Donald Trump has made his first public appearance since a second apparent assassination attempt against the former president.
Crowds chanted “fight, fight, fight” and “God bless Trump!” as the former president appeared on stage at a town hall in Flint, Michigan, surrounded by US Secret Service agents.
Trump described running for president as "a dangerous business" akin to car racing or bull riding. "Only consequential presidents get shot at," he said.
Earlier in the day, Vice President Kamala Harris struck a measured tone, even steering clear of mentioning Trump by name in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
The mood was a stark contrast to Trump’s interview with the group earlier in the campaign, in which he wrongly claimed Ms Harris - the first Black woman and Asian American to serve as vice president - had in the past only promoted her Indian heritage.
Ms Harris said earlier in the day that she had told Trump "there's no place for political violence in our country”.
Both sides are ramping up campaigning with no changes to Trump's calendar despite the apparent assassination attempt at one of his Florida golf courses.
Democrats have accused Trump in the past for his long history of inflammatory campaign rhetoric and advocacy for jailing or prosecuting his political enemies.
But Ms Harris was treading more carefully in the aftermath of the latest incident.
Her session with the National Association of Black Journalists was one of the few extensive sit-down interviews Ms Harris has done since replacing President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket in July.
She repeatedly criticised Trump on issues including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and opposition to abortion access, but was careful to refer to him as the former president and in other ways that avoided naming him directly.
Meanwhile, Trump renewed his past retaliation threats against election workers, donors and others as he tries to stoke fears about the integrity of the upcoming 2024 election.
He posted on Tuesday on his social media site: "Those involved in unscrupulous behaviour will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before."
The Michigan town hall was billed as focusing on the auto industry, a pillar of the battleground state.
Trump alleged Democrats would undercut American car manufacturing by pushing for the adoption of electric vehicles and repeated false claims that Chinese automakers are building large factories across the border in Mexico to flood the US with vehicles.
Trump has appearances later in the week in New York, Washington DC, and North Carolina.
Ms Harris has her own stops in Washington as well as Michigan and Wisconsin in the coming days, with the two candidates overlapping in concentrating on the industrial Midwest, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — all swing areas that could decide an election expected to be exceedingly close.
So far, Mr Biden and Ms Harris have tried to avoid politics in their responses to Sunday's incident, instead condemning political violence of all kinds. The president also urged Congress to increase funding to the Secret Service.
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that months of criticism against him by Ms Harris and Mr Biden, who call him a threat to American democracy, inspired the latest attack.
"I really believe that the rhetoric from the Democrats" is "making the bullets fly. And it's very dangerous. Dangerous for them. It's dangerous for both sides," Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Authorities say Ryan Wesley Routh camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach, where Trump was playing Sunday, for nearly 12 hours with food and a rifle but fled without firing shots when a Secret Service agent spotted and shot at him. He was subsequently arrested as he drove on the highway.
Routh's past online posts suggest he has not been consistent about his politics in terms of supporting Democrats or Republicans.
The attack came barely two months after Trump was wounded during a rally in Pennsylvania.
