A week after an assassination attempt left him with an injured ear, Donald Trump seemed to have fully regained his stride during a speech alongside his new running mate JD Vance.
With a skin-coloured plaster over the top of his right ear, Mr Trump was in jovial mood as he took to the stage in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to be greeted by chants from the crowd of “fight, fight fight”.
Noting the shooting happened “exactly one week ago”, he said: “I stand before you only by the grace of almighty God. I shouldn’t be here right now. Something very special happened.”
He sent his best wishes to the two people who were injured in the incident, and said 50-year-old firefighter Corey Comperatore, a spectator who was killed, “is a hero and we will carry his memory in our hearts”.
Meanwhile in an interview to be aired on Monday night, Mr Trump said he was given no indication that law enforcement had identified a suspicious person when he took the stage last week at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Speaking to Fox News, Mr Trump said, “Nobody mentioned it, nobody said there was a problem” before a gunman opened fire in an attempted assassination.
“They could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, something.’ Nobody said. I think that was a mistake.”
Mr Trump also questioned the security lapses and how the 20-year-old gunman was able to gain access to the roof of a manufacturing building that was within 135 metres of the stage.
“How did somebody get on that roof? And why wasn’t he reported? Because people saw that he was on the roof,” Mr Trump said. “You would’ve thought someone would’ve done something about it.”
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