Being president is a “dangerous job,” Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters in Michigan on Tuesday night, adding to his cheering supporters that the assassination attempt only proved that he mattered.
“You know, only important presidents get shot at,” Trump said at a town hall in Flint, where he spoke at length about the dramatic incident.
It was one of many light-hearted comments he made between his interventions, while pointing out the dangers of his public profile. After a couple of assassination attempts, he compared his work to high-risk occupations such as racing driver and bullfighter.
“What can you do? You have to do what you have to do, right? We have to be brave, otherwise we won’t have any country left,” Trump said.
Trump then gave a detailed account of the assassination attempt on his life, just as he discussed the first assassination attempt at the Republican convention.
The former president praised the officer who shot suspect Ryan Routh, who was hiding in bushes with an AK-47 at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach.
“There was no conversation. He didn’t say, ‘Hello, what are you doing here, please?’ He grabbed his gun and started shooting at him,” Trump said approvingly.
He also praised the eagle-eyed woman who took photos of the suspect’s getaway car.
Former President Donald Trump said only “important” presidents get shot and highlighted what impressed him most about the response to the second assassination attempt on him
If it weren’t for that, “I’d be running around saying, ‘Where’s this guy? Is he in the audience? We’d have a maniac out here,'” Trump said.
Instead, authorities were able to arrest the suspect just minutes after he fled the scene.
Trump also mocked the assassination attempt when he said he would impose 200 percent tariffs on Mexican car imports amid Chinese investment, and this time said it was his policies that made him a target. “And then you wonder why they shoot him, right?” he said.
The exchange of life-or-death banter was the most dramatic part of a town hall event in which the former president appeared to confuse Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with a national oil haven in Alaska. “We have Bagram in Alaska,” Trump said, conflating what he calls two major failures of the Biden administration.
At a time when the Secret Service is under fire for allowing a second attempt within weeks, Trump backed the agency, even as he acknowledged it faces shortages.
‘These guys do a great job’
“Now they need more people and they’ve been complaining about that for a long time,” Trump said.
His comments came at a public event hosted by his former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who in her opening remarks blamed “the left” for the attack on his life.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders addressed the crowd. “They’ve tried to impeach this president. They’ve tried to put him in jail. And not once but twice, two would-be assassins have tried to take down this president,” she told the crowd.
“Can I be honest? This was more fun than a rally today,” Trump said of the town hall format, which featured only a few questions from the audience and plenty of applause. He defended himself against accusations of “rambling” and his references to Hannibal Lecter.
“They’ve tried to remove this president. They’ve tried to put him in jail. And not once but twice, two would-be assassins have tried to take down this president,” he told the crowd, who booed at the mention.
Trump also responded to accusations from Vice President Kamala Harris and the media of rambling.
He did so after giving a lengthy answer to a question about the assassination attempt on him that referred to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and oil drilling in Alaska.
Trump seemed to acknowledge how far he had gone. “This is the world’s longest answer to an otherwise simple question,” he joked to the crowd.
“We don’t mind you giving long answers because you really have something to say,” the Arkansas governor and his former spokesman told him.
“By the way, everyone stays until the end,” Trump said.
“If I saw them leaving, I would say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, make America great again,’ and I would get out of there.”
He also defended his references to Hannibal Lecter, which Harris’ campaign has been criticizing him for.
“When I mentioned Dr. Hannibal Lecter, I used him as an example of people who come from The Silence of the Lambs,” Trump said.
A Ford auto worker asked Trump what the biggest threats to the state were. Instead of addressing the challenges facing the auto industry, Trump gave a long answer about nuclear war.
“I got along very well with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Everybody said, ‘Oh, you can’t get along with him.’ He liked me. I got along very well with him, and he has a lot of nuclear power, but you basically have five countries and you’re going to have more. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have more,” Trump said.
Trump then spoke about India and Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and climate change. “And when I hear these people talk about global warming, that’s global warming that you have to worry about, not that the ocean is going to rise in 400 years, an eighth of an inch, and there’s more oceanfront property, right? If that happens.”
Trump then called for “doing business with Russia.”
“They have a lot of minerals and other things; their land area is four times the size of the United States. They have minerals and other things. We can do big business and keep everybody happy.”
Trump finally addressed auto jobs, but not before touching on the “Chinese virus,” tariffs and other issues.
“I promise you that your state will be building plants at a level that hasn’t been seen in 50 years,” Trump said.
During his response at Bagram, Trump spoke at length on the topic, and bizarrely mentioned the air base the U.S. abandoned in Afghanistan, leaving equipment behind. His former press secretary did not correct him when he tried to describe the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.
‘We have Bagram in Alaska. They say it could be as big, maybe bigger than all of Saudi Arabia. I got it approved. Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it. I got it done in his first week. They canceled it. Look at that, Bagram. Look at that. No… Think about this between Bagram, between going to ANWR, take a look at the things we’ve given up.
“We should have that air base, we should have that oil,” Trump said, finally correctly identifying the two issues.