WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 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.
The attack and launched a frenzied 10-day stretch that included Trump’s at the Republican National Convention with a bandaged ear, President Joe Biden’s and the elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.
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.
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.”
Constant reminders
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 with art pieces depicting when he stood up, thrust his fist dramatically in the air and chanted, “Fight, fight, fight!”
A now hangs prominently in the foyer of the White House State Floor to the president’s residence. Earlier this year, he began of the tableau in the Oval Office on a side table next to the Resolute Desk.
And while he 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 .
During a press conference in the White House briefing room last month, he acknowledged lingering physical effects from the shooting.
“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 will spend Sunday’s anniversary attending the FIFA Club World Cup soccer final in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Crediting divine intervention
Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who as his then-campaign chief was with him at the rally, said in that Trump walked away from the shooting believing he had been spared for a reason.
“I would say I think he believes that he was saved. I do. And he would never — even if he thought it before, I don’t think he would have admitted it. And he will now,” she told “Pod Force One.”
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.”
She also credited the attack with helping change public perceptions of Trump during the campaign.
“For the American public to see a person who was such a fighter as he was that day, I think, as awful and tragic as it might have been, it turned out to be something that showed people his character. And that’s helpful,” 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 I was saved was to save our country.”
Roger Stone, a longtime friend and informal adviser, noted that Trump has had other brushes with death, including a last-minute decision not to board a helicopter to Atlantic City and another near-assassination two months after Butler when U.S. Secret Service agents spotted a man near where Trump was golfing.
Stone said he’s found the president “to be more serene and more determined after the attempt on his life” in Butler.
“He told me directly that he believed he was spared by God for the purpose of restoring the nation to greatness, and that he believes deeply that he is protected now by the Lord,” he said.
Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, agreed.
“I think for people who know the president, it is commonly believed that it changed him. I mean, how could it not? Imagine if you were who he was and if you don’t turn your head at that instant,” he said. “He knew he was lucky to be alive.”
Given how close Trump came to a very different outcome, Reed said, “it’s hard not to feel on some level that the hand of providence protected him for some greater purpose. And there are people that I’ve talked to who said they were confident that he would win for that reason. That there must have been a reason.”
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Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield contributed to this report from Rome.
