President Donald Trump has explained why he ended up on the floor while being evacuated when a shooting broke out at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump made the remarks during a conversation with CBS News Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes on Sunday, April 26.
Trump was seen falling to the ground as Secret Service agents whisked him away from the dais after shots rang out. Agents were seen quickly pulling him back on his feet before hurrying him away from the scene in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton in D.C.
“I started walking, and they said, ‘Please go down, please go down on the floor,’” Trump recounted. “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.
When O’Donnell asked if the Secret Service agents wanted him and Melania Trump to basically crawl out, Trump replied, “Pretty much.”
Why was JD Vance evacuated first?
Trump also explained during the interview why JD Vance was evacuated more quickly than himself after the shooting broke out.
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“You see the security moving quickly, within seconds, grabbing the vice president by his coat, lifting him up, bringing him out,” O’Donnell said to the president. “Then, the counterassault comes in, took 10 seconds for them to flank you, Mr. President, and then 20 seconds to get you out. It looked chaotic. At one point, you were down. What was happening?”
“Well, what happened is, it was a little bit me,” Trump replied. “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.”
“And different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom, which you hear all the time,” Trump added. “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.’”
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“Then, I started walking with them. I turned, I started walking. And they said, ‘Please go down. Please go down on the floor,’” Trump continued, explaining why he fell to the ground during the evacuation. ”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.”
White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen, 31, faces charges of two counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence and one count of assault on an officer using a dangerous weapon after breaching security at the Washington Hilton.
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