In an interview on Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) referred to the second assassination attempt on former President Trump and called him “unwavering.”
Johnson said he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the incident earlier this month and spent three hours with him.
“He wasn't fazed,” Johnson told radio hosts John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby on Friday. “I'll be very clear with you, you know Donald Trump as well as I do, and I mean, he wasn't fazed.”
“And there has never been a man or a leader in the history of the United States who has been attacked so much, attacked so violently, and yet survived so strong and resilient,” the chairman added. “But he still needs protection, and it is unforgivable that he was not provided with that protection.”
Asked on “The Cats & Cosby Show” for his reaction to the House of Representatives unanimously passing a bill to beef up security for the former president in light of the threats, Johnson praised the two bipartisan sponsors of the bill.
“You can thank the New York delegation for this,” he said, referring to Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y.
“This bill was spearheaded by Mike Lawler. He had the foresight to bring it to Congress, we passed it in the House, and we're sending it to the Senate,” he continued. “This bill demands the same level of protection for Donald J. Trump as any sitting president.”
“Any American who looks at this and thinks objectively will understand that it is desperately necessary to do that. He has suffered a second assassination attempt,” Johnson added.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) has introduced a similar bill in the Senate that would include presidential candidates and their running mates, as well as their spouses, and add that the Secret Service should take “all necessary protective measures.”
The bill came less than a week after Secret Service agents responded to a shooting at Florida's Trump International Golf Club, where the former president was playing, when they spotted a suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, pointing a rifle over a fence. Routh fled the scene but was later arrested and charged with gun crimes earlier this week.
The incident was believed to be the second assassination attempt against Trump after a gunman grazed the Republican presidential candidate's ear with a bullet during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. The shooting left would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks and another rally attendee dead and two others wounded.
