Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inboxGet our free Inside Washington email
In his first televised interview after an attempted assassination, Donald Trump questioned why there weren’t “enough people” protecting him at the Pennsylvania rally and took a dig at his rival despite his pledge for unity after the shooting.
“The problem is Biden doesn’t draw anybody. He draws flies,” said Trump, sitting beside his running mate JD Vance for their first interview together on Fox News.
“He draws nobody,” Trump said Monday. “You don’t need very many people for that because he does not draw — 30 people show up. We have 55, 65,000 people.”
Trump, whose ear was covered in a small brown bandage, said he was not given any warning of a “problem” from Secret Service agents and other officers following reports that top law enforcement officials had denied Trumps’ requests for additional manpower at events before the shooting in Pennsylvania this month.
“Nobody mentioned it, nobody said there was a problem,” he said. “I would’ve waited for 15 — they could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 5 minutes,’ something. Nobody said.”
Donald Trump and JD Vance took shots at the FBI and Joe Biden supporters despite calls for unity after the Pennsylvania shooting (Fox News)Trump and Vance quickly abandoned any pretense of a call for national unity after the former president was nearly killed. Both men returned to trashing their political opponents and depicting a nation in chaos at rallies in the week that followed, including in 90-minute headlining remarks to the Republican National Convention last week.
During the Fox News interview, Trump also suggested that Biden’s doctors should be investigated after providing reports on his condition after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 and appeared to float a conspiracy theory that the 20-year-old gunman who fired at him “had some encrypted phone numbers and to foreign countries.”
“You hear all different stories,” Trump said. “I would say probably he was a loner, but you don’t know that. You have to check out the phone numbers, you have to check out the phone.”
The interview – which was recorded on Saturday, one day before President Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination — aired the same day that Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle testified to members of Congress about apparent failures at the rally, as she faces calls to resign from members of both parties.
In her testimony to the House Oversight Committee on Monday, Cheatle said the shooting was “the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades.”
“There are multiple ongoing investigations into this incident, hundreds of people to interview, and thousands of documents to review,” she said. “I do not want to inadvertently provide you today with inaccurate information … I may not be able to speak specifically to certain items that have circulated over the past nine days.”
The Republican ticket sat down with Fox’s Jesse Watters to discuss the assassination attempt and selecting a running mate (Fox News)Trump told Fox News that Cheatle “came to see him.” She was “nice” but he said “you have to answer, why could I not have stayed off the stage for five minutes?”
Vance told Fox News that he does not trust FBI leadership. The bureau’s director, Christopher Wray, was appointed by Trump in 2017.
“What the hell was going on?” Vance said of the shooting. “How was that guy ever allowed to be there in the first place? I think somebody, whether it’s higher up or somebody else involved, really did screw up, and we have to get to the bottom of it.”
If Trump was killed, “the unrest in this country, the anger, it would have taken this country half a century to get over it,” Vance said.
Trump said there are “great people” in the FBI — “they tend to be at the mid and lower levels, and they’re MAGA” — but “there’s some things going on with our government that we have to really worry about.”
