President Donald Trump has explained how he ended up on the floor as he fled the shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Trump, 79, was captured falling to the ground as Secret Service agents ushered him away from the dais after shots rang out during the dinner. Agents quickly pulled him back on his feet before hurrying him away from the scene in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton in D.C.
Speaking to Norah O’Donnell in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, the president said that he went down at the urging of Secret Service agents, not because he fell.
“I started walking, and they said, ‘Please go down, please go down on the floor,’” Trump recounted. “So I went down, and the first lady went down also.”
“But we were asked to go down by the agents as I was walking,” he repeated.
O’Donnell asked if the Secret Service agents wanted the president and first lady to basically crawl out, which Trump affirmed, “Pretty much.”
Trump, who turns 80 in June, then retold his story another time, saying he had started to walk out “a little bent over” when the agents told him, “please go down to the floor, please go down to the floor.”
“So I dropped to the floor, so did the first lady,” he said again.
During the interview, O’Donnell also pressed Trump on why it took so long to escort him out during the “chaotic” evacuation, which saw Vice President JD Vance led away more than 10 seconds before Trump even rose from his seat.
“You see the security moving quickly, within seconds, grabbing the vice president by his coat, lifting him up, bringing him out,” O’Donnell said to the president. “Then, the counterassault comes in, 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, who has a number of health conditions, admitted he may have made things difficult for his security detail because he wanted to “see what was going on.”
“Well, what happened is, it was a little bit me,” he said. “I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them.”
He added, “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.’”
The gunman, a guest at the hotel, was apprehended after sprinting through a magnetometer and never made it to the ballroom.
The suspect has been identified as Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Los Angeles. He was allegedly trying to kill Trump and top administration officials, according to a manifesto obtained by the New York Post.
The oldest person ever inaugurated as president, Trump has faced a range of health issues, including swollen ankles, which the White House attributes to chronic venous insufficiency, a condition common in seniors where leg veins struggle to push blood back up to the heart.
