President Donald Trump is still stewing about his 60 Minutes interview a week later, hitting out at the reporter involved.
After the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, the president sat down for a lengthy interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Norah O’Donnell, 52.
In the interview, O’Donnell asked Trump about 31-year-old suspected shooter Cole Tomas Allen’s manifesto, which he allegedly sent to family members shortly before the shooting.
Specifically, she asked the president about Allen’s rationalization that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” the president responded. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
As O’Donnell was replying, asking if the president thought that Allen was referring to him, Trump steamrolled over her, ranting, “I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that c--p from some sick person? 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,” he continued. “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. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.”
O’Donnell interjected at the time, “Mr. President, these are the gunman’s words.”
“You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview,” Trump added, before ending with one last insulting comment aimed at O’Donnell: “You’re disgraceful.”
O‘Donnell moved on.
Over a week later, during a phone interview with the president on Monday, Salem News Channel’s Hugh Hewitt mentioned the exchange, telling Trump, “I’m not gonna ask you about the shooter’s manifesto, I can’t believe Norah O’Donnell did that... That was rehearsed of course, they wanted you to walk off.”
“Did you think about walking off?” Hewitt asked.
“No, because then you make it a bigger story, actually,“ he explained, before pivoting to complain about O’Donnell once more.
“She’s terrible, I mean, she’s interviewed me before... She’s a regular person that gets paid a lot of money. She’s no different. I could get any woman off the street practically and they would do just as good of job as her. There’s nothing special.”
“As soon as she said the word ‘manifesto,’ I said, ‘Here we go with the nonsense again,’ you know, this is a sick guy, a really sick guy, a deranged guy, and he writes stuff,” he added.
The official White House-affiliated @RapidResponse47 account later shared a clip of the president, claiming Trump “roasts” O’Donnell in the interview.
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment. In a statement made to the Washington Post following the broadcast of the president’s 60 Minutes interview, CBS News said, “This suspect is being charged with one count of trying to assassinate the president of the United States. It is a basic tenet of journalism to ask questions and seek the truth. It was our responsibility to ask the president about the latest evidence and what we had just learned after obtaining the manifesto a few hours before the interview.”
Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, issued a statement to the Post at the time, writing, “Criticism that seeks to intimidate or silence journalists for doing their jobs not only threatens individual reporters, but the public’s right to know. During this time of attacks on press freedom, it’s critical that newsrooms and the news media industry stand with Norah O’Donnell and all journalists facing attacks for their work.”
Trump, 79, has a lengthy history of attacking female journalists in particular. He has dismissed Fox News’ token liberal Jessica Tarlov as being “one of the Least Attractive and Talented People on all of Television‚” and repeatedly clashed with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, whom he once called “the worst reporter” and criticized for never smiling.
“I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face. You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth,” he told Collins in response to a question about the Epstein files.
In one of his most notorious incidents, the president snapped at a female reporter from Bloomberg who tried to ask him about the Epstein files, barking at her to be “quiet, piggy,” during a gaggle aboard Air Force One.
The White House later attempted to argue that this insult was merely an example of the president’s frankness, which was one of the qualities that endeared him to the American people.
“The president is very frank and honest with everyone in this room,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in a press briefing. “It’s one of the many reasons that the American people re-elected this president, because of his frankness.”
Adding that Trump gives reporters “unprecedented access,” Leavitt continued, arguing that, “I think the president being frank and open and honest to your faces rather than hiding behind your backs is frankly a lot more respectful than what you saw in the last administration, where you had a president who lied to your face and didn’t speak to you for weeks.”
