April 26, 2026 - "I'm not a rapist", Trump tells CBS 60 Minutes in response to WHCD suspect's 'ma...

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This is [music] LBC with Nick Abbot.

[00:00:03]And this is Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent. Hello Simon.

[00:00:07]Evening Nick. So quite the quite the day. It was sort of ironic that Trump did not attend the White House Correspondents Dinner before because of the reception he thought he'd get and now this.

[00:00:21]Yes, absolutely ironic indeed. He's now of course pressing for the dinner to take place to be rescheduled. He says within the next month, within the next 30 days.

[00:00:32]I have to tell you that the president has given an interview tonight to 60 Minutes, the flagship current affairs program on CBS, a network that is generally now increasingly friendly to him, but he has engaged in a very difficult exchange on 60 Minutes with Nora O'Donnell, the former anchor of the CBS Evening News.

[00:00:58]She has read to him a portion of the alleged gunman's 1,000 word manifesto that was sent again reportedly by the suspect to members of his own family minutes before the attempt to breach security at the Hilton Hotel 24 hours ago.

[00:01:26]That was all taking place of course on the ground floor of the Hilton Hotel.

[00:01:30]That's where the security was set up.

[00:01:33]The president was enjoying his salad course along with 2,000 invited guests in the basement ballroom. The gunman of course was tackled on the first floor, never got close to the basement ballroom, but take a listen to this simply astonishing exchange between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News and President Donald Trump on 60 Minutes tonight. The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote, "Administration officials, they are targets." And he also wrote this, "I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." What's your reaction?

[00:02:18]>> Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're you're you're horrible people, horrible people. Yeah, he did write that.

[00:02:26]I'm I'm not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody. Uh But oh, you think you think he was referring to you?

[00:02:32]>> me.

[00:02:33]I'm not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person.

[00:02:38]Uh I got associated with all 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. But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably I read the manifesto. So you know, he's a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I'm not any of those things.

[00:03:07]>> Mr. Staggering exchange there on 60 Minutes tonight between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News and President Trump in which he denies the claims made in the manifesto by this alleged suspect. The suspect doesn't name him in the manifesto. That's why you heard Nora O'Donnell there saying to him, "Oh, you you think he's referring to you?" And then the president denies that he is a rapist, has ever been a pedophile, insists once again that it was as he puts it in that exchange, friends of Nora O'Donnell, by which he means the people in the Democratic Party, prominent Democrats, people on the left that were associated with Jeffrey Epstein, not him.

[00:03:52]And that exchange I think is going to be dominating headlines here tomorrow morning. It literally aired within the last few minutes on CBS. On CNN meanwhile, they had the Democrat Jamie Raskin in for an interview and the host on CNN blamed Jamie Raskin for previously saying that Trump is bad for the country for this attack. Utterly extraordinary, an utterly extraordinary question posed to Congressman Jamie Raskin, Democrat from Maryland by Dana Bash of CNN, asking him in essence whether the Democrats are now going to cool it with their attacks on President Donald Trump and intimating through the question that Democrats in some sense may have been responsible for this attempt to breach security at the Hilton Hotel last night. I mean again, look, this entire weekend and and I don't take this view because Donald Trump is president. I have taken this view for over 20 years in this city.

[00:04:58]This White House Correspondents Dinner every year is just the most appalling example of media organizations choosing to cozy up casually and establish friendly relationships with the people in power that they cover. And it's one of the reasons why I never attend any of these dinners. I stopped attending these dinners years ago because I just felt that this was an increasingly uncomfortable place to be. We should not as reporters be casually socializing with the newsmakers that we cover on a daily basis. But we've now got to a stage where the news media pinned down as they were in the ballroom briefly last night.

[00:05:47]And let's be clear, it was brief because the gunman didn't get anywhere near the ballroom itself. He didn't even get down to the basement level of the hotel. Huge questions as we've been talking about earlier in the day on LBC about the nature of the security operation that was put into place at that hotel last night. There's going to be a big investigation into that. But now you have the news media that was present in the room for that dinner and President Trump and his top officials kind of fused together by the traumatic experience that they went through last night. And the result of that was the extraordinary moment today on CNN where a Democrat member of Congress who himself was at the dinner last night and went back into the room saying the show must go on just as President Trump had been doing before of course they canceled it on the advice of law enforcement is basically challenged by CNN and asked whether he's going to continue vocally opposing the actions of the Trump administration because in some sense the anchorwoman was suggesting that perhaps the Democrats had fueled all of this, which just takes the relationship between the media and the politicians they cover to an entirely new low, which is another reason why no self-respecting reporter should be going to these events.

[00:07:12]Yes, I mean apart from anything else, it's the price of the ticket to sit there and eat, isn't it? I mean they presumably are not paying for themselves in in large numbers I would imagine they are being paid for by friendly corporations to the president. Well, and well, I think it's $300 a ticket now and >> say way more than that. You know, and and and increasingly of course the reporters ticket price is covered by the networks that they work for. But what's happened to this dinner? It's really important to understand this because it's been around since the 1920s. But this is not the event that it was when I first moved here over 30 years ago.

[00:07:52]There are a handful of members of the permanent Washington elite who about 20 years ago decided that the character and tenor of this dinner needed to change and that it needed to become the East Coast's answer to the Oscars. So it became this celebrity-studded weekend-long affair that completely polluted what had been a fairly straightforward single night event where the reporters got into the room with the president and they all roasted each other.

[00:08:23]>> Yes. And now it's this weekend of excess that begins with lunch parties on the Saturday, stretches out into after parties after the dinner, then the Sunday is filled with parties as well, networks falling over themselves to get celebrities and prominent figures from whichever administration is in power to sit at their respective tables, the same networks that are trimming their news budgets, firing reporters, >> Right. cutting back their international news operations.

[00:08:55]It's it's it's it's it's just an appalling event and unfortunately last night, one that came under attack.

[00:09:03]Simon, always good to talk to you.

[00:09:04]Thanks so much for that. Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent.