Vice President JD Vance’s appearance at a potential do-over of Saturday’s chaotic White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a maybe.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that President Donald Trump’s second-in-command might not make the guest list if a redo of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner were to be rescheduled.
“It’s definitely a good question, and it’s one that will be raised,” Leavitt, 28, said during a press briefing Monday when asked whether the president and vice president should appear together after the shooting.
“I assure you the president intends to attend the event, as he has told all of you publicly,” she added. “I don’t want to rule in or out the vice president’s attendance, but certainly that’s a conversation that will take place.”
The White House referred the Daily Beast to the vice president’s office for comment. Vance’s office did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Both Vance, 41, and Trump, 79, were on stage at the annual dinner when shots rang out outside the Washington Hilton ballroom, which housed nearly the entire presidential line of succession.
The vice president was ushered off stage by Secret Service agents much more rapidly than the commander-in-chief, who appeared to have stumbled to the floor as he was evacuated to a safe location.
The near-octogenarian president tried to explain why his number two was evacuated more quickly than him during an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday.
“Well, what happened is, it was a little bit me,” Trump told CBS News senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell. “I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them. I wanted to see what was going on. And by that time, we started to realize maybe it was a bad problem, a different kind of problem, a bad one.”
After initially trying to continue the night’s events after the shooting, Trump announced that the dinner would be rescheduled within 30 days, but a new date or venue has not yet been announced.
Authorities apprehended Cole Tomas Allen, 31, after he allegedly sprinted past security magnetometers outside the dinner event while carrying a 12-gauge shotgun, a semi-automatic pistol, and three knives.
In a manifesto, the California resident allegedly wrote that he sought to kill top administration officials at the event, “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”
Allen, who referred to himself as “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” allegedly wrote in the 1,052-word manifesto that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
The 31-year-old teacher was arraigned in federal court on Monday on charges of attempting to assassinate the president of the United States, transportation of a firearm/ammo in interstate commerce, and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence.
