WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump was somberly contemplative and unusually conciliatory after confronting what he saw as a third attempt on his life in less than two years. He suggested that his personal politics had made him a repeated target, but he also called for unity and bipartisan healing in an increasingly violent world.
“It’s always shocking when something like this happens. Happened to me, a little bit. And that never changes,” a subdued Trump told reporters in a hastily organized news conference at the White House late Saturday. Only a short time before, a man with guns and knives tried to rush past the security perimeter inside the Washington hotel where the Republican president was about to address the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
WATCH: Gunfire outside ballroom disrupts White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Trump in attendance
Authorities are in the early stages of determining what happened and why. The shooting suspect was taken into custody and identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California.
Trump said he was undoubtedly the target. The presidency is “a dangerous profession,” he said. Trump said violence associated with politics had escalated in the United States and around the world. “No country is immune,” he said.
He also suggested it was a sign of how successful his presidency has been.
“I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people — the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said. He added: “The people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much.”
Trump called for Americans to put aside their differences and unite. That was a break from his usual gleefully combative political tack.
“We have to, we have to resolve our differences,” the president said. “I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.”
Echoes of what Trump said after 2024 incidents
Trump has called for national unity before, only to quickly pivot.
By Sunday morning, Trump was using the incident to promote the White House ballroom project, a work in progress on site where the East Wing, which he ordered demolished, had stood. He said on social media that what happened Saturday night “would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!”
Trump also scoffed at a legal challenge against the construction, calling it the “ridiculous ballroom lawsuit.”
After the shooting in 2024 during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump was wounded in the ear and a supporter was killed, the president strode into the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee two days later. Later that week, he gave a speech, in accepting the presidential nomination, that featured a softer and deeply personal message, drawing directly from his brush with death.
“The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly,” Trump said then. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”
Such calls were short-lived, though.
WATCH: Trump holds news conference after shooting at White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Trump used that same speech to veer back into the combativeness that has become his trademark. He repeated false claims about the 2020 election was stolen from him and assertions that Democratic President Joe Biden had done “unthinkable” damage to the nation.
The pattern played out anew in September 2024, when Secret Service agents fired at a man who was armed with a rifle as Trump played golf at his resort club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf partner when the second incident occurred, described Trump’s initial reaction as “courageous and stoic.” It was not long before Trump was talking constantly about “radical” Democrats and “left-wing lunatics.” He branded Ryan Routh, the man sentenced to life in prison for trying to kill him, a “sick” individual.
Unlike the first two incidents, Saturday’s occurred with first lady Melania Trump by his side.
The president seemed to describe his wife as being rattled but also “very cognizant, I think, of what happened.”
“I think she knew immediately,” Trump said. “She was saying ‘It’s a bad noise.'”
He added, “It was a rather traumatic experience for her.”
More coverage from the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
