Donald Trump has given his first detailed account of what he experienced on Sunday during what the FBI has said “appears to be an attempted assassination of the former president”, as authorities revealed new details about the incident at his West Palm Beach golf club.
Trump said he was playing golf with friends, including businessman Steve Witkoff, when he heard gunshots.
“Everything was beautiful, nice place to be, and all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and – I guess probably four or five – and it sounded like bullets but what do I know about that? But Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets,” Trump told cryptocurrency personality Farokh Sarmad during a livestream on X.
In his first public event since the apparent assassination attempt, Trump thanked the Secret Service, saying that soon after the shots were heard: “We got into the carts and we moved along pretty good. I was with an agent and the agent did a fantastic job, there was no question that we were off that course.”
“The secret service did a great job, everybody did a great job,” he said later.
Trump said the gunshots were the sound of another agent firing at the barrel of a gun he had seen pointing out of bushes at the golf course, and that “the other one never got a shot off”, appearing to refer to the suspected shooter.
Trump’s account – given on X during the launch of a cryptocurrency platform owned by his sons, broadly matched what authorities said on Monday. Ronald Rowe Jr, the US Secret Service acting director, said earlier that alleged gunman Ryan Wesley Routh did not fire any shots but that an agent discharged their firearm after spotting a rifle poking through the fence on the golf course perimeter.
“He [the suspect] did not fire or get off any shots at our agent,” Rowe Jr said. “With reports of gunfire, the former president’s close protection detail immediately evacuated the president to a safe location.”
Rowe also told reporters that Trump was “out of sight of the gunman” during his unscheduled visit to the golf club. Cellphone records showed Routh camped out near the golf course for about 12 hours, with food, before being confronted by a Secret Service agent.
Trump also praised the civilian who captured the suspect’s license plate, which helped authorities to track his car down. “The civilian did a phenomenal job”, he said.
Where Trump differed from authorities was in his description of the political views of Routh and Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman killed in the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania on 13 July.
Asked what he made of this being a potential second attempt on his life, he said: “Well there’s a lot of rhetoric going on, a lot of people think that the Democrats when they talk about ‘a threat to democracy’ and all of this, and it seems that both of these people were radical lefts.”
Routh, the man suspected of carrying out the second apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, has professed a variety of political convictions that elude partisan definition.
Although records show the 58-year-old former roofing contractor making small financial donations to Democratic candidates in recent years, Routh has acknowledged voting for Trump in his 2016 election before subsequently embarking on a ideological odyssey the aims of which appear incoherent and confused.
Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motivation remains unclear. In July, investigators said they were examining a social media account with antisemitic and anti-immigrant posts that they suspected might be connected to Crooks, according to the FBI deputy director, Paul Abbate.
Earlier on Monday, Trump sought to blame president Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris for the shooting. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out,” Trump told Fox News Digital.
“These are people that want to destroy our country,” he added. “It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”
Harris, her campaign, her running mate Tim Walz and the Biden administration have condemned political violence. The White House said earlier Biden had called Trump, “and conveyed his relief that he is safe. The two shared a cordial conversation and former president Trump expressed his thanks for the call.”
Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection on 6 January 2021 but was later acquitted when enough in the senate.
In the X event on Monday evening, Trump repeated his complaints about Biden choosing to drop out of the presidential race. He said he had spoken to Biden on Monday, saying “he couldn’t have been nicer”.
However, Trump went on to attack his rival presidential candidate, Harris, saying: “We can’t have a Marxist Communist president”.