Norah O'Donnell sat down with President Donald Trump in an exclusive interview for 60 Minutes on Sunday night and she did the unthinkable: she asked the president to justify himself against the allegations laid out in the suspected shooter's manifesto. She brought up the manifesto about 20 minutes into the interview and confronted Trump with the reasons Cole Allen stated for trying to take the President out.
The shooter could not sit with Trump and lay out his diatribe to his face, so O'Donnell and CBS did it for him. She took up the alleged shooter's manifesto and read parts of it to President Trump. This very action was to ask him to take accountability for what Allen had written. It was as if O'Donnell was saying "your would-be assassin justified his attempt on your life, and we think he's right."
"At one point," O'Donnell said, "in the so-called manifesto, Mr. President, he appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this, '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?" O'Donnell asked.
Yes, the 60 Minutes host asked the President to "react" to being called a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor by a man who tried to kill him. These are the same terms used by activists who jammed up the streets outside the White House Correspondents Dinner to scream obscenities, the same things desperate Democrats say because they can't argue against the Trump administration's policy on its own merits, and the same rhetoric spewed by late-night talk show hosts and radical left wing podcasters.
These are the terms that filled the head of Cole Allen, who then bought weapons and boarded a train from California to DC with the intention of killing the President. He believed all these things about Trump. He didn't realize that Democrats are just vying for power and that media is just vying for clicks. He thought they really meant it, not just that these are convenient talking points.
"Well, I was waiting for you to read that," Trump told O'Donnell, "because I knew you would. Because you're horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I'm not a rapist, I never did rape anybody."
"Oh, you think he was referring to you?" O'Donnell asked, wide-eyed, incredulous, as if she wasn't reading that quote from the would-be assassin's manifesto specifically so she could say to Trump that people think he's a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor.
Trump wasn't having it. "You read that crap from some sick person," he said. "I got associated with all that 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. You know, he's a sick person— but you should be ashamed of yourself reading that, because I'm not any of those things," he said.
When confronted with the madness of having read the manifesto of the would-be assassin to the President and on TV, she responded, "Mr. President, these are the gunman's words." She said it the way leftists blamed America for 9/11.
She said that as though anyone, anywhere, had been asked to justify themselves against the accusations of their would-be assassin. It's absurd on its face to demand that the president defend himself against the ramblings of a man who tried to kill him.
O'Donnell was using the manifesto to victim blame Trump, to use a leftist term, trying to say that in some way Trump had asked for it, had deserved it, had brought this horrible thing on himself.
"You shouldn't be reading that in 60 Minutes," Trump told O'Donnell. "You're a disgrace."
And he was right. O'Donnell wanted to see Trump squirm, but he didn't give her the pleasure. Instead, he pointed out the madness to her, that she would read the words of a crazed would-be killer on television, would demand that he in some way account for them, take responsibility for the man's actions.
In reading the manifesto to the President, in asking for his reaction, O'Donnell was saying what so many in mainstream media believe: that Trump deserved it. Obviously, the President does not deserve to be assassinated, and the American people do not deserve to have our entire society thrown into chaos.
