US President Donald Trump said he hadn’t been worried during the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night, in a Sunday evening interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes.
“I wasn't worried,” he said, “I understand life. We live in a crazy world.”
First Lady Melania Trump, however, had been “very upset” by the incident, Trump recalled, noting that he believed she’d “realized ahead of time that [the sound of gunfire] was more of a bullet than it was a tray.”
Security had taken 20 seconds to safely escort both the president and Melania from the ballroom, which, Trump said, had mostly been due to his reluctance to leave the room.
“I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn't making it that easy for them [security],” Trump explained, adding that he had eventually allowed himself to be escorted to a safe room before trying to “get them to continue the event, if possible.”
On the topic of 31-year-old suspected gunman Cole Thomas Allen, Trump joked that “the NFL should sign him up” due to how fast Allen had run past security.
“He was fast. When you look at it on tape, it's almost like a blur,” he said. “But it was amazing 'cause as soon as [security] saw that, you could see them draw their guns. They were so professional. Aimed their guns, and then they took him down immediately."
Other than a Secret Service agent who had been shot and is “a hundred percent,” according to Trump, no one else had been injured at the event.
Attendees of the event included Erika Kirk, current CEO of Turning Point USA, and the widow of the late right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk, as well as US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his sister Kerry Kennedy.
When asked about the matter of political violence and its effect on those in the room, Trump noted that “it's always been there. People are assassinated. People are injured. People are hurt. And I'm not sure that it's any more now than there was.”
However, he added that “the hate speech of the Democrats, much more so, is very dangerous. I really think it's very dangerous for the country.”
‘Radicalized’ suspect's manifesto
Minutes before the attack, Allen had reportedly emailed a "manifesto" to his family, writing there that he had planned on targeting members of the Trump administration.
Asked if he believed he had been a target, Trump did not directly respond, instead focusing on the content of the “radicalized” suspect’s manifesto.
“He was a Christian believer, and then he became an anti-Christian, and he had a lotta change,” Trump noted, adding that Allen had appeared to be “going through a lot.”
Allen’s family had alerted the police regarding anti-Trump, anti-Christian rhetoric shared on his social media accounts prior to the attempted attack, CBS reported on Sunday.
“His family was very concerned. He was probably a pretty sick guy,” Trump said. When asked about Allen’s “No King’s” stance, Trump added that “I'm not a king. If I was a king I wouldn't be dealing with you.”
According to CBS, the manifesto claimed that “administration officials, they are targets,” and that the author was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat [his] hands with his crimes."
“Yeah, he did write that,” Trump said, adding that he is “not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody. I'm not a pedophile. I got associated with all the stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”
He went on, accusing people on “the other side of the plate” of being involved with Jeffrey Epstein, but you [interviewer] should be ashamed of yourself for reading that because I'm not any of those things.”
Allen was “incompetent too, because he got caught,” Trump said, before praising security and law enforcement for their good work.