Posted

July 15, 2024 at 9:40 AM EDT

Patrick T. Fallon

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AFP via Getty Images

The speech former President Donald Trump delivers to his party faithful this week will be “a lot different” from the one he had been preparing before a shooting at his rally in Pennsylvania Saturday. His remarks will focus less on President Biden and more on unity, he said.

“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” Trump told the Washington Examiner, in an interview before traveling to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Trump said he had originally planned to target Biden’s policies this week, in what is expected to be an acceptance speech for his party’s presidential nomination.

“Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

Trump said he was still absorbing the magnitude of what happened in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, when he was injured in a sniper attack that killed one person and injured two others. The former president says he narrowly avoided a dire injury, as a bullet hit the upper part of his right ear. He was saved, he said, by a random turn of his head, to glance at a screen.

“That reality is just setting in,” Trump told the newspaper. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”

Now, Trump said, he’s working on a speech that’s geared less at stirring up his base and more at shifting the tone of the campaign.

“It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said.

He added, “The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.”

Trump’s comments mirror the sentiments of President Biden, who discussed “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics” in a national address Sunday night.

“We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said. “I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate.”