Sporting a new, flesh-colored ear bandage at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday night following the failed attempt on his life last week, Donald Trump claimed, “I took a bullet for democracy.”
The former president also broke the promise he made in his convention speech to never talk about the shooting again because he said it was “too painful” for him to recount.
“I begin this evening with a very special thanks to Americans nationwide including all of you here today for your extraordinary outpouring of love and support in the wake of the horrific last Saturday event,” Trump began.
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“And when you think of it, it was exactly one week ago today, almost to the hour, even to the minute,” he said. “Terrible, incredible. What a day it was. As I said earlier this week, I stand before you only by the grace of Almighty God. I shouldn’t be here.”
“They keep saying, ‘he’s a threat to democracy,’” Trump explained to the crowd.
“I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do for democracy? Last week I took a bullet for democracy. What did I do against democracy?’ Crazy,” he continued to a roaring crowd during his rally. “Crazy.”
The reported crowd of over 10,000 people had chanted, “fight, fight, fight,” a reference to the iconic moment when the former president appeared from a huddle of Secret Service agents after narrowly surviving the assassination attempt and fist-pumped the air while shouting the phrase.
Trump made reference to the victims of the Pennsylvania shooting, describing it as an “evil attack,” confirming he is still in touch with the two recovering victims while paying homage to Corey Comperatore, a “hero” attendee who died while shielding his family from the shots.
Yet, despite hopes the near-death attempt may have convinced the former president to change his tune, his old-fashioned election denialism and petty insults remained on full display.
The rest of Trump’s speech was riddled with many of the maniacal quirks and barely comprehensible ramblings of the “old” Trump, not the “reborn” version of the former president touted at the party convention in Milwaukee last week.
Early on at the Michigan rally, he went on a nonsensical rant about mail-in voting.
In an attempt to endorse early voting for his supporters, Trump put himself on shuffle, repeating a litany of random and verifiably untrue grievances from the 2020 election.
Trump began the off-the-rails portion of his speech on mail-in voting by promising to institute voter I.D. and, he would later say, by mandating a “one day” election, despite states having the constitutional authority to maintain their own voting laws.
“Until then,” Trump said of the largely unspecified legislation and arguably unconstitutional executive actions, “Republicans, we must win. We have to win. Win, win, win, win, win, win.”
Trump said he wants “a landslide that is too big to rig, I’ve said it before—I’ll say it 100, 200, 300 times—before, that spectacular date,” he continued, referring to the November election.
Yet immediately after he said, “you know, remember, November 5 is not really the date. It starts early September in North Carolina and a few others.”
Trump then began to mount the most minimal of efforts to endorse mail-in voting before quickly contradicting himself.
First, he told supporters to “you gotta vote early, vote absentee—I don’t care how you vote,” but the former president couldn’t keep up the act for longer than a few seconds.
“They all go, ‘Sir, you’ve got to vote early. Well sometimes you vote early, and that’s gone… You’ve gotta vote, you’ve gotta follow your vote. Make sure it doesn’t get canceled out.”
He tried endorsing mail-in voting again before giving a literal shrug.
“Think of it, you vote two months early,” Trump said later on in the same rant. “Nobody knows what the hell’s going on”
The former president repeated an unsubstantiated election fraud conspiracy theory about Georgia election officials “shoveling ballots into wheelbarrows, moving ’em around” shortly thereafter.
Notably, the speech also had a rare mention of abortion, if not by name.
“We will protect innocent life,” Trump said earlier in his remarks, despite the issue failing to appear in either his or vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s speeches at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
