2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Milwaukee: Five days after a gunman tried to assassinate him at a political rally, former President Donald Trump on Thursday night described his personal experience of the shooting as he formally accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination and called on Americans to see in him a unifier.
“As you already know, the assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “So many people have asked me what happened — 'Tell us what happened, please.’ And therefore, I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell.”
The crowd inside Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee was rapt and silent as Trump described turning his head to look at a chart on a screen behind him and then feeling a bullet hit his ear. He was lucky, he said, he had not turned further.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said. The crowd, devoted fans of a man they had nominated to be their presidential candidate, responded in unison by chanting, “Yes, you are.”
Trump shook his head. “I’m not,” he said, adding that it was only “by the grace of almighty God” that he had survived.
On the stage with him was the jacket and helmet of Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and supporter who was killed in the shooting. Leaving the podium briefly, Trump kissed the helmet.
The former president’s recounting of the shooting, in his first public speech since the assassination attempt, came as he encouraged Americans to unify behind him.
Trump — who frequently mocks his political enemies, has promised retribution against them and often insists this election is the country’s “final battle” — insisted that Americans must put aside the divisions that he has often stoked.
“The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must do it quickly,” Trump said. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”