President Donald Trump offered a detailed account of why Vice President JD Vance was evacuated first when the shooting interrupted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump explained that he personally resisted Secret Service agents’ initial efforts to remove him from the ballroom.
Donald Trump talks about JD Vance’s evacuation
In an interview with CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, Donald Trump addressed footage showing security personnel swiftly extracting JD Vance while the president remained in place longer. The sequence raised questions about the protective response after shots rang out Saturday night outside the Washington Hilton hotel.
O’Donnell described the scene to the president: agents grabbed Vance by the coat and lifted him out within seconds, while the counterassault team needed roughly 10 seconds to flank Trump and another 20 to get him moving. She noted the scene appeared chaotic, with the president at one point down on the floor.
Trump said the delay was due to his reluctance to leave immediately. “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. 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,” Trump added.
The president distinguished the gunshots from routine event noise. “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,'” Trump said. After deciding to move, Trump described complying with agents who directed him downward. “Then, I started walking with them. I turned, I started walking. And they said, ‘Please go down. Please go down on the floor.’ 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 added.
The WHCD shooting happened when Cole Tomas Allen allegedly rushed a security checkpoint outside the dinner while armed with two firearms and knives.
Originally reported by Devanshi Basu for Mandatory.
