President Donald Trump recalled his experience during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting on Saturday, April 25.
The president said in an interview on the Sunday, April 26, episode of 60 Minutes that he “wanted to see what was happening,” which led to Secret Service agents taking longer to usher him out of the Washington Hilton ballroom in Washington, D.C., than Vice President JD Vance.
“What happened is it was a little bit me,” Trump, 79, explained to CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell. “I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for [the shooter]. 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. I was surrounded by great people, and I probably made them act a little bit more slowly. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Let me see.’”
Amid the commotion, Trump said he started to leave the ballroom by walking out but was advised by Secret Service to get down to the ground.
“I started walking with them. They said, ‘Please go down on the floor,’ so I went down, and the first lady went down also,” he said.
Trump praised his wife, Melania Trump, for how she handled the situation, noting that, unlike him, she has not been involved in an active shooter situation before.
“My thought was, ‘I’ve been through this before a couple of times.’ She has not to this extent. She handled it great. She’s very strong, smart. She got it,” he said. “She listened. When they said, ‘Drop down,’ that meant trouble.”
A 31-year-old California man, Cole Tomas Allen, was arrested in connection with the shooting on Saturday. He is expected to be arraigned on Monday, April 27.
Following Saturday’s derailed event, Trump told reporters he was “honored” to be targeted by the suspected gunman.
“When you look at our great presidents, [this] doesn’t happen to people who don’t do anything,” he said.
“The man has been captured, and they’re going to his apartment. I guess he lives in California, and he’s a very sick person, a very sick person,” Trump added.
“I was totally shocked when something like this happens,” Trump said on Saturday night. “It happened to me a little bit, and that never changes. The fact, we were sitting right next to each other, first lady on my right, and I heard a noise … I thought it was a tray going down, and it was a pretty loud noise, and it was from quite far away. [The suspect] hadn’t reached the area at all. He really got him … but it was a gun.”
“Some people really understood that very quickly, other people didn’t … I was watching what happened,” he continued. “Melania was very cognizant of what happened; I think she knew immediately what happened. She was saying, ‘That’s a bad noise.’ And we were whisked away. It was very quick … it was a matter of seconds that we were out the door.”
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