MILWAUKEE—Donald Trump Jr. says his family didn’t have any real answers as to what had happened to their father and grandfather for almost 90 minutes after former President Donald Trump was shot.
Trump Jr. sat down with The Daily Signal at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday to discuss the Saturday assassination attempt on his father. Authorities shot and killed the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, as he lay on a roof where he shot at Trump.
Asked whether he has concerns about his father or his own immediate family being targeted again, Trump Jr. responded, “Obviously that’s something you think about. I try not to, because you also have to live your life.”
“When my father was in office, I had a Secret Service detail, and I was, I think, the No. 2 most threatened person in America according to them, because, like him, I don’t just accept the other side’s narrative and apologize for it. I push back, I fight. That’s the way I’m sort of built, I guess,” he explained. “Maybe we’re all built a little differently—certainly he is. I’d like to believe I got some of those genes.”
“It’s definitely a consideration, and you’ve seen the elevation of that over the years,” Trump Jr. continued. “They couldn’t beat him in so many ways, so they try to sue him to death, then they try to bankrupt him, then they try to take away his businesses, and when that doesn’t work, they try to jail him. It’s sort of the natural progression.”
He reminded The Daily Signal of a conversation he had with Tucker Carlson in recent months, where Carlson suggested that Trump would be violently targeted by his opponents. Trump Jr. said he told Carlson: “It’s totally plausible that they would try to do something like this.”
“I got criticized, but here we are,” he concluded.
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The former president’s son also shared that he was with his kids when he got the call Saturday night informing him that his father had been shot, with few other details.
“Is he alive, is he not, is he OK?” Trump Jr. said he thought. “Took about 90 minutes to actually get through … I didn’t even know for an hour and a half … I was trying to get all my kids together. Didn’t know if there was further stuff going on.”
In the meantime, Trump Jr. said he saw some videos online that gave him more insight into the former president’s condition before he finally got the phone call from his father.
“He was surprisingly upbeat. Obviously, a somber moment, but surprisingly, there we even got in a hair joke. I was like, ‘Is the hair OK after all that blood?’ We sort of had some fun with it. I think we all needed a Trump-style ice breaker just to get through some of the gravitas of everything that went on. Then you sit down, and that’s when it all hits you.”
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Asked how the incident changed how he looks at his father, Trump Jr. reflected on the now-iconic photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist into the air, shouting, “Fight, fight, fight,” to the crowd.
“We live in an era where everyone sort of thinks they’re a badass because they’re on the internet, and not really upfront. But he just got shot, he comes out defiant, ready to fight for our country. I just said, ‘Hey, you’re the biggest badass I’ve ever met.’ I could not have been legitimately more proud, ever, as a son, to have that kind of approach.”
“Everyone thinks they’re going to act that way, everyone wants to believe they’re going to act that way. But when actually tried, usually, that’s not the case, you usually wither and hide, and that’s not his style.”
Donald Trump announced Monday that Ohio Sen. JD Vance was his vice presidential running mate. The former president made an appearance on Monday at the convention, where he appeared serious and emotional as he greeted his sons, Tucker Carlson, Vance, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.