TRUMP: ‘I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE‘: Former President Donald Trump can’t stop thinking about the way he moved his head in the split second before a gunman, intent on assassinating him, pulled the trigger during his speech in Pennsylvania Saturday evening. Trump was standing at the podium and began to refer to a large screen, hanging to his right, that showed statistics about immigration. To better see the screen, Trump turned his head to the right and a little up, and at the millisecond in which his head was at just the right angle for the bullet to graze his ear but not enter his skull — at that moment, the bullet whizzed by. Trump suffered a bloody wound to his ear, but no other injuries. It seemed like a miracle.
“The most incredible thing was that I happened to not only turn but to turn at the exact right time and in just the right amount,” Trump said Sunday afternoon in a talk aboard his 757 as he flew to Milwaukee for the start of the Republican National Convention. “If I only half-turn, it hits the back of the brain. The other way goes right through [the skull]. And because the sign was high, I’m looking up. The chances of my making a perfect turn are probably one tenth of one percent, so I’m not supposed to be here.”
“I had to be at the exact right angle,” Trump said at another point in the conversation, which included the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin. “Because the thing was an eighth of an inch away. That I would turn exactly at that second, where he [the gunman] wouldn’t stop the shot is pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. I’m really not supposed to be here.”
Dressed in a dark suit with no tie and a gauze bandage taped to his ear, Trump spoke highly of the Secret Service agents who covered him while he was down on the stage. At one point, he rolled up his right sleeve and showed a deep red and black bruise where the agents made sure he stayed down. “That’s just from a guy grabbing me,” Trump said. “You know how strong you have to be to do that?” Trump also said he insisted on getting up and walking off the stage under his own power. “I said, I’ve got to walk out, I have to walk out,” Trump continued. “I did not want to be carried out. I’ve seen people being carried out, and it’s not good. And I had no problem with walking.”
I said that watching the video, it appeared that after being shot, surrounded by agents shielding him from any further threat, Trump actually wanted to return to the microphone to continue speaking. Indeed he did. “I wanted to keep speaking — I wanted to keep speaking, but I just got shot,” Trump said with a little laugh. “It’s a very surreal experience, and you never know what you’re going to do until a thing like that happens.”
It was obvious that Trump was still processing what had happened. Who wouldn’t be? It is something that will stay with him for the rest of his life. At the moment, he is grappling with the feeling that something very big has changed in his life and in the presidential race. When I asked him, “Does this change your campaign?” he immediately answered, “Yes.”
Trump explained that before Saturday night, he had finished the speech he planned to give later this week at the Republican convention. “I basically had a speech that was an unbelievable rip-roarer,” he said. “It was brutal — really good, really tough. [Last night] I threw it out. I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is, and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true. Had this not happened, we had a speech that was pretty well set that was extremely tough. Now, we have a speech that is more unifying.”
Trump did not mean that a new speech has been fully written, but parts of it have already been drafted, starting in the hours after the assassination attempt. The idea is to reframe the intense conflicts Trump has engaged in during his years in national politics. “I’ve been fighting a group of people that I considered very bad people for a long time, and they’ve been fighting me, and we’ve put up a very good fight,” Trump said. “We had a very tough speech, and I threw it out last night, I said I can’t say these things after what I’ve been through.”
Some of the people Trump talks to around the world of politics and business have suggested to him that he could use the assassination attempt as a starting point to try to be a more unifying candidate. Given the history of the last eight years, it’s an idea that seems wildly improbable. But an assassination attempt is a very big thing. There hasn’t been one of a president in more than 40 years, and there hasn’t been one of a leading presidential candidate in longer. It is hard to predict what effect it will have. But Trump suspects the chances of fundamental political change coming from the Pennsylvania attack are probably not great.
“I’d love to achieve unity if you could achieve unity, if that’s possible,” Trump said. “There are many good people on the other side…But there are also people who are very divided. Some people actually want open borders and some people don’t want open borders. The question is can those two sides get together? Can sides where you have people who want to see men play in women’s sports, and you have a side that doesn’t understand even the concept of allowing that to happen [get together]?”
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Trump knows it’s a long shot. “It has an impact,” he said of the assassination attempt. “Now, maybe the impact will wear off if the other side gets nasty.” It seems quite likely that that is exactly what will happen and the fighting will resume, even though both Trump and President Joe Biden are talking about unity.
But even if it does not bring lasting political change, a brush with death has had an obvious effect on Donald Trump. He survived “by luck or by God,” he said. Once the trigger was pulled, the chances of Trump avoiding a fatal injury seemed infinitesimally small. And yet that is what happened. “I’m not supposed to be here,” Trump said yet again. “It did have a lot of impact.”
