Trump Opens Up on How Assassination Attempt Has Affected Him
The Republican candidate described his own lack of PTSD symptoms as “just amazing” while diving into an all-too-familiar obsession with the size of crowds at his rallies.
CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Apparently people keep asking Donald Trump if he’s considered having counseling after the July attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally that killed one attendee and injured several others.
But Trump maintains the admittedly “surreal experience” has had precisely “no impact” on his mental wellbeing, describing his own lack of PTSD symptoms as “just amazing” in a recent interview with the Daily Mail.
However, he said he does believe that surviving the assassination attempt may have been an act of divine intervention. “You know what I’d love to think, I would love to think it’s God, and it’s God doing it because he wants to save America,” Trump said. “You look at the charts, and I would like to say that it is God that saved me. It wasn’t just luck, but the reason would be that he saved me, because I can save this country. I hope that’s right.”
These messianic reflections were accompanied by further comments on another of Trump’s regular obsessions: the size of the crowds at his rallies. “I had a massive crowd, as far as the eye could see,” he told the newspaper of the fateful day in Butler County. “We had crowd control people, who were saying when bullets are flying, everyone stampedes like 99% of the time. Nobody left, including the tens of thousands of people in front of me.”
Another apparent point of fascination for the 78-year-old Republican candidate in the weeks since the Pennsylvania shooting has been the tearaway success of Tim Walz-inspired accusations that both he and running mate JD Vance are just plain “weird.” Something to which Trump has repeatedly responded to by saying that they are, in fact, “extremely normal” people.
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