Former presidential advisor Ivanka Trump recently disclosed her terrifying real-time experience watching the July 2024 assassination attempt on her father, Donald Trump. Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett, the former first daughter detailed the immediate panic of the moment and the maternal instincts that took over as she shielded her young children from the unfolding violence.
The incident occurred on the afternoon of July 13, 2024, during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A gunman, later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire from a nearby rooftop, striking the former president in the ear before Secret Service counter-snipers neutralized the threat.
At the time, Ivanka Trump was hundreds of miles away at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, accompanied by two of the three children she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.
“I was in Bedminster, New Jersey, and there was a lot of commotion, and the televisions were on, so I saw it almost immediately,” she told Bartlett. Acknowledging she rarely watches television, she noted she was near the club’s bistro when the shocking broadcast began.
“It was almost real time. It was before he had stood back up that I had seen what was transpiring,” she explained. “My first reaction was to turn them [my children] away.”
Despite the chaos and visible fear, Ivanka described an immediate, inexplicable intuition regarding her father’s survival.
“Interestingly, I knew in real time, in that moment, that he was fine. Like, I just knew that it wasn’t his time,” she stated. Fighting back tears during the interview, she expressed immense gratitude that the worst possible outcome did not materialize.
Hours later, she and Kushner reunited with the former president as his motorcade returned to the Bedminster estate following his release from a Pennsylvania hospital. “We met his car as he was pulling in,” she recalled. “I just feel incredibly lucky that he was protected on that day.”
The near-tragedy profoundly impacted her worldview, compounding the grief from her mother Ivana Trump’s fatal accident in 2022 and Kushner’s 2019 early-stage thyroid cancer diagnosis. These successive family crises, she noted, serve as stark reminders of life’s fragility.
“When my mom passed prematurely, when my husband had a scare with cancer… it makes you realize you just can’t take anything for granted,” she concluded. “You recommit to love and connection and to a recognition of how short our time here on earth is.”
