Donald Trump, just days after claiming at the Republican National Convention that he would only describe his experience being the target of an assassination attempt once “because it’s actually too painful to tell,” broke that vow during a lengthy Fox News interview that aired Monday.
“I will tell you exactly what happened, and you will never hear it from me a second time,” Trump said Thursday at the RNC in Milwaukee.
But in a sit-down alongside running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) that was taped Saturday, Trump told host Jesse Watters all about the ordeal, which left him with a bloodied ear.
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Trump said that when he was on the ground protected by Secret Service agents, they wanted to put him on a stretcher, but he refused.
“I said I am not going on the stretcher, because I just felt it was the ear. And there was a lot of blood coming. I don’t know if you heard this, but the ear causes—they say the most in the body. You get hit in the ear, just about better than any other place in one way, but in another way, it bleeds more. And there was a lot of blood,” Trump said.
“We had a little argument. Well, I have six guys lying on top of me. I mean, I had some big guys on top of me. Strong guys… and brave guys, because they ran on to that stage quickly. I was down for the most part. When I looked at my hand I knew it was something very serious. I put my hand up, I looked at it, it had blood all over it,” he went on.
For the next few minutes, Trump continued to give his account of the shooting and the immediate aftermath.
“It hit the ear. And when I saw that, I got down pretty quickly I think,” he said. “And people were starting to shout. It is one of the reasons I was able to go down so fast. It is amazing that the move of checking here and going, almost immediately down, I think so probably people were shouting at the same time, who knows, and I was down. And I said, ‘Let’s get going. Come on, let’s go.’ And the shooting had stopped. So I assumed they probably got him. And they did get him.”
In his speech Thursday accepting the GOP’s presidential nomination, Trump covered much of the same ground. And in his comments on Fox, Trump also claimed some sort of divine intervention.
“I got very lucky. Or God,” Trump told Watters. “I think it was God, actually.”
