Donald Trump Jr. shared about the moment he was with his daughter, Kai, roughly a year ago when together they found out his father had been shot, during an appearance at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit held Friday in Tampa.
After Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk began asking Trump Jr. about his father’s feud with blue state governors over their decision to let transgender folks continue to participate in women’s sports, his daughter, Kai, was brought into the conversation.
“We’re both fathers of daughters. Your daughter is a very good golfer,” Kirk told Trump Jr. before the crowd began cheering. “I told you she had a lot of fans here,” Kirk quipped.
Trump Jr. and Kirk then joked about the fame his daughter has taken on as the president’s granddaughter, who also happens to be a very talented golfer. Eventually, Trump Jr. pivoted to telling the audience and Kirk about the moment he was with Kai last year after finding out his father had been shot at a rally in Pennsylvania.
“I was with her, on July 13th when my father was shot. I got an unusual call from my daughter that morning saying, ‘Hey, I want to go fishing.’ Which, you know, if you have a teenage daughter … you’re not often calling dad to go do something. So when you call dad he’s going to do it.”
Trump Jr. recounted how the pair were roughly 13 or 14 miles offshore when they “got the call” that his father, Kai’s grandfather, had been shot.
“I picked up my phone. It’s like ‘Your dad’s been shot.’ … We didn’t know anything. And we’re frantically kind of calling. I guess the only thing that I guess they did right that day was shut down other communications,” Trump Jr. recounted.
“I think we set the sea speed record from offshore into Jupiter, where we live and, you know, finally we were able to get my dad on the phone and, you know, it was sort of a harrowing thing,” Trump Jr. continued. “By then we had seen some of the videos of him coming back up with a sort of ‘fight, fight, fight,’ and I just got on the phone … I’m not usually at a loss for words, but that was one of those where I was like, ‘I got nothing.'”
Trump Jr. joked about asking his father, when he finally reached him over the phone, about the status of his hair, something that eased the awkward tension of the ongoing moment.
“It normalized the situation,” Trump Jr. said of the question about his father’s hair.
Trump Jr. then shared how the pivotal moment with his daughter that day launched her foray into the political spotlight.
“My daughter was with me, and, Kai has probably spent more time with my dad one-on-one than I have,” Trump Jr. said. “She’s like his golf buddy, and she plays with him every weekend when he was around, and that was all the time, and she called me that next morning and she was like, ‘You know what? I want to speak at the RNC.'”