Donald Trump says he feels like a ‘pinata’ after multiple assassination attempts

President Donald Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln after confronting what he saw as a third attempt on his life in less than two years.

Trump suggested the latest apparent attempt on his life was a sign of how successful his presidency was, even joking with Fox News ‘I feel like a pinata’.

‘I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people — the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln,’ Trump said.

He added: ‘The people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much.’

‘It’s always shocking when something like this happens. Happened to me, a little bit. And that never changes,’ a subdued Trump told reporters in a hastily organised news conference at the White House late Saturday.

Only a short time before, a man with guns and knives tried to rush past the security perimeter inside the Washington hotel where the Republican president was about to address the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Authorities are trying to determine what happened and why. A suspect was taken into custody and identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California.

‘When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians,’ Trump said on Fox.

Officials have said that the suspect fired a shotgun at a Secret Service agent at a security checkpoint in the Washington Hilton hotel before being tackled and arrested.

The agent who was shot escaped serious injury because the bullet struck his protective vest, Trump said.

Allen legally bought a .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol in October 2023 and a 12-gauge shotgun two years later.

Trump said he himself was undoubtedly the target. The presidency is ‘a dangerous profession,’ he said, noting that violence associated with politics had escalated in the US and around the world. ‘No country is immune.’

The president called for Americans to put aside their differences and unite — a break from his usual gleefully combative political tack.

‘We have to, we have to resolve our differences,’ Trump said. ‘I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.’

Trump says if the event was able to continue he would have changed course and made ‘a speech of love’

‘But I didn’t get a chance to do that,’ Trump said.

‘Probably I was better off, if I didn’t. I don’t know.’

There was still some of his old edge, especially when he spoke about the suspect: ‘I hated a guy like this — a sick, bad person — I hated somebody like that changing the course of our country.’

Trump also wrote on social media that the attack ‘would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!’

After the shooting in 2024 during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump was wounded in the ear and a supporter was killed, the president strode into the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee two days later. That same week, he gave a speech featured a softer and deeply personal message, drawing directly from his brush with death.

‘The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly,’ Trump said then.

‘As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.’