President Donald Trump gave an eyebrow-raising explanation as to why his second-in-command was evacuated more quickly than himself after shots rang out at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Speaking with CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Trump, 79, gave a play-by-play on why he was evacuated after Vice President JD Vance.
“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?”
“Well, what happened is, it was a little bit me,” Trump explained. “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.”
“And different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom, which you hear all the time,” the president continued. “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.’”
“Then, I started walking with them. I turned, I started walking. And they said, ‘Please go down. Please go down on the floor,’” Trump added, explaining why he fell to the ground during the evacuation. ”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."
O’Donnell asked if the Secret Service agents wanted the president and first lady to basically crawl out, which Trump affirmed, “Pretty much.”
The chaos erupted at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner after shots rang out outside the Washington Hilton hotel ballroom. One Secret Service agent was struck, but was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Authorities arrested the suspected shooter, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, who had allegedly tried to attack the dinner after sprinting past a security checkpoint while carrying two firearms and knives.
In a manifesto, the California resident referred to himself as “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” and sought to kill top administration officials, including the president.
However, the attempted assassin, who was not registered with a political party, allegedly noted that he would spare one Cabinet official—FBI Director Kash Patel.
Allen will be arraigned in a federal court on Monday on preliminary charges of using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer, authorities said.
D.C. federal prosecutor Jeanine Pirro said additional charges are expected.
