(NewsNation) — It may have been more coincidental than prophetic, but the Rev. Jason Charron’s comment at a Trump rally last week will surely go down as one of the eeriest moments of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Charron, a pastor at Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, had given the benediction at the opening of the rally and was leaving when people in the crowd thanked him for the prayer. Charron responded that it was now their turn to pray for the former president, “because people want to shoot him.”
A few minutes later, that’s exactly what happened.
Charron, a guest this week on NewsNation’s “One Nation Under God” podcast, said the moment he learned Trump had been shot at, and his words had come horribly to pass, was “the reverse of deja vu.”
With “deja vu, you think, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before.’ This was, ‘Am I really here right now?'”
Charron told “One Nation Under God” host Adrienne Bankert that he didn’t know what prompted him to express concern that someone might shoot at Trump.
“I felt at that moment … a surge just kind of came out of me and I said it, and I didn’t say it quietly. … It’s not characteristic of me to go into a crowd and say, with Secret Service agents around, that there are people who want to shoot him. … I don’t know where it came from.”
Charron told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week he wouldn’t call his comment a prediction but more of a “blanket statement of concern.” The benediction he had given at the Butler campaign rally shared the same sentiment.
“The nature of the prayer was to call upon God as our father to enable us to see in the present crisis … an opportunity to restore right relationships with one another, right relationships in our society, and ultimately, a right relationship with Him so that our nation would be great,” he said.
The attempted assassination, he said, demonstrates that the nation has a long way to go.
“The two sides have become dehumanized,” Charron said of Americans’ increasingly partisan attitudes. “Once we’ve dehumanized the other person, then we open the door to murder, violence, slander, everything that sets the stage for war.”
Hosted by NewsNation Special Projects Anchor Adrienne Bankert, weekly episodes of “One Nation Under God” debut on NewsNation’s YouTube channel Thursdays at 3p/2C.