Trump: Friends, allies see some signs of a changed man
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump was on stage at the Iowa State Fairgrounds earlier this month, kicking off the country’s 250th anniversary celebration, when he heard what sounded like fireworks in the distance.
“Did I hear what I think I heard?” Trump remarked as he spoke from behind a wall of thick, bulletproof glass. “Don’t worry, it’s only fireworks. I hope. Famous last words,” he quipped, drawing laughs and cheers.
“You always have to think positive,” he went on. “I didn’t like that sound, either.”
The comments, just days before the first anniversary of Trump’s near-assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, served as a stark reminder of the lingering impact of the day when a gunman opened fire at a campaign rally, grazing Trump’s ear and killing one of his supporters in the crowd.
More attentive, grateful
One year after coming millimeters from a very different outcome, Trump, according to friends and aides, is still the same Trump. But they see signs, beyond being on higher alert on stage, that his brush with death did change him in some ways: He is more attentive and more grateful, they say, and speaks openly about how he believes he was saved by God to save the country and serve a second term.
“I think it’s always in the back of his mind,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a longtime friend and ally who was in close touch with Trump after the shooting and joined him that night in New Jersey after he was treated at a Pennsylvania hospital. “He’s still a rough and tumble guy, you know. He hasn’t become a Zen Buddhist. But I think he is, I’ll say this, more appreciative. He’s more attentive to his friends,” he said, pointing to Trump sending him a message on his birthday earlier this week.
‘A miracle’
Graham added: “It’s just a miracle he’s not dead. He definitely was a man who believed he had a second lease on life.”
While many who survive traumatic events try to block them from memory, Trump has instead surrounded himself with memorabilia commemorating one of the darkest episodes in modern political history. He’s decorated the White House and his golf clubs with art pieces depicting the moment after the shooting when he stood up, thrust his fist dramatically in the air and chanted, “Fight, fight, fight!”
A painting of the scene now hangs prominently in the foyer of the White House State Floor near the staircase to the president’s residence. Earlier this year, he began displaying a bronze sculpture of the tableau in the Oval Office on a side table next to the Resolute Desk.
And while he said in his speech at the Republican convention that he would only talk about what had happened once, he often shares the story of how he turned his head at just the right moment to show off his “all-time favorite chart in history” of southern border crossings that he credits for saving his life.
During a press conference in the White House briefing room last month, he acknowledged lingering physical effects from the shooting.
‘Throbbing feeling’
“I get that throbbing feeling every once in a while,” he said, gesturing to his ear. “But you know what, that’s OK. This is a dangerous business. What I do is a dangerous business.”
Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who as his then campaign chief was with him at the rally, said in a podcast interview released last week that Trump walked away from the shooting believing he had been spared for a reason.
She, too credited divine intervention. The chart, she noted, “was always the last chart in the rotation. And it was always on the other side. So to have him ask for that chart eight minutes in, and to have it come on the side that is opposite, caused him to look in a different direction and lift his head just a little because it was higher. And that just doesn’t happen because it happened. It happened because, I believe, God wanted him to live.”
As a result, she said, when Trump says things that “are perfunctory—every president says ‘God bless America’—well, it’s more profound with him now, and it’s more personal.”
