New York, Sep 17 (IANS) Recalling the second assassination attempt on him, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump said all of a sudden firing shots were heard in the middle of a golf game and while he did not realise what it was, the Secret Service put him into a golf cart and took him to safety.
In his first public narration on Monday of the incident a day earlier, former US President Trump said, “Perhaps it’s God wanting me to save this country.”
He said, “I was playing golf with some of my friends, it was on a Sunday morning and very peaceful, beautiful weather, everything was beautiful, it’s a nice place to be. And all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air.”
He said there were about four or five shots, “But what do I know about that?”
“But Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me, and I think probably” one of the persons with him, he recalled in an online interview on X Spaces on Monday.
“We got into the carts, and we moved along pretty, pretty good … we were off that course,” he said.
He praised the Secret Service security detail, saying the agent “did a fantastic job, there was no question”.
“The shots we heard,” he said were those fired by the Secret Service who spotted only the barrel of a gun. “The other one never got a shot off.”
“How good is that? Right? I could only see the barrel. Based on that, he started shooting and ran toward the target and was shooting a lot,” Trump said of the agent who took action.
He added that he would have liked to continue the game, “but we decided, let’s get out of here”.
In contrast to the earlier assassination attempt in July at an open-air rally in Pennsylvania when a man in the audience was killed, this time there was a “much better result”, he said.
Trump praised the woman, a civilian, who followed the escaping the alleged would-be shooter and took pictures of his vehicle.
She “did a phenomenal job”, he said.
“How many people would have the brainpower to follow him and take pictures of the back of his truck” with the license plate numbers which enabled law enforcement to track down the man, he said.
He called the man charged in the incident, Ryan Wesley Routh, a “dangerous person, very, very dangerous person”.
Routh, who had donated to a political action committee that supported Democratic Party candidates and had participated in a party primary, had written in a book that Iran was “free to assassinate” Trump.
Routh was produced in a federal court on Monday charged with illegal possession of a firearm as he was a convicted criminal and erasing the serial number on the SKS-style rifle.
Earlier in an interview with Fox News Digital, Trump blamed President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party rival Kamala Harris for the attempted attack.
Routh “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it”, he said.
“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country,” Trump asserted.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)
–IANS
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