BREAKING: Trump speaks publicly for first time since second assassination attempt in wide-ranging interview on X

"They have the man behind bars, and hopefully he's going to be there for a long time," Trump said. "Dangerous person, very, very dangerous person." He detailed the events of Sunday afternoon. He had been playing golf with friends "Everything was beautiful," he said, "it was a nice place to be. And all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five, and it sounded like bullets. But what do I know about that?" He joked. This was the second attempt on his life this summer, the first being in Butler, PA on July 13, when a gunman fired off rounds and struck him in the ear. One man was killed and two others hospitalized with injuries.

Secret Service, he said, "knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me." He praised the agents who were his protection that day, saying "they did a fantastic job." The agents got Trump and his friends off the course. "I would have loved to have sank that last putt," he said, "but we decided, 'let's get out of here.'"

"And what the gunfire was actually, interestingly," Trump said, "was a Secret Service agent had seen a barrel of a AK-47, which is a very powerful gun, a rifle, and he started shooting at the barrel and started shooting in the bushes. Could only see the barrel. How good is that, right? But could only see the barrel. Based on that, he started shooting and ran toward the target and was shooting a lot of— I mean, those were the shots we heard.

"The other one never got a shot off," he said, "and he ran across the street and grabbed his car, hopped into his truck or car, and amazingly, a civilian in that area saw something, and it looked very suspicious, and in the car, drove their car to the back of his truck of some kind, and took pictures of the license plate, gave them to the sheriff's office. Sheriff Bradshaw is fantastic, great sheriff for a long time, and within a fairly short period of time, they tracked him down on the highways, pretty high-speed chase, and they ended up getting him. They got him. You wouldn't want to have somebody like that out there, you know, he dropped his gun, the AK-47, he left his gun, he left a cameras behind. Left a lot of things behind. So the agent did a fantastic job. The civilian did a phenomenal job."

When asked about what he made of there being a second attempt on his life in under two months, Trump said "There's a lot of rhetoric going on. A lot of people think that the Democrats, when they talk about threat to democracy and all of this, and it seems that both of these people were radical leftists, the first one they should learn more about. They have apps that they haven't opened yet, which is pretty strange. And the father went out and got the biggest lawyer in the state of Pennsylvania, which is pretty strange, about the father of the shooter we're talking about in Butler, the first one. And that's pretty strange. A couple of pretty strange things going on there."

President Joe Biden called Trump on Monday and the two spoke about the attempt on Trump's life. Trump said he thought Biden was "treated very unfairly" by his Democrat Party and that Vice President Kamala Harris "is far worse than Biden.""You know, that was a— if you think of it—that was an overthrow of a president. That was— he won. He had 14 million votes. She had no votes. Crazy Nancy Pelosi walked in, and some of the others, and they say, 'We want you out.' He said, 'I'm not going to get out. I want to run.' I was leading by a lot after the debate, but still, he had the right to run. And they literally, it was a coup in the truest sense. This was the first coup of an American President."

"Look," he added, "I don't say fair or not fair. He was very nice today. He called up to make sure I was okay."

"But he couldn't have been nicer," Trump said. "But I thought he was treated really unfairly. He went through a primary system, he won, and then they throw him overboard and she got no votes. You know, she got no votes, but she'd be very bad for the country. We have to save our country. We can't play games, or we can't have a Marxist communist president, because that's not what it's all about."