He told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during a Monday interview that Melania was “watching live” when the incident happened and now is unable to really discuss it with anyone.
“She was watching live. She can’t really even talk about it, which is OK. That means she likes me. She loves me.” He then added: “When I went down, she thought the worst had happened,” the 45th president said of Melania’s immediate reaction, “because I went down and grabbed my ear and my hand was loaded up with blood.”
Trump was shot by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was immediately engaged by a Secret Service counter-sniper team and killed.
A rallygoer was killed and two others wounded in the shooting, both of whom have since been discharged from hospitals.
The Secret Service has faced bipartisan scrutiny on Capitol Hill for failing to secure the roof of the building that Crooks was able to scale before he opened fire.
The agency has also been criticized for losing track of the would-be assassin’s location despite receiving warnings about him before Trump took the stage.
“There should have been communication with the local police, which there wasn’t,” Trump said of the Secret Service. “So that’s a bad thing, and they were seeing this guy – it was a very disturbed person, and they were seeing him around.”
Trump has also said he will ignore the Secret Service’s recommendation that he stop doing outside rallies. “Yeah, I’m going to do rallies [outside],” he told Ingraham, adding he believes it’s “important symbolically.” That will include holding another rally outdoors in Butler.
Ronald Rowe assumed the role of acting Secret Service Director last week, succeeding Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned after a House hearing where she faced intense questioning and struggled to address specific communication failures leading up to the July 13 shooting.
“The hearing comes one day after the FBI released new details about its investigation into the shooting, revealing that the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had looked online for information about mass shootings, power plants, improvised explosive devices and the May assassination attempt of the Slovakian prime minister,” the Associated Press reported.
