Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday called onto the stage the “computer genius” who created the graph that an assassin turned around just before he shot him, and credited her for it.
“I love that chart. I’m going to sleep with that chart for the rest of my life,” Trump, 78, said at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with his famous immigration chart held up to his right.
The Republican presidential candidate asked the staff member in charge of the slideshow to come onstage when he was shot by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
“She needs to come out. Just tell her to come over here,” Trump told his team. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, we’ve got to get her.”
“In a way, she saved my life,” the former president said, as he watched the young woman walk toward the podium.
The timid staffer shook his head twice when asked by Trump if he wanted to talk.
“Hello,” the woman, who declined to give her name, said into the microphone before returning to her post offstage.
“She’s a computer genius,” Trump claimed. “She saved my life.”
The former president said that a graph documenting illegal immigration levels over the years is used at his rallies “less than 20 percent of the time” and that the graph is “always to the left of me.”
Trump said the sniper’s bullet “would have been a perfect hit” if the chart had shown it to Butler’s left instead of his right.
Trump also said he typically displays the chart at the end of his speeches, and that his staff had told him they were “surprised” that he had asked for it so early in the July 13 rally.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Fox News earlier this month that he was the one who gave the life-saving chart to President Trump.
“It’s been in development since 2014, and we’ve been adding more every month,” Johnson told Fox News host Bret Baier, revealing that he first showed it to the former president during a plane trip.
“He loved it and turned it over to his staff, who made some changes in terms of graphics, but he used it that day and has used it ever since,” the senator said.
“I’m glad I was able to serve there…God works in mysterious ways,” Johnson added.
