The day after surviving an assassination attempt, former president Donald Trump promised to deliver “a whole different speech” at the Republican National Convention on Thursday — one that will prioritize national unity over partisan division.
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” Trump told the Washington Examiner‘s Salena Zito in an interview on Sunday. The original speech would have mostly focused on President Joe Biden’s policies; Trump described it as “one of the most incredible speeches” already before the new revision. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he added. “The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.”
Trump was shot in the ear on Saturday during a rally in Butler, Pa. by a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, who climbed to the roof of a building some 400 feet away from Trump’s stage before opening fire.
Trump told Zito he would have died if he hadn’t turned his head away from the crowd. Moments before Crooks opened fire, Trump turned to look at a screen showing data about the southern border.
“That reality is just setting in,” he said. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”
In a Truth Social post issued Sunday morning, Trump thanked God “who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” Hours later, he confirmed his attendance at the RNC in Milwaukee, Wis., and called for national unity following the failed attempt on his life.
After the bullet grazed the top of his right ear, Trump fell to the ground and was subsequently swarmed by Secret Service agents present at the weekend rally. But before they could escort him to safety, Trump repeatedly pumped his fist in the air to galvanize his supporters. He did this to show that he was not badly wounded and “that America goes on, we go forward, that we are strong,” he said.
“The energy coming from the people there in that moment, they just stood there; it’s hard to describe what that felt like, but I knew the world was looking,” Trump continued. “I knew that history would judge this, and I knew I had to let them know we are OK.”
Zito attended the disrupted Trump rally, recounting in a Free Press article that she “was four feet away [from the stage] when I heard the bullets.” She went on to describe the harrowing incident from her firsthand perspective, recalling how she, her daughter, and her son-in-law ducked to the ground together. A security officer laid on top of the reporter to provide extra protection.
“I’ve since seen videos of what happened. People were screaming. But all I remember hearing was an eerie silence. With that kind of crowd, you’d expect pandemonium, a stampede. But I never had a sense of chaos,” Zito wrote. She said that despite the chaos, a “calm” Trump got “back on his feet within seconds.”
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is set to formally receive his party’s nomination this week, as 2,400 delegates flock to the RNC to vote for Trump on Monday. Security measures have been strengthened following the shooting, which the FBI is treating as an assassination attempt on the former president and domestic terrorism in its investigation.
As Trump prepares to deliver his speech on unity at the end of the convention, Biden implored Americans to “lower the temperature in our politics” and compared the failed assassination attempt to the January 6 Capitol riots during a televised address from the Oval Office on Sunday evening.
“Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s members of Congress of both parties being targeted and shot or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or information intimidation on election officials with a kidnapping plot against the city government or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump,” the president said. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence ever. Period.”