(CP) Former President Donald Trump credited God for sparing his life from an assassin's bullet and insisted that he would win California if Jesus was the "vote counter."
Trump, the Republican nominee for president, sat down with talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw for an interview on his television program "Dr. Phil Primetime" posted on YouTube Tuesday. McGraw began the conversation by bringing up the July 13 assassination attempt against the candidate, where a bullet grazed his ear as he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
After McGraw explained to Trump that "experts said, frankly, you shouldn't be here right now" and "experts said a kill shot was almost a certainty, but yet here you sit," McGraw pressed the former president on whether he had asked himself, "How am I here and why am I here?" Trump responded by addressing the "big luck" he experienced at the rally, which enabled him to survive.
"The big thing was the turn," he said. "It had to be a perfect 90-degree turn or ... I wouldn't be with you today. And I had to be looking at something to the right."
Acknowledging the "massive crowds" at the event, Trump described how "they were in front" and "there was no reason to be looking to the right." The former president also highlighted the presence of what he called his "all-time favorite graph" documenting illegal immigration statistics at the rally, telling McGraw that he typically uses it about 20% of the time and that when he does, "it's always at the end" of his speeches and always positioned to his left instead of his right.
Trump also discussed how the graph was featured at the beginning of his speech at the Butler rally. In response to McGraw's question, "Why were you spared?" Trump replied, "There had to be some great power" as he reflected on the low odds of his surviving the situation he found himself in. "The only thing I can think [of] is that God loves our country and He thinks we're going to bring our country back; He wants to bring it back."
"It has to be God," he added. "How can you say it's luck when it's ... 20 million to one?"
Trump answered in the affirmative when McGraw posited, "Do you believe God's hand was in this that day?" McGraw also inquired as to whether Trump believes he has "more to do, you aren't done, you were spared for a reason?" To which Trump asserted, "God believes that, I guess."
Outlining the replacement of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris and the difficulties associated with this development in the race, Trump contended that if he won the 2024 presidential election, "That would really serve to say that there's an incredible power up there that wanted me to be involved in saving and maybe it's more than saving the nation, maybe it's saving the world."
After Trump elaborated on the problems facing the world, McGraw asked if he was "meant to take those challenges on" and "meant to serve in that way." The former president replied, "I don't know," adding, "It's beyond any of us, I guess, to really know that."
The exchange about the assassination attempt concluded with Trump implying that the fact that the bullet went "along that path and hit the top of my ear as opposed to any other place" might have been divine intervention.
In another portion of the interview, Trump recalled how he decided that "there's no way I could lose California" after giving a speech there with a crowd that "was so big." But he lamented, "automatically, they mark it down if you're a Republican, as a loss."
Reacting to the finding that he lost the state by 5 million votes, Trump told McGraw, "I guarantee if Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California," clarifying that he merely meant that "if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter," he would win the state.
California is among the most Democratic states in presidential elections. As Trump highlighted in the interview, he lost the state by a margin of approximately 5 million votes and 29 percentage points in the 2020 presidential election. Four years earlier, the former president lost the state by a margin of more than 4 million votes and 30 percentage points.
In light of its status as a Democratic bastion, polling for the 2024 presidential election in California is limited. However, a survey of 3,765 likely California voters conducted by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley between July 31 and Aug. 11 shows Harris beating Trump 59% to 34%.
