shooting.
He also deployed his latest line of attack against Harris - that she had botched the authorities' response to the aftermath of Tropical Storm Helen.
"Helen" was "Katrina to them," Trump said. | BGNES
