In the wake of the attempted assassination at his rally in Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump said Sunday he believes he narrowly avoided his own death.
“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump said in an interview with The New York Post.
Trump spoke to the Post while en route to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this week; the former president reportedly had a large white bandage on his right ear from the injury he sustained from the shooting.
Trump recalled turning his head slightly to the right to read a chart about undocumented immigrants during the rally — a split-second move he believes allowed him to dodge a shot that would have killed him.
The suspected shooter was killed by the Secret Service shortly before its agents covered and guided Trump to safety.
During an interview Monday on NBC’s “TODAY” show, Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said the former president “feels very fortunate” to be alive.
“And as he said, it’s only by the grace of God that he’s even still with us. It’s miraculous that President Trump turned his head just that slight amount at the right moment to avoid the bullet,” Miller said. “And the message that President Trump is coming out of this is very simple: We have to unite America. We have to unite the country.”
In his interview with the Post, Trump said that he had initially prepared an “extremely tough” RNC speech about the “corrupt, horrible” Biden administration, but that he “threw it away” in the wake of the attempted assassination.
The former president reportedly said he’s working on a new speech instead because “I want to try to unite our country,” adding “but I don’t know if that’s possible. People are very divided.”
Asked by host Savannah Guthrie on the “TODAY” show if he expects a different tone from Trump going forward, Miller pointed to Trump’s post on his social media site Truth Social on Sunday urging the need to be “resilient in our faith and defiant in the face of wickedness.”
“This is a moment in our country’s history where we’re in a tinderbox,” Miller said. “There’s so much political division.”
“The disunity and the unrest that’s happening at the national level just simply isn’t good for the country,” he added. “It cannot persist. We have to come together in this moment.”
President Joe Biden has repeatedly urged national unity in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump and called on the public to “lower the temperature” of political rhetoric in an Oval Office address Sunday night.
“Disagreement is inevitable in American democracy,” Biden said Sunday, arguing that political differences should never lead to a “killing field.”
Biden also made a phone call to Trump after the shooting to check on his condition, describing the call as a “short but good conversation” and that he and first lady Jill Biden “are keeping him and his family in our prayers.”
Peter Nicholas contributed.
