God may have allowed Donald Trump to survive two assassination attempts so that he could be president again, the former president said in an X Space interview on Monday night.
“There’s something going on,” said Trump, the Republican nominee for president. “I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be president, to save this country. Nobody knows.”
This was Trump’s first public event since a gunman attempted to assassinate him as he golfed Sunday at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“It was quite something, but it worked out well, and Secret Service did an excellent job, and they have the man behind bars, and hopefully, he’s going to be there for a long time,” Trump said. “Dangerous person, very, very dangerous person.”
1) Trump Thanks Secret Service, Police, Alert Citizen
Trump said he was playing golf with some friends on a peaceful Sunday morning when he heard gunfire.
“Everything was beautiful, nice place to be, and all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five, and it sounded like bullets,” he said.
A Secret Service agent then “did a fantastic job” getting Trump and his friend off the course. Secret Service members fired at the gunman, who has now been identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, but he fled in his vehicle.
“Amazingly, a civilian in that area saw something, and it looked very suspicious, and in the car, drove their car to the back of his truck of some kind, and took pictures of the license plate, and gave them to the sheriff’s office,” the former president said.
Police were able to use a license-plate reader to find the gunman’s plate to pinpoint his location on the highway.
“Within a fairly short period of time, they tracked him down on the highways, pretty high-speed chase, and they ended up getting them,” Trump said.
“So, the agent did a fantastic job,” he continued. “The civilian did a phenomenal job.”
“I would have loved to have sank that last putt, but we decided, let’s get out of here,” Trump joked.
2) Trump Faults Democrats’ Violent Rhetoric for Attacks
Trump said Democrats’ “rhetoric” calling him “a threat to democracy” and other epithets likely contributed to the assassination attempts.
Both shooters were members of the radical Left, according to Trump.
Trump recalled the first assassination attempt on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He praised the people at the rally—especially volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore, who was killed—for their bravery that day.
“I love the people of this country, people like Corey, who was just this massive Trump fan, and he got hit,” the former president said. “But people like that, they’re in love with the country, and they hate seeing what’s happened to the country.”
3) Trump Warns Against a Harris Presidency
“You have 21 million people pouring in from all countries all over the world, from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said.
“They’re coming in as terrorists, and they’re coming into our country at levels that nobody’s ever seen,” he continued. “And they’re taking over our towns, and they’re taking over small cities and big cities.”
Trump referenced New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as Aurora, Colorado, where Venezuelan gangs have taken over apartment buildings.
“The border is in much worse shape than it’s ever been,” he said. “There’s the worst border there’s ever been in any country.”
Trump criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for her management of the border crisis.
“You have Kamala. She was the border czar,” the 45th president said. “I call her the comrade because she’s a Marxist. She wants to tax everybody out of business.”
4) ‘The World is a Nasty Place’
The world is a “nasty place,” Trump said, but he doesn’t view Russia and China as enemies.
“I think we’ll get along great with China,” he said. “I think we’ll get along with great with Russia. I want to get Russia to settle up with Ukraine, and stop this. Millions of people being killed, far greater than the number you read about, but I want to get that done. Before I even take office, I want to get that done as president elect, because it has to be solved.”
The world would not be on the brink of war if he had remained in office, he said.
“There wouldn’t have been an Oct. 7,” he said, referring to Hamas’ invasion of Israel, the massacre of some 1,200 people, and the war that has raged since. “There wouldn’t have been Russia attacking Ukraine. There wouldn’t be inflation, all this inflation, which has hurt people so badly. You wouldn’t have had that horrible type of withdrawal where we were getting out of Afghanistan.”
He said President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago “was the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” Trump said.
“And frankly, Russia would have never gone into Ukraine if it weren’t for that,” he said. “They looked at that, and they said, this country is no longer run by Trump. This country is run by stupid, stupid people.”
He said American military is great, but needs the right leadership.
“The bottom line is that it can be nasty, but it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “It’s going to get really bad. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
Harris’ replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee was an “overthrow of a president,” Trump said.
“That literally was a coup,” he said. “The first coup of an American president.”
Trump emphasized the urgency of electing him as president in November.
“I love the country,” he said. “We’re going to make America great again, and we’ll be able to do it. We did it once, and we’ll do it again, and much easier this time.”