PALM BEACH, Florida — Former President Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively that when he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, in mid-July he knew instantly it was a bullet that had hit him.
“A lot of times, and I was thinking about this, it would seem like a surreal moment—like you don’t realize almost where you are,” Trump said when asked to describe what went through his mind in that moment. “I never felt that. I knew immediately I got hit by a bullet.”
Trump’s comments came during a lengthy exclusive interview at Mar-a-Lago a couple weeks ago, where he sat for an hour with Breitbart News after a press conference he held earlier in the day. One of the most interesting parts of the interview was Trump talking about the failed assassination attempt from 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks against him, and it was unbelievable to hear Trump himself describe just how lucky he was that the would-be assassin’s bullets barely missed him.
Trump, sitting behind his big ornate wooden desk, described to Breitbart News that he would be dead if he had not turned exactly the right way at exactly the right second.
“So what are the odds that I’m looking to the right?” Trump said. “The poster is never used early, and it’s never on the right it’s always on the left. If you take the odds of this whole thing it’s like 10 million to one and you only have an eighth of a second.”
As Trump said this, he started moving his head to various angles and pointing out he’d be dead in all but one angle in which he’s alive which he thankfully is today.
“I’m turning, and I’m dead here, I’m dead here, I’m dead here, dead, dead, alive, dead,” Trump said. “So, think, you only have this exact spot right here. This is an amazing phenomena. It’s millions to nothing. There’s about an eighth of a second where I’m good. The rest of the time you’re dead.”
Trump said the shooter was very close to him comparatively speaking, and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump—both avid shooters—are shocked that the shooter missed.
“Because [the shooter] was 130 yards away, which for a shooter is very little,” Trump said. “My son’s a shooter—he says that’s like a two-foot putt. He says it’s impossible. He said it’s like a one-foot putt. It’s impossible. He can’t believe it. Don is a real shooter, and so is Eric. They can’t believe it.”
Trump said the odds of him looking the exact right way at that exact right second are next to impossible.
“Number one, I’d never be looking there or there because there’s nobody there and the audience is maybe 55,000 people—it was packed,” Trump said. “The only reason I looked—I use that poster, that chart a maximum of 20 percent. I just don’t use it. It’s always at the end and it’s always on my left. The only time I use it is at the end of the speech. Now I say put up the poster and let’s go, here it is right here. Ping. I never do it during the early part. The only time I do it is at the end of the show and it’s always on my left—this time it was on my right. So what are the odds that I turn there because there’s nobody there and nobody to speak to there, because the fans are all up there and to the right or the left, but there’s no people there. You have the fences.”
Trump detailed the second he was shot as he continued explaining the angles that saved his life.
“So when I’m looking at the audience, I’m like this—he’s got me right here,” Trump said. “Then I go look like this when he’s ready to shoot because I have the immigration sign. So I’m going like that. I said ‘you take a look at how well we did,’ and boom. Then remember I took my hand and I looked my hand has blood all over my hand. All over—and I went down. If I didn’t go down I would have been hit. That I don’t consider as lucky because that’s going down. The amazing thing is if my head is even turned like this I get hit. If it’s turned like this I get hit. The only thing I could have been is flat. I’m like this, and he was exactly there 90 degrees—dead parallel.”
Trump said that in the moment he “knew exactly what was happening” and knew that a bullet hit him in the ear. He also said the Secret Service agents who covered him thought he was hit multiple times.
“Don’t forget eight bullets went over me. So if I’m not down, the luckiest was looking this way. Being down is a little different because the bullets were flying over my head. They killed the fireman and they really badly hurt two people who are recovering and are going to make it but they thought those two guys would not be alive—very good guys too. You would think it would be a surreal experience. It wasn’t. I knew exactly what was happening. I knew I was hit in the ear. I had seven very large people on top of me. They wanted me to stay down and they assumed [I was hit more than once] because there was so much blood from the ear. Butler Hospital did a fantastic job. But the doctor explained when you get hit in the ear it’s the bloodiest part because of cartilage. I said ‘how can it be that much?’ It was amazing. He said, ‘sir, you get hit in the ear, and it’s like an explosion of blood.’ If you get hit in the stomach, it’s much different—it’s not nearly as bad—or if you get hit in the leg. Who would have thought that? But when the ear gets cut you won’t be happy. But they thought I was hit in multiple places because there were a lot of shots fired. And they didn’t know those shots went over my head.”
Trump said if the bullet had actually hit his head rather than his ear, “my head would have exploded like a watermelon,” and that America’s adversaries would have used it as propaganda against the United States.
“How about if you had that on slow-motion instant replay?” Trump said. “Couple of things just to think of it because it’s got to be divine intervention.”
Trump said his views on the U.S. Secret Service are mixed. While he said there were some failures that day—particularly with regard to securing the rooftop from which Crooks shot him—he also recognizes the bravery of the agents around him who shielded him.
“So, Secret Service they obviously had a big lapse when they didn’t cover the roof of that building,” Trump said. “Yet, they were very brave when they jumped on me when I went down. I reacted very well because I went down fast.”
“They were very brave because they jumped when the shots were coming and yet they jumped,” Trump added of the agents who shielded him. “You saw them—the one big guy comes literally from where the bullets were coming trying to cover me.”
Later in the interview, Trump added that he thought the effectiveness of the Secret Service counter-sniper who took out the shooter was “incredible.”
“The Secret Service sniper was incredible,” Trump said. “One shot from 400 yards right there—can you believe it? He didn’t know about it. He was a shooter—an unbelievable shooter. He heard the noise, he looks around—I guess his eyes are good. That’s four football fields—that’s a lot.”
The then-director of the U.S. Secret Service has resigned, and reportedly several Secret Service personnel have been placed on administrative duty as the investigation into what happened continues. Congressional Republicans have been fighting for more accountability and transparency, and some have raised concerns that the agency has been less than forthcoming. Trump, for his part, seems to side with the idea of more transparency as at his recent event this weekend with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he announced if he wins in November he will form a special presidential commission on assassinations to get to the bottom of what happened in this case and in so many others throughout U.S. history like the assassinations that killed the father and uncle of RFK Jr. Of course, then-President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas, and then a few years later his brother then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, California, while he was running for president. RFK Jr. has said he has major questions about the circumstances of his own father’s death, and questions the official narrative which led to the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan who’s currently serving in prison in California. Then, when it comes to JFK’s assassination, there have long been unanswered questions about what happened there and many have hoped for generations for more transparency. RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump this weekend unites the two historic American political families—the Kennedies and the Trumps—behind getting to the bottom of these things once and for all.
It’s not just the Kennedies and Trump, though. Former President Ronald Reagan survived an assassin’s bullet, and throughout American history several American presidents have been shot—some fatally.
“Being president is a dangerous profession,” Trump told Breitbart News. “If you look, how many people have been assassinated? Then you see how many people have been attempted? You know, Reagan almost died—he came close to dying actually. People don’t know that, but they thought they were going to lose him.”
Trump noted that out of 46 presidential several—four, in fact—have been assassinated, a much higher percentage than most other professions. The four presidents who were killed in office were Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. That’s around 12 percent of U.S. presents killed in office. In addition to those numbers, many more presidents have faced assassination plots. President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt despite being shot while in office. And several other presidents like Andrew Jackson, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have all faced foiled assassination plots while in office. When out of office, both Trump and Teddy Roosevelt were wounded in failed assassination attempts. Then there are assassination attempts—either foiled plots or successful killings—of people who were running for president, like Kennedy’s brother Robert F. Kennedy who was killed. And other high-profile American political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. who was assassinated as well.
“It’s a pretty high number,” Trump said. “And if you talk about attempted, attempted is pretty bad too.”
While Trump understands the intrigue behind the dangers of the job, he also told Breitbart News that no person not even presidents can ever really be prepared for what he nearly encountered: their own mortality at the hands of an assassin.
“You can never be too prepared for that—you don’t want to be prepared for that actually,” Trump said. “But it’s a dangerous profession. Being president is a very dangerous thing. I knew that—I always knew that. Especially if you have strong opinions and strong convictions like you want borders and a strong economy and a strong military and you want things that are important for the nation. The tougher you are in terms of things that are important for the nation the more dangerous it becomes.”
After Trump was shot and he went down, Trump told Breitbart News the Secret Service personnel around him wanted to take him out on a stretcher. But he said he insisted he could and would get up and walk to the waiting vehicle to take him to the hospital under his own strength.
“I wanted to get up because I thought it would look terrible for me to not get up,” Trump said. “They wanted me to go on a stretcher and I said ‘no I don’t want to go on a stretcher. I was hit in the ear. I was only hit in the ear.’ They said ‘no, no you were hit—‘ and I said ‘I’m telling you folks, I want to get up now. I want to get up.’ And they wanted me on a stretcher for obvious reasons because if I was hit somewhere else bad things can happen and you know if they don’t take the person out. I was really actually angry because I didn’t want to go on a stretcher. I wanted to get up and I felt I could get up. I said ‘the only place I’m telling you I was hit was in the ear.’”
Trump stood up, and held his fist in the air yelling “fight, fight, fight!” Then agents hurried him off to the vehicle where they took him to the hospital to treat the bullet wound to his ear.
“People think it’s the most iconic moment,” Trump told Breitbart News of the photo of that moment.
One of the other things Trump found fascinating is the reaction of the crowd behind him and around him.
“But the amazing thing is the audience is there, and it was a massive audience—it was as far as they eye could see,” Trump said. “Then you had some people at the back and you saw how brave they are. They didn’t flinch. That one guy right behind me he’s looking—you want him in a foxhole with you. He’s not hiding.”
Breitbart News told Trump about a woman named Renee White who was behind him at the Butler rally and who we interviewed at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the next week. White can be seen in the video right behind Trump when the shots were fired.
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She was wearing brightly colored Trump gear, the same shirt and hat she wore to the RNC. White told Breitbart News at the RNC that when she saw the shooting, “I was like, ‘The fight’s on. He’s not done. He’s not down. This isn’t gonna stop him.’ And it gave me hope.”
Told about White’s story, Trump reacted by saying “the women were very brave.”
“The level of love is unbelievable,” Trump told Breitbart News.
Trump added that the crowd at his rally showed incredible restraint and concern for each other by not rushing out and hurting anyone else in the process.
“Crowd control experts told us when a bullet is fired in a crowd especially in a stadium everyone leaves immediately,” Trump said. “They run. They stampede—they use the word stampede, like cattle. People are often killed, because like if somebody falls the people run right over them. It’s like terrible. They said they’ve never seen anything like this. Here, there were a lot of bullets fired—and then you had the bullets going the other way too.”
While very little has come out so far about Crooks—the shooter—so far, Trump told Breitbart News he was “very liberal.”
“I think he was very liberal,” Trump said. “He was very smart—a good student and all of that. But very mixed up.”
As for Crooks’s motive, and the broader political discourse in the United States, Trump said Democrats constantly and falsely saying he is a threat to democracy is not helpful to stopping incidents like these.
“I think it might have had something to do with the left,” Trump said. “I’m not sure. Certainly, the way they took about threat to democracy all the time—I think that’s a terrible statement to make. They don’t believe any of it. A lot of people think it’s their rhetoric that caused this. Their rhetoric is terrible. All I want to do is Make America Great Again. We have a name—Make America Great Again. But it’s a dangerous business. Think of it—the percentage—around 12 percent. That’s worse than going up in space ships, and that’s not a good one either. But it’s a lot safer than this.”