UPDATED: Donald Trump got angry with 60 Minutes‘ Norah O’Donnell after she read a portion of a manifesto left by the suspect who stormed through a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
During the sit down, taped on Sunday, O’Donnell asked, “The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote, ‘Administration officials, they are targets.’ And he also wrote this, ‘I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’ What’s your reaction to that?”
“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re … horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
O’Donnell asked Trump whether he thought the suspect was referring to him.
Trump responded, “I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with … stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, lets say, Epstein or other things. But I said to myself, ‘You know, I’ll do this interview and they’ll probably’ — I read the manifesto. You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.”
Trump called O”Donnell a “disgrace,” and said she shouldn’t be reading the manifesto on the show.
“But go ahead, let’s finish the interview,” the president said.
The suspect has been identified by multiple outlets as Cole Allen of Torrance, CA, who is expected to face a series of federal charges on Monday. There also were a number of reports on a manifesto the suspect allegedly wrote before he attempted to charge through security.
O’Donnell continued to ask Trump about the suspect’s writings, noting that he checked into the hotel and “he said he had cased the place, and he wrote, ‘What the hell is the Secret Service doing?’ And he wrote this quote, ‘I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every ten feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got is nothing.’ He wrote, ‘Like, this level of incompetence is insane.’”
Trump responded, “Well, he was pretty incompetent too, because he got caught. And he got caught pretty easily. So I’d say he was pretty incompetent too. I can take any event having to do with security or anything else. I can always find fault. Those guys did a good job last night. They did a really good job.”
Earlier in the sit down, the president described the moments that shots were heard in the Washington Hilton ballroom and he and other top officials were rushed out.
O’Donnell referred to video of the moment, captured by Getty Images, when first Vice President JD Vance is dragged from his seat by Secret Service agents, and then Trump is ushered away.
O’Donnell asked Trump, “You see the security moving quickly, within seconds, grabbing the vice president by his coat, lifting him up, bringing him out, then the counter assault comes in. It took 10 seconds for them to flank you, Mr. President, and then 20 seconds to get you out. It looked chaotic. At one point you were down. What was happening?”
Trump said, “Well, what happened is it was a little bit me. I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for him. I wanted to see what was going on. And by that time, we started to realize maybe it was a bad problem, different kind of a problem, bad one. And different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom, which you hear all the time. And I was surrounded by great people, and I probably made them act a little bit more slowly. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me see, wait a minute.’”
O’Donnell then asked him about a moment in the video in which Trump looks to have gone down to the ground.
What happened is, then I started walking with him. I turned, I started walking, and they said, ‘Please go down. Please go down on the floor.’ So I went down, and first lady went down also. We were asked to go down by the agents as I was walking.”
O’Donnell said, “They wanted you almost to crawl.”
Trump said, “Pretty much. I was standing up, and then turned around the opposite direction and started pretty much walking out, pretty tall, a little bent over, because, you know, I’m not looking to be standing too tall but I was walking out. It was pretty about halfway there, and they said, ‘Please go down to the floor. Please go down to the floor.’ So I dropped to the floor. So did the first lady.”
The interview, taped at the White House on Sunday, will air on this evening’s 60 Minutes.
