Trump Erupts After Being Confronted With Alleged Shooter’s Manifesto

President Donald Trump was infuriated after hearing the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner gunman’s manifesto, and lashed out at a reporter who asked him about it.

On Sunday, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump on 60 Minutes, and told him, “The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read.

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” O’Donnell quoted directly. Then, she asked Trump, “What’s your reaction to that?”

“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody. I’m not a pedophile—” Trump began to rant, before O’Donnell tried to cut in.

“Do you think he was referring to you?” she asked.

“Excuse me, excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person. Uh, I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things,” Trump said.

“But I said to myself, ‘You know, I’ll do this interview, and they’ll probably,’—I read the manifesto—you know he’s a sick person. You should be ashamed of yourself, reading that, because I’m not any of those things, and I was never—excuse me, excuse me,” Trump continued, cutting off O’Donnell when she tried to interject with a question. “You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. Go ahead, let’s finish the interview.”

The words “pedophile” and “rapist” clearly triggered Trump during the interview, because he immediately went into full-on denial mode and attacked O’Donnell simply for repeating the shooter’s manifesto. An assassination attempt is a gravely serious event, but those words made Trump quickly grow furious because they referenced his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and a New York judge’s ruling nearly three years ago that said he could legally be called a rapist. At that moment, Trump was more upset about those accusations than the attempt on his life.

President Donald Trump really doesn’t want you to think he fell down.

Just one day after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner came to a dramatic halt when a man fired a weapon outside the room, Trump became defensive Sunday when speaking about the experience to CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

“It looked chaotic, at one point you were down, what was happening?” asked host Norah O’Donnell, referring to videos of the event that showed Trump appear to fall down while fleeing to safety.

“I turned, I started walking. They said ‘Please go down, please go down, on the floor.’ So, I went down. And the first lady went down also. We were asked to go down by agents as I was walking,” Trump said.

“They wanted you almost to crawl out?” O’Donnell pressed.

“I was standing up—pretty much—I was standing up, and turned around the opposite direction, and started pretty much walking out. Pretty tall, a little bent over, because you know, I’m not looking to be standing too tall. And uh, but I was walking out. Pretty—I’m about half way there and they said, ‘Please go down to the floor, please go down to the floor.’ So, I dropped to the floor, and so did the first lady.”

Videos of Trump exiting the stage tell a different story.

As Trump made his way offstage surrounded by law enforcement agents, he appeared to drop to the ground by accident. At least three agents appeared to reach down to lift the president back up, before ushering him offstage, one video showed.

In another video, security agents can even be heard announcing the room was “clear” as Trump moved off the stage, indicating there was no imminent threat that would have required him to crawl to safety.

It’s unclear why Trump would bother to rewrite this minor detail, of which there is ample video evidence. It’s not shameful to trip while running to safety in an emergency, but it seems that Trump’s fragile pride may be preventing him from telling the truth. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Questions abound after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday, inspiring a mix of speculation and conspiracy across social media. The public still has few answers, but Donald Trump has addressed one lingering point of confusion: why the Secret Service secured Vice President JD Vance before they ushered the president out to safety.

Speaking with 60 Minutes on Sunday, Trump confessed that the delay was his fault.

“I wasn’t making it that easy for them,” Trump told correspondent Norah O’Donnell. “I wanted to see what was going on.”

Trump added that he was surrounded by “great people” and that he “probably made them act a little more slowly,” repeatedly telling his security detail to “wait a minute.”

“Just at that moment, where it looks like you go sort of down, you were telling them to wait?” asked O’Donnell.

“Well, what happened is I started walking with them, I turned, I started walking,” Trump said. “And they said, ‘Please go down, please go down on the floor.’ So I went down, and the first lady went down. We were asked to go down by the agents, as we were walking.”

“They wanted you to crawl out?” pressed O’Donnell.

“Pretty much,” Trump said. “I was standing up and turned around, the opposite direction, and started pretty much walking out. Pretty tall, a little bent over, you know, because I’m not looking to stand too tall, but I was walking out. Pretty much about halfway there when they said, ‘Please go down to the floor, please go down to the floor.’

“So I dropped to the floor, so did the first lady,” Trump said.

Saturday’s attack was the third assassination attempt on Trump, and the first to happen during his second term as president. The MAGA leader endured two other attacks on his life while campaigning in 2024, including an instance while he was golfing at Trump International Golf Club in Florida, and another at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in which a bullet clipped his ear.

The suspected shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, was apprehended and arrested at the scene. He did not make it to the ballroom, but was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and multiple knives when he attempted to rush a security checkpoint, according to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, was staying as a guest at the hotel when the dinner was scheduled to take place. He left behind a written “manifesto” in which he detailed his intent to target Trump administration officials, a senior U.S. official told CBS News.

President Trump is being sued by two watchdog groups for an internal White House memo asserting that text messages between officials could be deleted, regardless of a law stating the opposite.

The lawsuit was filed Friday by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“These text messages capture the day-to-day business of the most powerful office in the country—and arguably the world,” the Freedom of Press Foundation’s Lauren Harper told The New York Times, arguing that the memo “sanctifies” the notion that Trump and his Cabinet “get to decide what becomes part of the American story.”

This all comes after the Justice Department claimed that the post-Watergate Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional earlier this month. And just a day after that, the White House sent that memo around, asserting that text messages between officials didn’t need to be kept unless they were “the sole record of official decision-making.” The memo is cited in the watchdog groups’ lawsuit.

Beyond text messages, the memo relaxes restrictions on emails from personal accounts and general record-keeping.

This lackadaisical approach is not new within the Trump administration. Trump has been known to tear important documents into little pieces and leave them on the floor, and was of course criminally indicted for taking classified records to his home in Florida after losing the 2020 election.

Even the State Department recognizes that the U.S. entered the Iran war on behalf of Israel.

A government release written earlier this week by Reed D. Rubinstein, the department’s legal adviser, detailed how the U.S. “is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.” The release cited multiple letters issued by the agency to the U.N. Security Council as evidence of the apparent connection.

But the candid admission directly contradicts the White House and Donald Trump, who has repeatedly insisted that Israel had nothing to do with his decision to spark another unpopular Middle East war. Just this week, Trump complained online about the circling narrative, claiming on Truth Social that “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran” but that “the results of Oct. 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did.”

U.S. involvement in the war was reportedly arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room, The New York Times reported earlier this month.

It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and the ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. U.S. military commanders advised Trump that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” but by that point, Trump had already been inspired to throw over Tehran’s theocratic regime.

It’s likely that Netanyahu continues to hold the reins. Last month, Trump told The Times of Israel that the decision to end the Iran war will be a “mutual” decision he makes with the Israeli leader—though Israel has not made peace negotiations easy, repeatedly defying fragile ceasefire arrangements by relentlessly bombing its regional neighbors.

It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died. But the regime has not been overthrown—if anything, it’s gotten more extreme.

The war also spiked the cost of living for people around the world and agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the western hemisphere. It has cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion per day (the current total is estimated at more than $60 billion) and sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.

Republican Representative Thomas Kean Jr. of western New Jersey hasn’t voted on a single bill since March 5. Apparently, he’s been ill.

Kean Jr. and his staff never explained to his constituents why the lawmaker was suddenly missing in action, but the 57-year-old politician was recently willing to share an update with Republican leadership.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told ABC News Friday that he spoke with Kean over the phone the day before, during which the lawmaker explained that he has been dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

“I was happy to speak to Tom Kean Jr. this afternoon by phone,” Johnson said, referring to their Thursday call. “He is attending to a personal health matter and expects to be back to 100 percent very soon. Tom is one of the most dedicated and hardest-working members of Congress, and I am grateful for all he does and will continue to do to serve New Jerseyans and our country.”

That lone response was the culmination of a small pressure campaign led by the other two House Republicans from New Jersey: Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew. Both were unable to make contact with Kean. Van Drew told Politico that it had been “radio silence” from their conservative colleague.

New York Republicans were similarly stumped in their efforts to call and text Kean, while other Republicans—such as Representative Don Bacon—were completely unaware of their ally’s absence until they failed to find him on the House floor earlier this week.

“I was looking for him,” Bacon said Wednesday. “I didn’t know it was that long.”

Kean’s staff told Politico on Wednesday that the lawmaker was struggling with health issues, but did not provide additional details. Harrison Neely, a strategist for the lawmaker, told the publication that Kean will be “back on a regular full schedule very soon.”

Kean was elected to represent New Jersey’s 7th congressional district in 2022, and is months away from being thrust into a contentious midterm reelection cycle. He is currently unchallenged in the Garden State’s Republican primary, scheduled for June 2, but is likely to face tremendous opposition from Democrats come November. Over the last several months, New Jersey’s 7th congressional district has shifted from a “lean Republican” advantage to a toss-up, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

It sure seems that the Trump administration is trying to pull a fast one on Senator Thom Tillis.

Just hours after the Department of Justice announced Friday that it had dropped the investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the renovation of the central bank’s Washington headquarters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the case was still ongoing.

“The case is not necessarily dropped, it’s just being moved over to the inspector general who has critical tools at their disposal to continue to look into the financial mismanagement at the Fed,” Leavitt said while speaking to reporters.

As a member of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Tillis has repeatedly vowed to exercise his ability to single-handedly block Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, until the investigation into Powell is dropped. Committee Democrats are united in blocking Warsh, so Tillis’s single “no” vote can tip the scales.

Tillis has said he believes Donald Trump wasn’t behind the investigation into Powell, even though the president has mocked and threatened to fire him repeatedly. Tillis suggested instead that it was the work of “somebody in the DOJ” who was hoping to “maybe garner favor from somebody in the White House,” according to NBC News.

Leavitt didn’t even bother to pretend the president wasn’t behind the investigation. “This has obviously been a priority for the president,” she said. “So the investigation still continues, it’s just under a different authority.”

President Trump has offended U.S. ally India with his racist Truth Social post calling the country a “hellhole.”

On Wednesday evening, Trump posted a screed from far-right commentator Michael Savage railing against birthright citizenship, claiming Indian immigrants had poor English skills and that Indians in the technology industry weren’t hiring white Americans. Trump posted not only a four-page transcript of Savage’s remarks but a video as well.

Among Savage’s remarks was the line, “A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet.”

In a statement on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Indian foreign ministry, Randhir Jaiswal, wrote that Trump’s post was “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste.”

“They certainly do not reflect the reality of the India-US relationship, which has long been based on mutual respect and shared interests,” Jaiswal added.

Indians in the U.S. were also offended.

“We are deeply disturbed by @POTUS sharing this hateful, racist screed targeting Indian and Chinese Americans,” the right-leaning Hindu American Foundation posted on X. “Endorsing such rants as the president of the United States will further stoke hatred and endanger our communities, at a time when xenophobia and racism are already at an all time high.”

Trump’s post came despite many Indian Americans being among his supporters, such as Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and FBI Director Kash Patel. But Trump has long railed against immigrants from what he has called “shithole countries,” making the remark in 2018 and repeating it in 2025. Those racist views are probably why he’s trying to overturn birthright citizenship and demolish pathways to legal immigration.

Just days into the fallout over The Atlantic’s reporting on his alleged drinking issues, FBI Director Kash Patel will now have to answer questions about a 2005 letter, in which he admitted to being arrested twice for public intoxication and public urination.

The letter, which was first reported by The Intercept, was part of Patel’s Florida Bar Disclosure Statement. Patel reported that his first arrest, in 2001, occurred while he was drunk at a basketball game as a student at the University of Richmond. He was escorted out of the game by campus police.

“Upon exiting the arena,” he wrote, “the officer placed me under arrest for public intoxication, as I was not yet of 21 years of age.”

The second arrest was while he was a law student at Pace University.

“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks.… In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel wrote. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.

“Both of these incidents are not representative of my usual conduct of behavior,” Patel continued. “And it is my hope that the Board views them as an anomaly. I dually apologize for my improper behavior both to the Board and the community at large.”

While neither incident was particularly scandalous, they do not appear to have just been anomalies, as Patel said. The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick has not only said she stands by her initial report about Patel’s drinking affecting his performance, but that she’d “been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.”

Patel has yet to comment on the letter.

The Department of Justice announced Friday that it will resurrect federal firing squads as part of an effort to implement Donald Trump’s day-one executive order to revamp capital punishment.

Trump’s order, signed in January 2025, demanded the attorney general pursue the death penalty on “all crimes of a severity demanding its use,” including murder of a law enforcement officer or any capital crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.

Under former President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland had paused federal executions. Trump became furious when, before leaving the White House, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole.* The Republican kicked off his second term in office with a bloodthirsty decree for more death.

The January order made no mention of firing squads. Still, the DOJ said in its Friday announcement it had directed the Bureau of Prisons to “expand the execution protocol to include additional manners of execution such as the firing squad.”

Some view firing squads as more humane than lethal injection, which do not have a 100 percent success rate and sometimes require multiple doses. However, execution by firing squad can also result in prisoners slowly bleeding to death if they are not immediately killed by the bullet.

In March 2025, the Supreme Court allowed South Carolina to carry out the country’s first execution by firing squad in 15 years. Since 1608, at least 144 prisoners have been executed by firing squads in America, most of them in Utah, according to the Associated Press. Firing squads have not gained much traction outside of Utah because they are considered to be barbaric. Currently only five states—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah—allow the use of firing squads in certain circumstances.

* This article previously misstated Biden’s order regarding 37 prisoners on death row.