Former President Donald Trump, in his first campaign appearance since the latest attempt on his life, suggested Tuesday that he’s been the subject of multiple assassination attempts because his presidency was “consequential.”
“You know, only consequential presidents get shot at,” Trump declared at a town hall in Flint, Mich., two days after the Secret Service foiled the second assassination attempt against him in as many months.
“It’s a dangerous business running for president,” the Republican nominee told Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, who was moderating the event.
“Being president, it’s a little bit dangerous,” Trump continued. “It’s, you know, they think race car driving is dangerous – no. They think bull riding, that’s pretty scary, right? No, this is a dangerous business, and we have to keep it safe.”
“God is not done with President Trump,” said Sanders, who served as his White House Press secretary.
“He’s the toughest guy I know and the fighter our country most desperately needs right now,” she added.
Trump also noted that he had a “nice conversation” with President Biden and received a “very, very, nice” phone call from Vice President Kamala Harris after Sunday’s scare at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club.
Alleged would-be assassin Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was arrested and charged with federal gun crimes after he allegedly posted up in the bushes adjacent to Trump’s golf course with an AK-47 rifle.
“These guys do a great job,” Trump said of the Secret Service’s response to the incident. “Now – they do need more people. And they’ve been complaining about that for a long time. But they did a great job.”
“This guy was all set to do his number,” the former president said of Routh, calling his setup outside the golf course “sophisticated.”
Trump went on to praise the woman who followed Routh as he fled the scene and took down his license plate number, allowing law enforcement to quickly track him down.
“See, women are smarter than men,” Trump said of the vigilant woman, adding, “I’d like to meet her. I’m going to meet her, I hope.”
On policy, Trump slammed the effort by Chinese automakers to set up shop in Mexico, in an apparent effort to evade tariffs and import electric vehicles into the United States.
“They’re owned and built by China in Mexico, and there are a number of them going up right now,” he said of automobile factories south of the border.
“They think they’re going to make their cars there, and they’re going to sell them across our line, and we’re going to take them and we’re not going to charge them tax – we’re going to charge them,” Trump vowed.
Here’s what we know about the assassination attempt on Trump in Florida:
“I’m telling you right now, I’m putting a 200% tariff on, which means they’re unsellable, unsellable in the United States,” he continued
“And then you wonder why I get shot at, right?” Trump quipped.
“When I say something like that, you have countries saying, ‘This guy,’ but what can you do?” he argued. “You have to do what you have to do, right? We have to be brave. Otherwise, we’re not going to have a country left.”
Trump is among 15 US presidents who have escaped assassination attempts. Two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, were assassinated in office after narrowly escaping previous attempts on their lives.
Former President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt at the US Capitol in 1835 when the madman’s gun misfired.
Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Franklin Roosevelt were shot at by would-be assassins at close range who apparently missed their shots.
Shooters opened fire on the White House during the presidencies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – and a deranged man even crashed a small plane on the South Lawn in a failed attempt to kill Clinton in 1994.
Follow the latest on the foiled assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Florida:
Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt (who, like Trump, was on the campaign trail at the time) were hit by bullets but survived.
Former Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Harry S. Truman and Herbert Hoover also had apparent assassination attempts foiled before they could be carried out.
In an appearance on Fox News that aired after the Flint town hall, Trump said he “understands” the criticism that has been leveled against the Secret Service and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in the wake of the two assassinations attempts but that “in this particular case” he’s satisfied with the job done by Secret Service.
“In this case, it was something that worked out very well,” he said.
When asked whether agents should’ve swept the perimeter of the golf course ahead of his Sunday outing, Trump said “I can’t say.”
“I just said, ‘Let’s go play a quick round,’” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity, “because it’s all business for me.”
“It’s my only little bit of a form of exercise,” he said of his love of golf, arguing that presidents and those seeking the office “should be able to go and do what you want in safety.”
“Butler is a very different story,” Trump said of the first attempt on his life. “You know, somebody should have been on that building, and that’s a different story.”
Trump noted that his campaign has ‘long requested more [Secret Service agents]” at events and that he believes that will be the case moving forward.
“That’s the weakness, if, if there’s a weakness,” he said of the apparent lack of Secret Service manpower at his rallies.
“We’ve long requested more people … I will say, in Butler, we wanted more people. I heard them say it, you know, ‘We need more people here for security,’ and we never seem to get that. And I think we are getting it now,” Trump said. “Somebody told me that they will be providing more people now.”
