"It was a hard hit": Donald Trump recalls assassination attempt in conversation with Elon Musk
Aug 13, 2024
Washington, DC [US], August 13 : In a conversation with the billionaire CEO and entrepreneur Elon Musk, former US President Donald Trump opened up on the recent 'assassination attempt', which he described as a 'hard hit', and said that it was a surreal situation.
During the interview, after X owner asked, "how was the shooting like for you like?", Trump responded to it, saying that the shooting was "not pleasant" and it was a very hard hit.
"It was a hard hit. It was very, I guess you would say, surreal, but it wasn't surreal. You know, I was telling somebody, you have instances like this ... where you feel it's a surreal situation. And I never felt that way. I knew immediately that it was a bullet," Trump said of the moment when he said the bullet hit his ear," the former US President told Musk in a conversation on X.
Trump further stated that the moment he went down after being hit by a bullet, the only question which was in his mind was "How many were killed?"
"Because we had a massive crowd there -- a tremendous thousands and thousands of people. ... So I said, 'How many people have been killed?' Because I knew there were other shots being fired," he went on to say.
Meanwhile, Musk said that the reason he endorsed Trump's presidential campaign was because of his reaction to the assassination attempt campaign rally in Pennsylvania last month, calling Trump pumping his fists "just incredibly inspiring," reported CNN.
Trump was on stage at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13 when gunshots rang out and Secret Service agents stormed the stage. Hours after the shooting, Trump said that the bullet pierced the upper part of his right ear.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
It is pertinent to note that Musk started the live stream conversation on X with Trump at 8:42 p.m. ET Monday as it got delayed due to a technical glitch. The event was initially scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. earlier.
Musk went on to say that the conversation got delayed due to a cyberattack, and added that a distributed denial-of-service attack "saturated ... hundreds of gigabits of data," overwhelming X's servers, as per CNN.
"As this massive attack illustrates, there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say," he said.
Earlier, Elon Musk announced that a massive DDoS attack hit his livestream with former US President Donald Trump, forcing X owner to scale down the live audience.
The users on social media platform X faced numerous issues while looking for access to the livestream conversation of Elon Musk with Trump on the platform Monday night.
Within minutes of the event's expected 8 p.m. ET start time, "crashed," "unable" and "#TwitterBlackout" were trending on the site, reported CNN.
A pop-up stating "this space is not available" with a monkey emoji appeared on the screen of desktop users as well who attempted to attend the "Spaces" event. Whereas, several others who tried to connect via the mobile app were met with a motionless, greyed-out screen and were unable to participate in the event.