Washington (AP) -President Donald Trump was on the stage of State Fair in Iowa earlier this month, launching the holiday on the 250th anniversary of the country when he heard what sounds like fireworks in the distance.
“Did I hear what I think I heard?” Donald Trump noted as he spoke behind a wall of thick, bulletproof glass. “Don’t worry, these are just fireworks. I hope. Famous last words,” he said, painting laughing and cheers.
“You always have to think positively,” he continued. “I didn’t like this sound either.”
The comments, just days before the first anniversary of Trump’s close assignment in Butler, Pennsylvania, served as the lowest reminder of the prolonged impact of the day when the shooter opened fire on a campaign rally, Passy in Trump’s ear, and killed one of his supporters in the crowd.
The attack drastically increased the campaign in 2024 and launched a fierce 10-day section, which included Trump’s triumphant arrival of the Republican National Convention with a bandaged ear, the decision of President Joe Biden to abandon his candidacy for re-election and elevation of Vice President Kamala Haris.
One year after millimeters from a very different result comes, Trump, according to friends and assistants, is still the same Trump. But they see signs, except to be alert on stage that his death brush has changed him in some way: he is more careful and more thankful, they say and speak openly about how he believes he is saved by God to save the country and serve a second term.
“I think he’s always in the back of his mind,” says Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, a longtime friend and ally, who was in a close touch with Trump after the shooting and joined him that evening in New Jersey after being treated at a hospital in Pennsylvania. “He is still a rude and destroyed man.
Graham added, “It’s just a miracle that he was not dead. He was definitely a man who believed he had a second leasing for life.”
Permanent reminders
While many who experience traumatic events are trying to block them from memory, Trump has instead surrounded himself with memorials in memory of one of the most dark episodes in modern political history. He decorated the White House and his golf clubs with works of art, depicting the moment after the shooting, when he stood up, dramatically pushed his fist into the air and chant: “Fight, fight, fight!”
A picture of the stage is now hanging on the lobby of the White House State Floor near the staircase to the president’s residence. Earlier this year, it began to show the bronze sculpture of the table in the oval cabinet on a side table to the decisive desk.
And as he said in his speech to the Republican Convention that he would only talk about what happened once, he often shared the story of how he turned his head at the right moment to show his “favorite ranking of all time in history” at the southern border crossroads, which he attributes to saving his life.
During a press conference at the White House briefing room last month, he acknowledged the duration of the physical effects of shooting.
“I get this throbbing feeling from time to time,” he said, pointing to his ear. “But do you know what is good. It’s a dangerous business. What I do is a dangerous business.”
Trump will spend the anniversary on Sunday, attending the finale of the FIFA Club football cup in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Lending to divine intervention
Trump’s chief Susie Wills, who, as his then -campaign chief, was with him at the rally, said in an interview with a podcast, published last week, that Trump was moving away from the shooting, believing that he was spared for a reason.
“I would say I think he believes he was saved. I do it. And he would never – even if he thought it before, I don’t think he would admit it. And he now,” she told Pod Force One.
She also credit divine intervention. The graphics, she noted, “It was always the last diagram in the rotation. And it was always on the other side. So to make him ask for this diagram eight minutes and to come aside, which is opposite, made him look in another direction and raise his head just a little because it was higher. And it just didn’t happen because it happened.
As a result, she said, when Trump says things that “are perfect – every president says” God bless America ” – well, it’s more deep with him now and it’s more personal.”
She also credits the attack, helping to change Trump’s public perceptions during the campaign.
“For the American public to see a person who was as much a fighter as this day, in my opinion, as terrible and tragic as he could, turned out to be something that shows people his character. And that is useful,” she said.
“You know, I have an obligation to do a good job, I feel because I was really saved,” Trump told Fox News Friday. “I owe a lot. And I think – I hope – the reason they saved me was to save our country.”
Roger Stone, a longtime friend and an informal advisor, noted that Trump had other death brushes, including a last -minute decision not to get on a helicopter in Atlantic City, who crashed in 1989 and another nearby golf, when the American secrets were noticed.
Stone said he had found the president “for more and more decisive after the experience of his life” in Butler.
“He told me directly that he believed that he was spared by God for the purpose of restoring the nation to greatness and that he believed deeply that he was now protected by the Lord,” he said.
Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom coalition, agreed.
“I think for the people who know the president, it is usually believed that it changed it. I want to say how he couldn’t?” He knew he was lucky to be alive. “
Considering how close Trump came to a completely different result, Reed said: “It’s hard not to feel at some level that Providence’s hand protects him for a bigger purpose. And there are people who have said that they are confident that he will win for that reason. It must have been a reason.”
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The writer of the Associated Press Nicole Winfield has contributed to this report from Rome.