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July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania eight shots were fired, one of which hit former president Donald Trump in his ear. Before any shots were even fired, there were people in the crowd who noticed the gunman and began to shout “He’s got a gun!” and “On the roof, he’s got a gun!” as heard in a video recording before the chaos broke out.
The first shots were heard at 6:11 PM, and within the minute, Trump had put a hand to his bloody ear, and the US Secret Service was yelling and dragging him behind the podium. The gunman was only approximately 400 to 500 feet away.
“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” Trump posted on X.
The most recent shooting was at a Floridian golf course in Palm Beach on September 15, 2024. This was not a pre-managed event, so security was not as in depth as it normally would have been.
However, despite this, the general consensus of many has been that the Secret Service should have taken into account that Trump enjoys golfing every Sunday, and should have prepared the area for that reason.
BBC stated, “A gunman hid for nearly 12 hours in bushes before Donald Trump played an unscheduled game of golf at his oceanfront club in Florida,” confirming the fact the gunman assumed Trump would be present.
Multiple other sources agree that this is how the gunman got so close to Trump, by assuming he would go golfing, thus scouting the area before the morning. This gunman was also only around 400-500 feet away.
To get a visual representation of this, there is an interactive map of the golf course by the Miami Herald.
Trump soon posted his view on the second assassination attempt, instantly blaming his political rivals Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the second attempt on his life.
“Their rhetoric [Biden and Harris] is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Image courtesy of Your Golf Travel.
