In a new interview, former President Donald Trump gave viewers a glimpse into how traumatic his brush with death was for former First Lady Melania Trump.
Speaking with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the 45th president and Republican candidate told the story of sitting with his wife of 19 years as they first discussed the attempted assassination on July 13th. Watching live, Melania saw Trump grab his ear and go down, fearing the worst had happened, he said.
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“She was watching live. It was all over the place. It was on television, it was on your network… She was watching, I asked her that. I wasn’t there, I was on the ground. And when the world started to, like you could talk to people, I said so what was your feeling? And she just can’t even really even talk about it,” Trump told the anchor, who characterized her reaction as “traumatized.”
“Which is okay, because she likes me,” he joked, lightening the mood. “Or she loves me.”
“I mean, let’s say she could talk about it freely. I’m not so sure. But I will say this: When I went down she thought the worst had happened, because I went down. My hand was loaded up with blood, you saw it on instant replay.”
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Ingraham responded by agreeing with Trump on how important it is for authorities to “get to the bottom” of how 20-year-old Thomas Crooks was able to skirt the Secret Service and position himself on a rooftop just several hundred yards from the stage where the former president was speaking to rallygoers in Butler, Pennsylvania. Supporters argue that dereliction on the part of the Secret Service, including the potential diverting of officers to staff First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, contributed to a security failure that is among the worst in the agency’s history. Last week FBI Director Christopher Wray told a bipartisan consortium of lawmakers that an ongoing investigation has uncovered how Crooks used a drone to survey the site before opening fire and text messages between officers show the young man was under surveillance up to a half-hour in advance.
The disclosures have sparked anger among conservatives who have cudgeled the FBI director in the past for other perceived offenses, including downplaying the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a product of Russian disinformation, a claim which a special counsel investigator later found unsubstantiated. Less than a week after the shooting, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned following several interviews and congressional testimony where she accepted blame while appearing to deflect responsibility on local authorities who were entrusted to guard the perimeter of the rally where Crooks found his vantage point. Over the weekend, another security failure at a Trump event in Nashville led the Secret Service to briefly hide him off-stage while two individuals were investigated for bypassing security measures to gain access to the room where he was speaking.