Former President Donald Trump announced he would be returning to Pennsylvania’s Butler County, where he survived an assassination attempt in mid-July.
His confirmation came during an interview with X owner Elon Musk on his social media platform on Monday evening.
“By the way, we’re going back to Butler, and we’re going to go back in October,” Trump said, adding that a Butler event would be a “great idea.”
He did not elaborate on a date or whether it would be a campaign rally, although any event held in October would be only a few weeks away from the Nov. 5 election. Pennsylvania is considered a key battleground state and has 19 electoral votes.
Law enforcement, Trump said, are “going to learn” from the incident, he told Musk when he was asked about his thoughts about how officials missed a gunman on a roof of a nearby building.
“There was a mistake ... there was just a bad feeling that there was somebody around,” Trump said.
Trump praised the Butler police officer who attempted to climb onto the roof of the building where the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was perched. He said that if the officer did not distract Crooks, Trump may have been killed in the assassination attempt.
Local officials said that the officer likely distracted gunman as he was about to open fire on the former president.
The responding officer “saw the man with the gun, the man with a gun pointed the gun at him, he thought he was probably going to get shot,” Trump told Musk. “But he was, like, pulling himself up, and because of that, he couldn’t get to his gun.”
“He fell down and he did, from what I understand, he did say there’s a guy up there with a gun. And the shooting started very quickly after that,” he said.
Again, the former president praised Secret Service agents who responded to the shooting, including the counter-sniper who killed Crooks soon after he opened fire.
“He’s an extraordinary shot, obviously. And he didn’t know there was a problem. And he was able to pick it all out within five seconds,” Trump said, referring to the sniper. “He used one bullet from very far away … and he saw the smoke and the flame from the gun. He immediately recognized it and immediately took a shot.”
He again praised the agents who immediately moved to surround him after shots were fired, striking him in the right ear.
“They moved so fast,” he told Musk, referring to the agents. “And let me tell you, that took tremendous courage.”
After the shooting, the Secret Service and its former director, Kimberly Cheatle, came under intense pressure from lawmakers before Cheatle stepped down last month. Questions emerged about why the Secret Service did not put an agent on the building where Crooks was positioned.
On Monday, X wrote in a post that the Trump–Musk talk received more than 73 million views and more than a 1 billion people saw posts that made reference to the conversation during a three hour period that evening.
Musk, meanwhile, said on his platform that a major distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack targeted X ahead of the talk with Trump.
After the interview, Musk wrote that he would be “happy to host Kamala” in the same interview format, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.
