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First thing Trump said after being shot…

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by Frank Holmes, reporter

When you’re the first president who has faced an attempted assassination in 40 years—and the first presidential candidate to be shot since 1972—what do you think the next day?

We now know exactly what went through the mind of President Donald Trump the morning after his shooting.

 

A 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, named Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at the president and his supporters at a rally in nearby Butler Saturday evening. Trump turned his head ever-so-slightly before the bullets made a sound. The fraction-of-an-inch motion made the difference between the bullet grazing Trump’s ear and the projectile slamming through his skull and piercing his brain.

Trump suffered no hearing loss but lost up to “half his ear,” according to his son, Eric Trump.

The president insisted that Secret Service agents let him rise and leave the stage on his own feet, instead of carrying him out, and pumped his fist, telling the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” for America.

But what were his first words in the ensuing days, when he had a chance to calm down, a little, and think about his situation?

The Horn can tell you, thanks to a few people speaking out about what the president said on their intimate phone calls after the shooting.

“I talked to him this morning,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told Tyler O’Neil of The Daily Signal on Monday, 37 hours after the assassination attempt. “He called me about 7 o’clock, and he said, ‘Well, how are you? I lost part of my ear!’”

That joking comment sounded like what he told his son, Eric, after the shooting.

 

“He says it’s the greatest ear ache in the history of ear aches,” Eric Trump told CBS News.

That joke reflected the fact that the 45th president has been in “good spirits” ever since his quasi-miraculous survival.

President Trump’s joshing reference to an earache sounded like another potential presidential assassination victim, President Ronald Reagan.

When a madman tried to kill the president to impress Hollywood actress Jodie Foster—who, as it turns out, is a lesbian—Reagan joked with the surgeons about to save his life, saying, “I hope you’re all Republicans.”

 

Reagan, who kept up his good-natured banter as soon as he regained consciousness. When he saw his wife, First Lady Nancy Reagan, the president quoted former boxing champion Jack Dempsey explaining how he lost his title: “Honey, I forgot to duck,” said The Gipper.

The shooting understandably stayed with him. Six years later, while giving a speech in Berlin in 1987, someone in the crowd popped a balloon.

“Missed me,” Reagan joked.

He made a similar, but more serious, comparison on a more notorious call.

 “It felt like the world’s largest mosquito” bite, the president told independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leaked the phone call on the internet.

 

That’s also how viewers interpreted the shooting. “I thought at first he got stung by a bee or something” when President Trump clasped his ear, said Sen. Tuberville.

That tough-guy response to the shooting has only increased the intensity of his supporters’ devotion to him.

 

“If Biden got a mosquito bite on his ear he would be in the ICU,” said one online commentator. “Trump gets his ear blown off and pops right up. Looks ready for war.  This is the guy I want negotiating on behalf of our country.”

“I f***ing love Trump,” he said.

But after joking around, the president made stunningly serious comments, as well.

Donald Trump “said it was divine intervention,” Sen. Tuberville told O’Neil.

“God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” President Trump posted to Truth Social shortly after his death-defying survival.

“That was absolutely divine intervention,” Eric Trump told “Fox and Friends” host Lawrence Jones.

“That was 130 yards. That is not a long shot with a rifle; that’s a chip shot with a rifle,” said Eric Trump. “I talked to an emergency room doctor, and he said, ‘I’ve treated thousands of gunshot wounds in my life, and I’ve never seen a bullet graze somebody.’”

“I felt that for the last eight years—I felt that somebody has had a hand on my father and has guided him. Because in dark moments and unthinkable moments, he’s been protected,”

 

He said he also saw a picture of an American flag on the stage curl up into a shape resembling an angel. “I’m not a mushy person, either, but I believe someone was looking down.”

A man who can narrowly escape an assassination attempt, joke around, and thank the Almighty may just have the perfect temperament to be president of the United States.

About the Author

Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”