Let me begin this evening by expressing my gratitude to the American people for your outpouring of love and support following the assassination attempt at my rally on Saturday.
As you already know, the Assassin’s Bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life.
If so many people have asked me what happened, tell us what happened, please, and therefore I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time because it’s actually too painful to tell.
It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening in Butler Township in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Music was loudly playing and the campaign was doing really well. I went to the stage and the crowd was cheering wildly.
Everybody was happy. I began speaking very strongly, powerfully, and happily because I was discussing the great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border. We were very proud of it.
Behind me and to the right was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership.
The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do.
When I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard on my right ear, I said to myself, wow, what was that?
It can only be a bullet, and moved my right hand to my ear, brought it down. My hand was covered with blood, just absolutely blood all over the place.
I immediately knew it was very serious that we were under attack, and in one movement proceeded to drop to the ground. Bullets were continuing to fly as very brave Secret Service agents rushed.