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Ivanka Trump is recalling how she got the news that her father, President Donald Trump, was shot in the ear during a July 2024 assassination attempt.
Trump, 79, survived the shooting at an open-air rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, while campaigning for a second term as president. The perpetrator, Thomas Crooks, 20, was shot and killed by Secret Service in the ensuing melee.
“I was in Bedminster, New Jersey. There was a lot of commotion. The televisions were on, so I saw it almost immediately. … It was almost real time,” Ivanka, 44, said on the Thursday, April 9, episode of “The Diary of a CEO” podcast.
Ivanka said two of her children were with her when the news broke. (The businesswoman shares daughter Arabella, 15, and sons Joseph, 12, and Theodore, 10, with husband Jared Kushner.)
“It was before he had stood back up that I had seen what was transpiring, and two of my children were there. My first reaction was to turn them away. It was incredibly difficult,” she explained.
Despite the events Ivanka saw unfolding on television, she said, “Interestingly, I knew in real time in that moment that he was fine. I just knew it wasn’t his time. I was horrified and scared and protective of my children, but I also didn’t believe the worst possible outcome had transpired. And thank God it hadn’t.”
Ivanka said she and Kushner, 45, waited up that night for Trump to return to the family residence in Bedminster after he returned from the hospital.
“I saw him that night when he came home from the hospital because he was also staying [in Bedminster],” she said. “It was late, like, 1, 2 o’clock in the morning. Jared and I stayed up and we met his car as he was pulling in. I just feel incredibly lucky that he was protected on that day. You can’t take things for granted, and I’ve learned that in numerous ways, that being one of them.”
“We were so fortunate that day that this was a failed attempt to take his life, not a realized one,” Ivanka said. “But you sort of recommit to love and connection and to a recognition of how short our time here on earth is and how you have to value it.”
Podcast host Steven Bartlett asked Ivanka how an experience like the assassination attempt on her father doesn’t make her “negative to the world.”
She responded, “‘Cause I don’t allow it to. What does that accomplish, being negative towards the world? I think that brings more negativity into the world.”
As for the perpetrator, “There’s a lot of sickness there and I think that forgiveness is a difficult thing in this regard … but [Trump’s] living is a blessing,” Ivanka said.
“So I could look at what happened and be rightfully traumatized by the experience and nobody could really argue with that, but you have to move through it,” she said of choosing to remain positive. “And on the opposite side of that is the fact that he’s with us today, that he didn’t die, that my father’s alive. That is an extraordinary blessing for me as his daughter. In life, you only have a choice only in how you respond, and I choose to see the positive outcome that transpired and dwell there.”
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