Former President Donald Trump acknowledged the miraculous nature of his brush with death on Saturday when a would-be assassin shot him in his right ear, narrowly missing his head, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump noted that only the fact that he had turned his head slightly at the moment the shots were fired saved him from certain death,

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told The New York Post aboard his private plane on Sunday on his way to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Calling the attempted assassination a “very surreal experience,” Trump said, “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.”

Trump said he wanted to continue speaking after he was shot, but Secret Service agents hustled him off the stage, reminding him his safety was at stake and that he needed to go to a hospital.

Praising the Secret Service agents who tackled him as “linebackers,” he explained why, after they got him to his feet, he had insisted, “Wait, I want to get my shoes.”

“The agents hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight,” he said, smiling.

He continued by praising the counter-sniper who killed the would-be assassin: “They took him out with one shot right between the eyes. They did a fantastic job. … It’s surreal for all of us.”

“I just wanted to keep speaking, but I just got shot,” he asserted.

Pennsylvania GOP senatorial candidate David McCormick, who was seated in the front row behind Trump when the attack occurred, acknowledged, “It was pretty clearly quickly that this was a series of shots. And the president went down immediately and the Secret Service jumped on top of him. And then he got up and you saw the pictures you’re now seeing on TV where his fist came out in sort of a measure of, I think, defiance and reassurance, leadership. He really reassured people that he was okay. …  An inch difference and the president would have been dead. It was a very scary moment.”