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

[0:00] This is LBC with Nick Abbott. [0:03] And this is Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent. [0:07] Hello, Simon. [0:07] Evening, Nick. [0:08] So, quite the day. [0:11] It was sort of ironic that Trump did not attend [0:14] the White House Correspondents' Dinner before [0:16] because of the reception he thought he'd get, and now this. [0:21] Yes, absolutely ironic indeed. [0:23] He's now, of course, pressing for the dinner to take place, [0:26] to be rescheduled, he says, within the next month, [0:30] within the next 30 days. [0:32] I have to tell you that the president has given an interview tonight [0:35] to 60 Minutes, the flagship current affairs programme on CBS, [0:41] a network that is generally now increasingly friendly to him, [0:46] but he has engaged in a very difficult exchange on 60 Minutes [0:52] with Nora O'Donnell, the former anchor of the CBS Evening News. [0:57] She has read to him a portion of the alleged gunman's 1,000-word manifesto [1:07] that was sent, again reportedly, by the suspect to members of his own family [1:15] minutes before the attempt to breach security at the Hilton Hotel 24 hours ago. [1:25] That was all taking place, of course, on the ground floor of the Hilton Hotel. [1:30] That's where the security was set up. [1:33] The president was enjoying his salad course, [1:37] along with 2,000 invited guests in the basement ballroom. [1:42] The gunman, of course, was tackled on the first floor, [1:44] never got close to the basement ballroom. [1:47] But take a listen to this simply astonishing exchange between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News [1:54] and President Donald Trump on 60 Minutes tonight. [1:57] The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. [2:01] He appears to reference a motive in it. [2:05] He writes this, quote, [2:06] administration officials, they are targets. [2:09] And he also wrote this, [2:11] I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. [2:17] What's your reaction to that? [2:18] Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, [2:21] because you're horrible people, horrible people. [2:24] Yeah, he did write that. [2:26] I'm not a rapist. [2:28] I didn't rape anybody. [2:30] I'm not a pedophile. [2:31] Do you think he was referring to you? [2:32] Excuse me, excuse me. [2:32] I'm not a pedophile. [2:35] You read that crap from some sick person. [2:38] I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. [2:44] I was totally exonerated. [2:46] Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, [2:52] let's say, Epstein or other things. [2:54] But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably, [2:59] I read the manifesto, you know, he's a sick person. [3:01] But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I'm not any of those things. [3:07] Staggering exchange there on 60 Minutes Tonight between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News [3:12] and President Trump in which he denies the claims made in the manifesto by this alleged suspect. [3:22] The suspect doesn't name him in the manifesto. [3:25] That's why you heard Nora O'Donnell there saying to him, [3:27] oh, you think he's referring to you? [3:29] And then the president denies that he is a rapist, has ever been a pedophile, [3:36] insists once again that it was, as he puts it in that exchange, [3:41] friends of Nora O'Donnell, by which he means the people in the Democratic Party, [3:46] prominent Democrats, people on the left that were associated with Jeffrey Epstein, not him. [3:52] And that exchange, I think, is going to be dominating headlines here tomorrow morning. [3:58] It literally aired within the last few minutes on CBS. [4:01] On CNN, meanwhile, they had the Democrat Jamie Raskin in for an interview. [4:07] And the host on CNN blamed Jamie Raskin for previously saying that Trump is bad for the country for this attack. [4:17] Utterly extraordinary. An utterly extraordinary question posed to Congressman Jamie Raskin, [4:22] Democrat from Maryland, by Dana Bash of CNN, [4:26] asking him, in essence, whether the Democrats are now going to cool it with their attacks on President Donald Trump [4:33] and intimating through the question that Democrats in some sense may have been responsible [4:38] for this attempt to breach security at the Hilton Hotel last night. [4:44] I mean, again, look, this entire weekend, and I don't take this view because Donald Trump is president. [4:53] I have taken this view for over 20 years in this city. [4:58] This White House Correspondents Dinner every year is just the most appalling example of media organisations [5:10] choosing to cosy up casually and establish friendly relationships with the people in power that they cover. [5:20] And it's one of the reasons why I never attend any of these dinners. [5:24] I stopped attending these dinners years ago because I just felt that this was an increasingly uncomfortable place to be. [5:32] We should not, as reporters, be casually socialising with the newsmakers that we cover on a daily basis. [5:40] But we've now got to a stage where the news media pinned down as they were in the ballroom briefly last night. [5:47] And let's be clear, it was brief because the gunman didn't get anywhere near the ballroom itself. [5:53] He didn't even get down to the basement level of the hotel. [5:57] Huge questions, as we've been talking about earlier in the day on LBC, [6:00] about the nature of the security operation that was put into place at that hotel last night. [6:05] There's going to be a big investigation into that. [6:07] But now you have the news media that was present in the room for that dinner [6:13] and President Trump and his top officials kind of fused together by the traumatic experience that they went through last night. [6:23] And the result of that was the extraordinary moment today on CNN where a Democrat member of Congress, [6:29] who himself was at the dinner last night and went back into the room saying the show must go on, [6:34] just as President Trump had been doing before, of course, they cancelled it on the advice of law enforcement, [6:41] is basically challenged by CNN and asked whether he's going to continue vocally opposing the actions of the Trump administration [6:50] because, in some sense, the anchorwoman was suggesting that perhaps the Democrats had fuelled all of this, [6:57] which just takes the relationship between the media and the politicians they cover to an entirely new low, [7:04] which is another reason why no self-respecting reporter should be going to these events. [7:12] Yes. I mean, apart from anything else, it's the price of the ticket to sit there and eat, isn't it? [7:17] I mean, they presumably are not paying for themselves. [7:20] In large numbers, I would imagine, they are being paid for by friendly corporations to the President. [7:27] Well, I think it's $300 a ticket now. [7:30] Oh, I thought it was way more than that. [7:32] And increasingly, of course, the reporters' ticket price is covered by the networks that they work for. [7:41] But what's happened to this dinner, it's really important to understand this because it's been around since the 1920s, [7:46] but this is not the event that it was when I first moved here over 30 years ago. [7:52] There are a handful of members of the permanent Washington elite [7:56] who, about 20 years ago, decided that the character and tenor of this dinner needed to change [8:02] and that it needed to become the East Coast's answer to the Oscars. [8:08] So it became this celebrity-studded, weekend-long affair [8:13] that completely polluted what had been a fairly straightforward single-night event [8:19] where the reporters got into the room with the President and they all roasted each other. [8:23] And now it's this weekend of excess that begins with lunch parties on the Saturday, [8:30] stretches out into after parties after the dinner, [8:34] then the Sunday is filled with parties as well, [8:38] networks falling over themselves to get celebrities and prominent figures from whichever administration is in power [8:45] to sit at their respective tables, the same networks that are trimming their news budgets, [8:51] firing reporters, cutting back their international news operations. [8:57] It's just an appalling event, and unfortunately last night, one that came under attack. [9:03] Simon, always good to talk to you. Thanks so much for that. [9:05] Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent.