Former President Donald Trump called being president a “very dangerous business,” citing his two close calls with would-be assassins in a highly anticipated Joe Rogan interview that was released Friday night.
During his nearly three-hour appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” — which generated more than 350,000 views within 30 minutes of it going live — Trump repeatedly referred to the role of the presidency as a dangerous position, suggesting that pundits and officials don’t want to talk about the attempts on his life.
“I do things that don’t necessarily make me so popular. I just do what’s right,” the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee said.
“I understand what I’m doing. You make yourself a target, and it’s a very dangerous business. I never thought of that when I did it.”
Trump’s stump speech in Butler, Pa., on July 13 turned into a bloodbath that stunned the world.
Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, opened fire on a rooftop 130 yards from where the former president was speaking, nicking him in the ear and causing pandemonium before he was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The attack left a 50-year-old retired fire chief in the audience dead and two others severely injured.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned 10 days later after facing bipartisan outrage over agency failures.
Just two months later, would-be assassin Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was arrested after he got within a few hundred yards of Trump as he played golf at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Sept. 15.
Trump gave Rogan a glimpse of the scar he received from Crooks’ bullet.
“It zicked right there,” he said of the mark behind his right ear.
“It healed up pretty f–king good,” Rogan said.
“It’s not like some of the wrestlers, some of the UFC fighters… it was sort of like a top shot. The thing’s taken off a little bit,” Trump continued.
“But it makes me a tougher guy.”
Rogan, 57, suggested the assassination attempts wouldn’t have happened if the media — and Democrats such as his rival Vice President Kamala Harris and twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — didn’t conflate Trump with Adolf Hitler.
“They love to take things out of context and distort them,” Rogan said.
“The rhetoric is that you’re Hitler, and in order to stop Hitler, you have to do whatever it takes.”
Trump recorded the discussion at the comedian’s studios in Austin, Texas, just hours before it went live on “The Joe Rogan Experience” YouTube channel.
The interview — which is about two hours and 58 minutes long — reached just over 800,000 views an hour after it was published.
Trump began the chat by discussing his “two different lives” — referring to his time as a businessman and host of “The Apprentice” reality TV show before his subsequent foray into politics in 2015.
“I had a very wonderful life but I wanted to do this,” the GOP nominee said, explaining how producers wanted to extend his contract on the “hot show” to stay on primetime TV.
“Somehow they put me in a poll, and I blew everybody away.”
“The Joe Rogan Experience” has an estimated 14.5 million followers on Spotify, Bloomberg News reported this year.
His audience is believed to be overwhelmingly male.
Trump has appeared on many podcasts in the home stretch of the campaign and co-hosted a streaming conversation with X owner Elon Musk in August that the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX said reached 1 billion viewers.
The ex-president and Harris, are neck and neck in most swing-state polling.
