Things got real on 60 Minutes Sunday night when CBS senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Donald Trump for an interview about the chaos that unfolded outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend. The conversation was already loaded, given that a 31 year old man named Cole Tomas Allen had charged the Washington Hilton on Saturday armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, getting off rounds and striking a Secret Service officer in the bulletproof vest before being taken into custody. But the moment that has the internet talking came when Norah pulled out the alleged shooter’s so called manifesto and asked Trump to react to the words written inside.
Norah read the passage out loud. The shooter, she said, wrote that “administration officials, they are targets,” and added, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” She then turned to Trump and asked for his reaction. Trump did not handle it well. “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” he snapped, before pivoting straight into denial mode. “I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
When Norah pressed him on whether he believed the shooter was referring to him directly, Trump cut her off. “I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile,” he said. “You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with all stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.” He then deflected by pointing at “your friends on the other side of the plate” who he said “were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things,” before doubling back to attack Norah herself. “You should be ashamed of yourself reading that. You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview.”
The “totally exonerated” line is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because the public record says otherwise. In May 2023, a federal jury in Manhattan found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid 1990s and for defaming her when he publicly denied the allegation. He was ordered to pay $5 million in damages. A separate jury later tacked on an additional $83.3 million in defamation damages for statements he made after the initial verdict. Appellate courts have upheld both rulings, and his legal team is still trying to get the Supreme Court to take up the case. The judge who oversaw the trial, Lewis Kaplan, also stated on the record that while jurors did not find Trump liable for rape under New York’s narrow legal definition, the verdict did establish that he raped Carroll under the common understanding of the word.
As for the shooter, sources have identified him as Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California. According to investigators, Allen emailed his manifesto to family members roughly ten minutes before storming the Hilton lobby, and his brother and sister had reportedly been raising concerns about his mental state for some time. He is currently in custody and is expected to face multiple federal charges, with more potentially on the way. Trump told Norah he wasn’t worried during the incident and praised Secret Service for moving quickly to get him offstage, and he is now pushing the White House Correspondents’ Association to reschedule the dinner within the next 30 days.
