President Donald Trump sat down with Norah O’Donnell for an interview that’s set to air Sunday night on 60 Minutes to share his perspective of what happened in the moments after shots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
O’Donnell noted to Trump that the scened looked “chaotic” as Secret Service rushed to protect both the president and Vice President J.D. Vance on Saturday night.
“Well, what happened is — it was a little bit me,” Trump says in a clip shared Sunday. “I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for ’em. 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, wait a minute. Lemme see. Wait a minute.’”
Asked to clarify what he meant, Trump said he started walking with the Secret Service and then they told him to “go down on the floor.” He said both he and First Lady Melania Trump complied.
The reason he was asked to “go down,” he said, was because he was “walking out pretty tall” and they wanted him protected.
Watch the clip below.
The interview O’Donnell will be broadcast Sunday night on 60 Minutes, which airs at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS and Paramount+.
As the event got under way Saturday night at the Washington Hilton, a gunman reportedly charged through a security checkpoint and into ballroom where the event was taking place armed with multiple weapons. He fired multiple shots before being subdued by authorities. He was later identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen.
In a press briefing, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Allen will be charged with using a firearm and assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon and that there will likely be “many more charges” to come.
Weijia Jiang, White House Correspondents Association president and CBS News’ senior White House correspondent, called the incident “harrowing.”
Carly Thomas contributed to this report.
