President Donald Trump sat down with Norah O'Donnell for a 60 Minutes interview… and let’s just say that things got really uncomfortable for O'Donnell when the subject of the manifesto written by the man who attempted to assassinate Trump and other administration officials at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner Saturday night came up.
O'Donnell read aloud from the document, citing the shooter's apparent motive: "Administration officials, they are targets." Then she kept going, reading the gunman's claim that he was "no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." She asked Trump for his reaction.
He had one.
"Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you're — you're horrible people. Horrible people," Trump said.
Trump didn't flinch. He looked straight at her and said what a lot of people watching were probably thinking — that a major news anchor choosing to amplify a would-be assassin's smears against the sitting president on national television is, at minimum, a choice worth examining. O'Donnell pressed forward anyway, asking whether Trump believed the manifesto's insults were directed at him personally.
"I'm not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody."
She tried to interject. He kept going, saying: "I'm not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person. I got associated with old stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated."
Then Trump turned the tables in a way that O'Donnell wasn't prepared for. He noted that the people most associated with Jeffrey Epstein aren't exactly on his side of the aisle.
"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. You know, he's a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that, because I'm not any of those things."
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O'Donnell tried to justify it, arguing these were simply "the gunman's words." Trump cut through that framing without missing a beat.
"You shouldn't be reading that on 60 Minutes," he said. "You're a disgrace, but go ahead. Let's finish the interview."
She pushed on anyway, starting to reference something else from the manifesto. Trump stopped her again: "You're disgraceful."
President Donald Trump just obliterated Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes after she tried to smear POTUS with the vile attacks contained within the WHCD shooter’s manifesto.
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 26, 2026
Trump FIGHTS BACK, concluding by calling O’Donnell “disgraceful.”
O’Donnell: The so-called manifesto is a… pic.twitter.com/49xpxzLzcB
A man just tried to kill the president — and several other administration officials — at what's supposed to be a lighthearted Washington tradition. And 60 Minutes' idea of journalism in the aftermath is to have its anchor read the shooter's unhinged accusations against Trump on air, word for word, and ask him to respond to them.
It doesn’t shock me at all that Trump knew O'Donnell would go there because the mainstream media and the Democratic Party are the source of all the lies and bogus allegations that radicalized the shooter to do what he did in the first place.
Whether CBS considers that good television or good journalism is, at this point, a distinction without much of a difference.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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