President Donald Trump said he complicated the Secret Service's effort to rush him out of the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night after gunfire erupted outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, telling CBS News he paused to see what was happening before agents could move him to safety.
In a preview of a "60 Minutes" interview set to air Sunday night, Trump described the moments after shots rang out near a Secret Service checkpoint at the annual dinner in Washington, D.C. The president was candid about his own role in slowing the response, even as the full scope of the threat became clearer in the hours that followed.
What began as an evening of political pageantry ended as an attempted assassination. Authorities later identified the suspect as Cole Allen, a 31-year-old computer scientist from Torrance, California, who was armed with multiple weapons when he rushed the checkpoint and allegedly opened fire on a Secret Service officer.
Speaking with CBS News correspondent Norah O'Donnell, Trump acknowledged that he did not immediately cooperate with agents trying to evacuate him from the ballroom.
"Well, what happened is it was a little bit me. 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, different kind of a problem, bad one, and different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom, which you hear all the time. And I was surrounded by great people. And I probably made them act a little bit more slow. They said, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me see. Wait a minute.'"
O'Donnell noted that it took roughly 10 seconds for an agent to reach Trump and another 20 seconds before he was taken out of the building. That half-minute gap, in a situation where a gunman was firing just outside, underscores both the danger and the difficulty agents faced in moving a president who wanted to assess the threat himself.
Trump went on to describe how he eventually complied with agents' instructions as the gravity of the situation set in. He said he initially turned and began walking out "pretty tall," then bent over slightly before agents told him to get down.
"I was standing up and then turned around the opposite direction and started pretty much walking out pretty tall, a little bent over because I, you know, I'm not looking to be standing too tall but I was walking out, was pretty about halfway there. And 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."
First lady Melania Trump was evacuated alongside the president. Several administration officials were also ushered out by Secret Service agents who flanked the group as they moved through the venue.
Authorities said during a news conference Saturday night that Allen was armed with multiple weapons when he rushed the Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton. He allegedly opened fire on a Secret Service officer, striking the officer's ballistic vest. The officer was taken to the hospital and released Sunday.
Fox News confirmed with law enforcement sources that Allen was targeting Trump administration officials.
The New York Post reported that prosecutors charged Allen in federal court with attempted assassination of the president, transporting a firearm across state lines to commit a felony, and discharging a gun. Prosecutors said Allen traveled by train from Torrance, California, to Washington, D.C., carrying a 12-gauge shotgun, a.38-caliber pistol, and three knives. His manifesto, prosecutors said, made clear he intended to kill Trump and other senior officials.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described the Secret Service officer's response at the checkpoint:
"This heroic officer, who was hit, fired five times at Allen, who was not shot, but fell to the ground and was promptly arrested."
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro framed the attack in stark terms, telling reporters that forensic evidence definitively linked Allen's Mossberg pump-action shotgun to the pellet found intertwined with the fibers of the officer's ballistic vest.
"It is definitively his bullet. He hit that Secret Service agent."
Pirro went further, calling the attack premeditated and calculated.
"This was a premeditated, violent act calculated to take down the president and anyone who was in the line of fire."
Surveillance footage later emerged showing Allen casing the hotel and pointing a weapon at a Secret Service agent, evidence that bolsters the prosecution's claim of premeditation.
Trump's account of the evacuation will sound familiar to anyone who watched the July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the president was struck by a bullet and famously raised his fist before being pulled off stage. In both cases, Trump's instinct was to face the threat rather than retreat from it.
That instinct makes for powerful imagery. It also makes the Secret Service's job harder, a point Trump himself acknowledged in the "60 Minutes" preview. He complimented the agents who surrounded him, saying he was "surrounded by great people," even as he admitted slowing them down.
In a press conference shortly after the shooting, Trump confirmed the shooter was in custody. He also said he had requested the White House Correspondents' Association reschedule the dinner within the next 30 days, a signal that he intended to treat the evening as interrupted, not canceled.
The broader investigation, meanwhile, has raised questions that extend well beyond one suspect's actions. The Washington Free Beacon reported that the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to testify about security lapses surrounding a prior assassination attempt on Trump, a pattern of scrutiny that has followed the agency through multiple high-profile incidents. Rep. James Comer called the earlier failures "a total failure of the agency's core mission."
Whether the Secret Service's response at the Washington Hilton met the standard the agency failed to reach in Butler remains an open question. The officer at the checkpoint took a shotgun blast to his vest and still returned fire five times. That is not a failure. That is the job done right, at least at the perimeter.
But the fact that a man carrying a shotgun, a pistol, and three knives was able to reach the checkpoint of an event attended by the president, the first lady, and senior cabinet officials will demand answers. How did Allen get that close? What screening measures were in place? Fox News Digital reached out to the Secret Service for comment; no response was noted.
A federal judge's subsequent courtroom remarks regarding Allen's jail conditions have added another layer of controversy to the case, one that may test the public's patience with a judiciary that sometimes appears more concerned with a defendant's comfort than with the gravity of the charges.
The specific weapons Allen carried have been partially identified, the Mossberg shotgun, the.38-caliber pistol, the knives, but the full inventory and how he transported them by train across the country without detection remain unclear. The manifesto prosecutors referenced has not been publicly released in full.
The timeline of the shooting itself still has gaps. The exact moment shots were fired, the precise sequence of the evacuation, and the full accounting of any additional injuries beyond the officer's vest strike have not been detailed publicly.
Trump's own account of the evacuation fills in part of the picture, the hesitation, the half-crouch walk toward the exit, the moment he and Melania hit the floor. But the Secret Service's internal assessment of the response, and whether the 30-second delay Trump described created additional risk, is something only the agency can answer.
A man with a shotgun tried to reach the president of the United States at a formal dinner in the nation's capital. A Secret Service officer stopped him and took a round to the chest doing it. The president walked out on his own terms. The country should be grateful for the officer's courage, and clear-eyed about the fact that courage at the checkpoint is not the same as security that prevents a gunman from ever reaching it.