Donald Trump is under no illusion about how lucky he is to be alive after a gunman came terrifyingly close to shooting him dead at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” the former president told the New York Post on Sunday. “I’m supposed to be dead.” An attendee at the rally, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, was killed, while two others were injured when 20-year-old shooter Thomas Crooks opened fire. Crooks was himself killed by a Secret Service sniper.
Trump, who was reportedly wearing a white bandage on his injured right ear, made the stark comments while on board his plane en route to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday. He previously said he “felt the bullet ripping through the skin” of his ear during the attempt on his life.
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The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also reflected on the fine margins of his survival, saying he’d turned his head to look at a screen showing a chart about illegal immigration at the fateful moment.
“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 told the Washington Examiner on the plane. “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.” He added that the chances of making “a perfect turn” are probably “one tenth of one percent, so I’m not supposed to be here.”
Trump again praised the Secret Service agents for their actions during the attack, even as the federal agency has come under intense scrutiny in the aftermath of the shooting. He also showed reporters a bruise on his right forearm he sustained while agents tried to keep him on the ground. “The agents hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight,” he told the Post.
In the wake of the assassination attempt, Trump says he’s decided to ditch the “unbelievable rip-roarer” of a speech he’d planned to give later this week at the RNC.
“I threw it out,” Trump said, according to the Examiner. “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.”
