Stephen King has hit back at a critic who condemned his response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday.
The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he was shot in the ear in an attack that left one person dead and two injured. The FBI identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who is also dead.
After news of the assassination attempt broke, King took to X, formerly Twitter, to share his thoughts. The horror writer is a vocal Trump critic, regularly criticizing the 78-year-old and his politics on social media.
"An AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle was used in the Butler shooting," King wrote on Sunday. "These are the guns the Republican party—and Trump—want to protect."
The 76-year-old's post has since received more than 9 million views, drawing mixed reactions from people on the social media platform. One person told The Shining author to stay in his "fictional lane."
The user also said, "For a fiction writer, Stephen King knows little about this subject."
King replied: "Here's what I know, as a responsible gun owner: Those people would be alive and Trump would be unwounded if all that crazy kid had access to was a butcher knife.
"Don't tell me to stay in my f****** lane. I'm an American. Are you, or are you a bot?"
On July 13, shots rang out during Trump's rally, and the Republican politician was rushed offstage by the Secret Service after a bullet hit the upper section of his right ear. A Secret Service sharpshooter at the scene killed Crooks, and the FBI has launched an investigation into the attack.
On Saturday, a representative for Trump said the business mogul was "fine" after being "checked out at a local medical facility."
A Democrat since the 1970s, King first began speaking out against Trump in 2016, when he became one of 250 writers to sign an open letter condemning the real estate magnate's presidential election run.
Earlier in July, King criticized the Supreme Court's decision to give Trump partial immunity from prosecution, after it ruled that former presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts.
The decision may have implications for Trump's election subversion case, in which the former reality star is accused of attempting to overturn the 2020 general election results.
"Thanks to the Supreme Court, the next president will have the powers of a king. That's not what the founders intended. Quite the opposite," King wrote on X on July 1.
He added in another post on July 3: "Three Supreme Court justices—Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts—said in their confirmation hearings that 'no man is above the law.' But in the case of the United States vs. Donald J. Trump, Trump won."
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