It’s a chart that former President Donald Trump credits with saving his life. And, on Wednesday, we met the woman responsible for it not far from where an assassin’s bullet almost cut him down.
At a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the GOP presidential nominee brought up the staffer who created the chart on illegal immigration that caused Trump to turn his head at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month just as attempted assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, shot at him.
Instead of hitting him square in the head, Crooks hit Trump in the ear; the attempted assassin was shot dead.
Trump told the audience that he was “thrilled to be back in this beautiful state,” the U.K. Daily Mail reported, adding: “As you know this is my first return to the state since my rally in Butler.”
As for the chart that saved his life, he was talking about it during a segment of the rally focused on human trafficking, which he noted was “at a level five times greater than it ever was before.”
“You can see it on a certain chart that I have,” Trump said. “You know, this chart saved my life … I’m going to sleep with that chart for the rest of my life.”
And then he decided to get the woman responsible for the chart out in front of the crowd.
“She should come out. Just tell her to come out here for a second,” Trump said, giving instructions to his team. “Quick, quick, quick, quick, you got to get her.”
“She saved in my life, in a sense. Here she is!” Trump exclaimed.
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The shy staffer, meanwhile, just said, “hi” into the mic and walked away, laughing.
“No, she’s a computer genius,” Trump continued, noting that the chart was used at “less than 20 percent” of his rallies and had always been put up on his left. In Butler, it was on his right.
“It would have been a perfect hit” had it been in its normal position, Trump told the audience, adding the unnamed computer genius was “flabbergasted” he asked for it so early in his Butler rally.
The data on the chart was, according to Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, from him; as the New York Post noted, he said he’d “been developing it since 2014, adding to it every month.”
“He liked it. He turned it over to his staff. They made a few changes in terms of graphics, but he used it that day and he’s been using it ever since,” Johnson said.
And then, of course, it saved Trump’s life on July 13.
So, is he going to be a different Donald Trump now that a bullet has hit him?
“When I got hit, everyone thought I was going to be a nice guy and they thought I changed. Remember? Right before the Republican Convention,” he told the crowd.
“And I really agreed with that for about eight hours or so,” he added, the crowd laughing. “And then I realized they were trying to put me in prison for doing absolutely nothing wrong.”
He may be more grateful, but he’s the same Donald underneath.
