Is This Trump Post What Finally Provoked Alleged WHCD Shooter?

The alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter critiqued the Trump administration constantly on BlueSky, and was particularly upset by the president’s AI Jesus post earlier this month.

Cole Allen, who described himself as a Protestant Christian—contradicting President Trump’s claim that Allen “hates” Christians—called members of the Trump administration “satanic idolators” after Trump shared the image of himself as Jesus Christ.

“I’m not sure that you can work for this admin and be *any flavor of genuine christian believer* and see Trump post something like this without understanding, at some level, deep down, that you are fucking damned, even if you’ll never admit it to anyone,” one of his reposts read. Allen even cited the Book of Revelation in response, writing that “there will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.”

Allen shared similar sentiments in his supposed manifesto.

“As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.… Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration,” he wrote. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

These are not the words of someone who hates Christians or Christianity, regardless of what Trump and the greater right wing say. Allen is expected to be charged with using a firearm during a crime of violence and with assault of a federal officer on Monday.

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.