Trump jokes: “Golf is a very dangerous game” – and reveals in a rare late-night show appearance what he would have done to a potential assassin

Former President Donald Trump joked in a rare late-night talk show appearance Wednesday that “golf is a very dangerous game,” just days after the Secret Service foiled a second assassination attempt on the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

Trump, 78, joked around with the co-hosts of Fox News' “Gutfeld!” in an appearance taped hours before his raucous campaign rally on Long Island.

“Well, Mr. P, how’s your golf game?” comedian Greg Gutfeld asked the former president.

“Well, I haven't thought about it much lately,” Trump replied. “I've always said golf is a very dangerous game.”

“Especially when they play with you,” joked Gutfeld.

“Yeah, that's true,” Trump said. “It's pretty sad.”

The 45th president escaped a second assassination attempt on Sunday after Secret Service agents saw the barrel of a rifle sticking out of bushes along one of the holes on his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida, while Trump was on a green a few hundred yards from the sniper.

“If they had told you the shooter was there, would you have tried to take him out with your Wood 3?” Gutfeld later asked Trump.

“I think so,” Trump replied. “If I knew.”

“Actually, the intelligence community did a great job,” he added. “They saw the muzzle of a gun – a big gun – and it came through bushes. And how many people would see that?”

“That was really extraordinary of him,” Trump said of the sharp-sighted agent.

“We've been through a lot,” he said of the time he was targeted by assassins in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Palm Beach. “We're getting better at it. But I don't want to say it too loudly.”

When asked how he was dealing with the frightening incidents, Trump said he had come to terms with the fact that “being president is a very dangerous job.”

“With a president, 6% or 7% [get assassinated]”, he noted.

The former president admitted that since Butler was shot, he no longer thinks “about mortality” but “more about God.”

Trump also expressed regret over his debate earlier this month against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I think my only regret is that I wanted to appear classy and not attack the moderators. In some ways, I wish I had done that,” he said, referring to ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis, who repeatedly fact-checked the former president during the showdown but never did so with Harris.

According to Fox News, Trump's appearance on the comedy show was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

The interview was Trump's first on a late-night television or cable show during an election cycle since his appearance on NBC's “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” in 2016, the network said.

According to data recently released by Nielsen MRI Fusion, “Gutfeld!” attracts more independents and Democrats than any other late-night program on the air.