Trump says he should be “dead” after assassination

Donald Trump has no illusions about how lucky he is to be alive after a gunman nearly shot him at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

“I shouldn’t be here,” the former president told New York Post on Sunday. “I should be dead.” One rally participant, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, was killed and two others were wounded when 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks opened fire. Crooks himself was killed by a Secret Service sniper.

Trump, reportedly wearing a white bandage on his injured right ear, made the graphic remarks aboard his plane en route to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday, after previously saying he “felt the bullet go through the skin” of his ear during the attempt on his life.

The likely Republican presidential nominee also reflected on how close his survival was, saying that at that fateful moment he turned his head and looked at a screen showing a graph of illegal immigration.

“The most incredible thing was that I not only turned around, but I turned around at exactly the right time and to the right extent,” Trump told the Washington Examiner on the plane. “If I do a half turn, it hits the back of the head. Going the other way, it goes right through (the skull). And because the sign was high, I’m looking up.” He added that the chances of making “a perfect turn” are probably “one-tenth of one percent, so I really shouldn’t be here.”

Trump again praised Secret Service agents for their actions during the attack, even though the federal agency has come under intense scrutiny following the shooting. He also showed reporters a bruise on his right forearm that he sustained when agents tried to hold him down. “The agents hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight,” he told the post.

According to Trump, in the wake of the assassination attempt, he decided to call off the “incredible, howler speech” he planned to give at the RNC later this week.

“I threw it away,” Trump said loudly tester“I think it would be very bad if I stood up and started ranting about how terrible everyone is and how corrupt and deceitful, even if that was true. If that hadn’t happened, we would have had a pretty well-crafted and extremely tough speech. Now we have a speech that creates more unity.”