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Donald Trump admitted this Sunday that he himself hindered the response of the Secret Service during the shooting on Saturday at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, because he wanted to see what was happening before allowing himself to be evacuated.
"Well, what happened was partly my fault. I wanted to see what was going on. And I wasn’t making it easy for anyone. I wanted to see what would happen," said the president in a clip from his interview with Norah O'Donnell for the CBS News program 60 Minutes, aired this Sunday.
The incident occurred on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington D.C., during the 105th Annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, when Cole Tomas Allen, 31 years old, burst in armed with a shotgun, a pistol, and knives at the event's security checkpoint and fired between five and eight shots near the metal detectors.
After the shooting, Trump responded firmly from the White House and quipped, "No one told me this job was so dangerous."
In the interview, Trump explained that in the initial moments he wasn't sure if the gunfire was something serious or just the "normal noise of a ballroom, which is heard all the time."
"By then, we began to realize that it might be a serious problem [...] and different from the usual noise of a ballroom," he added.
The president described how he would ask the agents to wait: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me see, wait a minute,” which, as he acknowledged, made them act “a little slower.”
According to the data shown in the interview, the Secret Service took about 10 seconds to flank Trump and 20 seconds to escort him out of the room, where there were between 2,000 and 2,600 people.
Trump recounted that he walked upright for most of the evacuation route before the agents asked him to get down on the ground. "So I went down, and the First Lady went down too," he said.
The attacker was neutralized and arrested immediately without managing to enter the main hall. A Secret Service agent was injured after being hit in his bulletproof vest, although full recovery is expected. There were no fatalities or civilian injuries.
Trump, the First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other officials were evacuated unharmed. Rubio shared an iconic image from the Oval Office after returning to the White House.
This was the first time Trump attended the Correspondents' Dinner as sitting president, an event he had boycotted during his first term. He announced his attendance in March 2026 "in honor of the 250th anniversary of the Nation."
The incident is considered the third assassination attempt against Trump in less than two years, following those that occurred in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, and in West Palm Beach, Florida, on September 15, 2024.
Allen had written a manifesto in which he called himself the "Friendly Federal Assassin," criticized the policies of the Trump administration, and prioritized officials "from highest to lowest rank." A family member alerted the police after receiving the document. Formal charges against Allen—assaulting a federal officer and using a firearm in a violent crime—were expected to be filed today, Monday.
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