{"id":287862,"date":"2026-04-27T09:10:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T09:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/287862\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T09:10:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T09:10:17","slug":"trump-was-set-to-let-it-rip-with-the-press-then-came-shots-chaos-and-a-call-for-unity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/287862\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump was set to ‘let it rip’ with the press. Then came shots, chaos and a call for unity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0President Trump was preparing to take the stage at the White House Correspondents\u2019 Assn. dinner<\/a> Saturday night, eager \u2014 by his own account \u2014 to \u201clet it rip\u201d before a room of Washington\u2019s elite and reporters he has spent years calling the enemy of the people.<\/p>\n

Then shots were heard. Secret Service agents rushed him off the stage. And within hours, the president was at the White House calling for unity, offering overtures to a press corps that he had long clashed with.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want to say you did a fantastic job, what a beautiful evening and we are going to reschedule,\u201d Trump told Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents\u2019 Assn., at a news briefing after the shooting at the dinner.<\/p>\n

His magnanimity did not last long. On Sunday night, sitting down for an interview with Norah O\u2019Donnell of CBS\u2019 \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d Trump reacted with fury to her reading of the suspected shooter\u2019s manifesto, calling her a \u201cdisgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The manifesto characterized his targets as rapists and pedophiles.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re horrible people. Horrible people,\u201d Trump said. \u201cHe did write that. I\u2019m not a rapist. I didn\u2019t rape anybody.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with all \u2014 stuff that has nothing to do with me,\u201d he added. \u201cYou should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I\u2019m not any of those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

It marked a return to the familiar dynamic between the president and the press after a night of shared crisis and purpose \u2014 raising doubts about how long the goodwill would last.<\/p>\n

Just hours before, at the briefing, Trump expressed dismay at the violent outburst at the Washington Hilton, where the black-tie event has been held for more than 50 years. <\/p>\n

\u201cI will tell you, I fought like hell to stay, but it was protocol,\u201d the president said. On Sunday he repeated his desire to reschedule the event, telling Fox News that he is committed to attending it in the near future, even proposing to do it within 30 days.<\/p>\n

Trump appeared to be enjoying himself moments before Cole Tomas Allen<\/a>, a 31-year-old tutor from Torrance, allegedly ran past a security checkpoint at the hotel and fired off two shots. Oz Pearlman, a mentalist and the entertainer for the night, seemed to be doing a trick for the president and the first lady when the shots were fired, videos show.<\/p>\n

Trump was preparing to deliver remarks at the end of the night. His team was excited about it, and the president had been making tweaks to his speech on Air Force One up until Saturday morning.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will be funny. It will be entertaining,\u201d White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a red carpet event ahead of the dinner. <\/p>\n

The speech was going to mark Trump\u2019s first at the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner. He told Fox News on Sunday that he was \u201creally going to let it rip,\u201d and that he had considered the moment an \u201cimportant event\u201d until it came to a halt.<\/p>\n

Trump said he would like to reschedule the event within the next month, adding that he will make an \u201centirely different speech\u201d \u2014 one that he said will be focused on \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is unclear how long Trump\u2019s media-friendly tone will last, but some Republicans continued to blame reporters for the violent act. Kari Lake, the senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said some reporters attending the event \u201chave spent a decade spreading absolute lies\u201d about Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump, for his part, used the security breach at the event to make the case for his White House ballroom project<\/a>, claiming that the Washington Hilton is \u201cnot a particularly secure building\u201d and is a prime example of why legal challenges holding up its construction need to be dismissed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need the ballroom,\u201d Trump told reporters. \u201cToday, we need levels of security that probably nobody\u2019s ever seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the annual dinner\u2019s venue is picked not by the White House, but by the White House Correspondents\u2019 Assn., an independent organization of journalists who cover the president. <\/p>\n

Trump has vowed to return to the event in the near future, and has called for it to take place within the next month to show that \u201cbad people\u201d cannot \u201cchange the course of the country.\u201d But the ballroom project could not be ready that quickly.<\/p>\n

It remains under construction and \u201cahead of schedule,\u201d Trump has said. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court allowed construction<\/a> on the project to continue through early June, as legal challenges remain ongoing. <\/p>\n

The construction of the $400-million ballroom on the White House grounds has come under searing scrutiny. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued last year to stop the project, has argued that Trump lacked authority to make architectural changes to the White House grounds. <\/p>\n

Carol Quillen, president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has argued the White House is \u201cthe most evocative building in our country\u201d and any changes should go through a review process, including a public comment period. Trump on Sunday described the lawsuit as one brought by a \u201cwoman walking a dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attempted attack, which marks the third time in less than two years that Trump has faced the threat of a gunman, has reignited questions about the tense political environment besetting the United States.<\/p>\n

Trump, for his part, called his job a \u201cdangerous profession\u201d and said he believed he has become the target of attacks because of his presidency\u2019s own consequence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they are the people that they go after,\u201d Trump told reporters at the White House after being rushed out of the hotel.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, he added: \u201cIf you\u2019re a consequential president, you\u2019re in much more danger than if you\u2019re not a consequential president.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an example, Trump pointed to his war in Iran, a conflict that recent polling shows<\/a> has contributed to his approval rating falling to around 40%. The president said the war \u201cshould\u2019ve been done by previous presidents … but nobody did anything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Saturday night\u2019s dinner, people infiltrated the hotel to protest the Iran war and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. <\/p>\n

Two demonstrators, wearing suits, crashed a red carpet photo shoot in the hotel lobby and called for Hegseth to be arrested for war crimes, underscoring how the foreign conflict is fueling the political rhetoric at home.<\/p>\n

In the hours after the shooting, Trump remained defiant. In an interview, he said he was determined to show a unified front and not let \u201cone nut\u201d derail his agenda or events.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate it when a sick, bad person,\u201d he told Fox News on Sunday. \u201cI hate someone like that changing the course of our country.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0President Trump was preparing to take the stage at the White House Correspondents\u2019 Assn. dinner Saturday night, eager…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[122787,123246,123247,7766,14019,6199,48,52,51,47,50,49,26341,592,6283,5408,5250,776,1519,122785,72],"class_list":["post-287862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-assn","tag-black-tie-event","tag-construction-need","tag-dinner","tag-fox-news","tag-hotel","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-next-month","tag-people","tag-president","tag-reporter","tag-shot","tag-sunday","tag-trump","tag-white-house-correspondents","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}