Donald Trump recently opened up about the aftermath of the assassination attempt on him. In a recent interview with the Daily Mail , he remarked how the incident had not affected him psychologically and how he had not felt the need for counselling. In the lavish living room of his Mar-a-Lago mansion, which doubles as his political headquarters, Trump claimed, “I have had no impact. It’s just amazing.”
Trump assured that he did not need counselling since he had not had PTSD -like symptoms, such as nightmares or flashbacks. “I don’t think about it a lot. I don’t want to think about it a lot, but I’ve had no…it’s had no impact. It healed up.” Trump’s rally address in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, started the same way as hundreds of his rallies before.
Unknown to most but a handful of witnesses perched on rooftops, an assailant was clambering onto the top of a structure just beyond the rally’s security cordon, some 150 yards north of the former president. He was armed with an AR-style firearm. The shooter’s spray grazed Trump’s right ear. The FBI soon identified him as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. According to Trump’s account in the Daily Mail interview, he was able to narrowly escape the shooting because he had glanced sideways at a border statistics chart.
Reflecting on the same, he weaved a narrative to further his political campaign. Trump claimed, “And you know what I’d love to think? I would love to think it’s God, and it’s God doing it because he wants to save America. He sees what’s happening…We’re going bad as a country. Even with religion, we’re going bad. You look at the charts, and I would like to say that God saved me. It wasn’t just just luck, but the reason would be that he saved me, because I could save this country. I hope that’s right.”
Donald Trump told CBS News’ @CHueyBurns yesterday that he has no PTSD from the attempt on his life, and suspects God saved him because “he wants to save this country — maybe save the world.” pic.twitter.com/KH1QnSRQyP
— The Recount (@therecount) August 20, 2024
Contrary to the former president’s assurance, several sources have lately disclosed that Trump may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An unnamed Republican with ties to the Trump campaign told Vanity Fair , “He’s been watching that seven-second clip of how close he was to getting shot right in the head— over and over and over again. He may actually legit have PTSD.”
However, according to one prominent specialist, Trump’s tendency to replay the scene of his shooting is more indicative of his ‘narcissism’ than post-traumatic stress disorder. Neuroscientist Dr. Seth Norrholm of Detroit’s Wayne State University School of Medicine, told The Independent, “If he is going back and watching this– and this is my opinion– he’s not watching this in the vein of PTSD; he’s watching this in a vein of ‘look at this event that happened to me, I took a bullet for democracy.'”
This article originally appeared 2 months ago.