President Trump claimed that Democrats radicalized far-left agitators with ‘hate speech’ following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner – while an MS NOW anchor blamed him for spreading ‘violent rhetoric.’
Trump sat down with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell on Sunday to discuss the moment that suspect Cole Tomas Allen, 31, started firing at the Washington Hilton, where more than 2,000 journalists and politicians had gathered for the annual gala.
Investigators later found a manifesto Allen allegedly wrote before the shooting that detailed his desire to target members of Trump’s Cabinet, as well as online posts that included anti-Trump rhetoric.
He had also attended one of the No Kings protests – which Trump claimed were funded by the Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups.
‘I see these “No Kings,” which were funded just like the Southern Law was funded – you saw the Southern Law was financing the KKK and lots of other radical terrible groups and then they go out and say, “Oh we’ve got to go out and stop the KKK,” and yet they give them hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars,’ Trump told O’Donnell, referencing an indictment the Justice Department filed against the civil rights group.
‘It’s a total scam, run by the Democrats,’ he continued, later adding: ‘They’re the ones that are funding it.’
Trump also cited the Internet as having ‘radicalized some people’ and ‘made some people mentally sick,’ and argued that the far-left is spreading violent rhetoric.
‘I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats much more so is very dangerous,’ Trump said. ‘I really think it’s very dangerous for the country.’
President Donald Trump claimed Democrats helped ‘radicalize’ the gunman who opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
The president sat down with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell to discuss the harrowing experience
Suspected gunman Cole Allen, 31, (pictured) allegedly wrote a manifesto detailing his desire to target members of the Trump administration
Earlier on MS NOW, Antonia Hylton claimed that Trump ‘certainly contributed’ to the violent political rhetoric.
Hylton was speaking on The Weekend: Primetime when she began by commending the president for being ‘very reflective’ following the shooting.
MS NOW then played a clip of the president saying it was a ‘very sad evening in many ways’ but also represented a moment of unity between Democrats and Republicans.
Trump also applauded law enforcement at a press conference late Saturday and thanked the mainstream media for its ‘responsible reporting.’
Yet Hylton suggested his conciliatory remarks rang hollow considering past statements on his political rivals and those in the media.
‘I know there are some voters, some Americans, who I think would have liked to hear more from the president. Who, you know, just weeks ago posted about the possible extermination of an entire civilization online, who has called his political foes “vermin, lunatics, terrorists, the enemy within,” she said, referring in part to Trump’s fiery rhetoric on the war in Iran.
‘He has certainly contributed at a minimum, contributed to the political rhetoric. So you know while it’s nice to hear this sort of sense of unity, or at least appreciation across the aisle, I know that there are people who feel these remarks have fallen short.’
The president hit out at O’Donnell after she read some of the most inciting lines of Allen’s alleged missive
Allen seemed to have targeted Trump due to his ties with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, writing in the alleged manifesto that he is ‘no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’
But Trump took issue with those allegations when O’Donnell read it aloud in the interview Sunday night, as the president denied that he ever raped anybody.
‘You read that crap from some sick person. I got associated with all stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated,’ Trump said.
‘Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things.’
Trump has never been charged with a crime in connection to Epstein, who the President has said he kicked out of his Mar-a-Lago club decades ago.
Instead, the president suggested that he was targeted because he is ‘influential.’
‘So I’ve said and I’ve said numerous times, actually, because of the position I’m in – I’ve done a lot of research into the word “assassination,” terrible word. And they go after consequential presidents, they go after presidents that do things,’ he said.
‘If you look at what I’ve done, we’ve turned this country around, we’ve taken a country that was actually a dead country – it was dying very rapidly – and it’s the hottest country in the world,’ the president continued, citing his efforts in Iran and Venezuela.
Trump then compared himself to former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, who were both assassinated after he said they did ‘things that work out very well for our country.’
‘We’re respected now as a country all over the world, and some people love that, but some people probably don’t.’
Allen was apprehended after he dashed past a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton
Allen had apparently been staying at the Hilton hotel where the event was taking place in the lead up to the gala, and his family has said he would regularly visit a shooting range to train with his guns.
He was then said to be armed with two guns and knives when he allegedly sprinted past a security checkpoint and attempted to reach the doors to the ballroom where the president was gathered along with his most senior cabinet members and thousands of journalists.
Trump said the shooter appeared to be like a ‘blur’ in surveillance footage showing him racing through the hotel hallway on Saturday night, joking that the ‘NFL should sign him up.’
‘But it was amazing because as soon as they [law enforcement] saw that, you could see them draw their guns. They were so professional, aimed their guns, and then they took him down immediately,’ Trump told O’Donnell.
Meanwhile, in the ballroom, Trump said he may have slowed the Secret Service’s response after the attendees heard shots fired.
He said he ‘wanted to see what was happening’ in the moments before security ‘started to realize maybe it was a bad problem… different from [the] normal noise that you hear 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 sluggish,’ Trump continued. ‘I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, let me see.”‘
The president added that First Lady Melania Trump was among the first to realize the sound they were hearing was bullets, as she appeared shocked in footage from the event.
First Lady Melania Trump looked stunned just moments before she and the president were rushed out of the room following gunshots
Guests are pictured taking cover after President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner
Secret Service agents then led the president and First Lady out of the ballroom.
They were about halfway out, when Trump said agents told him and his wife to ‘Please go down to the floor, please go down to the floor.’
When O’Donnell asked him what he was thinking at that moment, Trump replied that he had become used to it.
‘My thought was I’ve been through this a couple times,’ the president replied. ‘When they said “drop down,” that meant trouble.’
The president previously faced assassination attempts at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and again months later at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
First Lady Melania Trump was not present at either of those previous shootings, but Trump said on Sunday that his wife acted professionally.
‘She got it. She knew what was happening. She listened,’ he said.
Despite the chaos on Saturday, Trump said he wants to reschedule the annual Correspondents’ Dinner, saying he did not want a ‘crazy person’ to succeed in canceling it.
Next time, he said, it would include ‘bigger security’ and ‘more perimeter security.’
