Many watched on national television as Donald Trump was grazed with a bullet in a failed assassination attempt at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, but his eldest son was not one of them.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Donald Trump, Jr., who revealed he was on a fishing trip with his daughter when he got the sobering call that his father had been shot. He opened up about the 90 minutes that followed and the moment he knew his dad was okay.
The Call
As Trump explained it, his 17-year-old daughter Kai, who spoke at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, defied typical teenage behavior and asked him to take her fishing on Saturday. “I took her and a couple of her friends out on the boat, and I get a call: ‘Your dad’s been shot… We don’t know anything,'” he recalled. “It took 90 minutes for me to figure out if he was even alive. I didn’t know.”
In the meantime, Trump and his daughter “rushed home” to be with family. Kai is one of five children Trump shares with ex-wife, Vanessa Trump, and they range in age from 10 to 17. He admitted he struggled “trying to explain to a 10 year old that their grandpa got shot in the face.” And starting to see video footage from the event roll in only made it worse. “It’s like, ‘Is he okay? Is he not,'” Trump said. “Saturday, obviously, was a rough and somber day for me.”
‘Biggest Badass I Know’
Trump said he finally got through to his father “after an hour and a half.” By that time, he had seen the now historic clips and images of his dad defiantly raising his fist in the air and shouting “Fight, fight, fight!” His first thought: “You are the biggest badass I know.”
As he explained, the imagery made him “so proud” on several fronts. “Every man thinks they’re Trump in that situation, but 99 out of 100 probably aren’t,” he said. “I could not have been more proud as an American or as a son in that moment.”
Megyn called the entire situation “illuminating” and a “superhero moment” because of how it summed up who Trump is. “I think so much of what [he] has done over the years is also in that same ‘fight’ mentality, and it reframes it all,” she said. “Like, the guy who will pick a fight or send a tweet or whatever that people might not like – that is part of the package. He is a fighter. He is not a flighter. That’s just who he is.”
As it turns out, the message the former president sent with his courageous reaction did more than the former first son even realized. He said a couple of rally goers stopped on the floor of the RNC to tell him his dad “saved a lot of lives” in Pennsylvania.
In their view, the situation at the rally was about to devolve into “pandemonium” with people running for their lives. “They said it was about to be like a stampede and people were going to get hurt, but when he stood back up and put his fist in the air… everyone stopped. They just froze and took in the moment,” Trump recounted. “I would have never even thought about that.”
Lightening the Mood
There is no denying, Trump said, that it was a “heavy” day for his family, but there turned out to be a key moment of comic relief. “It was 90 minutes of waiting with my kids, and my ex-wife, and [Kimberly Guilfoyle], and my brother was on speaker phone,” he recalled. “We were just going back and forth.”
Eventually, it was time for a laugh. “Finally I was like, ‘So, how’s the hair?’ I just needed to break the air,” he said. “[My dad] was like, ‘Don, the hair is fine. There is blood in it, but it’s fine. It will be okay.’ I was like, ‘Okay, things are back to normal.’”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Trump by tuning in to episode 841 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.