Following a second assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump openly discussed the incident in an interview on X Spaces Monday night.
Originally planned to focus on cryptocurrency, the pre-scheduled interview took a turn as Trump addressed the new threat to his life.
Join me live from Mar-A-Lago at 8:00PM Eastern, tonight on X Spaces. Set a reminder and be sure to tune in! https://t.co/MXTu3hxVFP
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 16, 2024
“They have the man behind bars, and hopefully he’s going to be there for a long time,” said Trump. “Dangerous person, very, very dangerous person.”
Speaking to Goodlife Media CEO Farokh Sarmad, Trump gave an account of the events leading to the incident. He said that he was playing golf with friends on Sunday afternoon and that “everything was beautiful” and that “it was a 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. But what do I know about that?” He joked, according to a transcript provided by The Post Millennial.
He commended the actions of the Secret Service, saying “they did a fantastic job.”
They “knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me,” said Trump.
The agents escorted the former president and his associates to safety.
“I would have loved to have sank that last putt, but we decided, ‘let’s get out of here,’” he said.
Trump clarified that the gunfire everyone heard came from a Secret Service agent who had spotted a rifle hidden in the shrubs.
“And what the gunfire was actually, interestingly, was a Secret Service agent had seen a barrel of a AK-47, which is a very powerful gun, a rifle, and he started shooting at the barrel and started shooting in the bushes,” he said.
“Could only see the barrel. How good is that, right? But could only see the barrel. Based on that, he started shooting and ran toward the target and was shooting a lot of— I mean, those were the shots we heard.”
Trump further detailed how gunman Ryan Routh was unable to discharge his weapon and fled, but was subsequently captured with the aid of a witness who photographed the getaway car’s license plate.
“Sheriff Bradshaw is fantastic,” he said, “great sheriff for a long time, and within a fairly short period of time, they tracked him down on the highways, pretty high-speed chase, and they ended up getting him. They got him.”
“You wouldn’t want to have somebody like that out there, you know, he dropped his gun, the AK-47, he left his gun, he left a cameras behind,” he continued. “Left a lot of things behind. So the agent did a fantastic job. The civilian did a phenomenal job.”
Trump attributed the attempt on his life to the left’s rhetoric about him, which came two months after he was shot in the ear by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks in Pennsylvania.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric going on,” he said. “A lot of people think that the Democrats, when they talk about threat to democracy and all of this, and it seems that both of these people were radical leftists, the first one they should learn more about. They have apps that they haven’t opened yet, which is pretty strange.”
“And the father went out and got the biggest lawyer in the state of Pennsylvania, which is pretty strange, about the father of the shooter we’re talking about in Butler, the first one. And that’s pretty strange. A couple of pretty strange things going on there.”
