Trump: Correspondents and Why It Matters

You mentioned Weijia Jiang. Our Ed O'Keefe is not far from here across town with Weijia right now. We're going to go to him now. Ed? Uh good to see you again. We obviously were all together in that ballroom uh about what 2 hours ago now uh when this happened. Uh the rest of us were on the ballroom floor uh at our tables and Weijia was up on stage uh on the dais uh in her role not only as senior White House correspondent but as chairwoman of the White House Correspondents Association. For the uninitiated, remind them what is this association? What were we doing tonight? Uh the White House Correspondents Association serves as the bridge between the White House press corps and the administration. And once a year we host this dinner um

for all of the those people in both groups to come together to celebrate the importance of the First Amendment and all the freedoms in the First Amendment. So, we were doing that today. Um this was, you know, in the middle of dinner and the formal program had not started, but we were all seated. We were, you know, having conversation. Um I was talking to President Trump because I was sitting there with him. And it was so quick. Um Did you hear it? We heard commotion and then I saw um [clears throat] the Secret Service agents plunging toward our head table. And it just it took me a couple seconds to realize what was happening, but when I heard them say down um

I of course crawled to the ground as quickly as possible. And there was President Trump right in front of me. We were touching because we were both sprawled out on the ground. In front of him was the First Lady. And agents were telling us to move when they thought it was safe. Um so, we crawled out um into the off the stage. Yes, I crawled off the stage. Um and I had no idea what was going on. I just knew that something there was some sort of threat. Um the president and the First Lady were whisked away and, you know, we were just holding for a while um to see if we could find out more details about what was happening. And I will say the president um kept in very close touch. And he wanted the show to go on as he posted publicly,

but he kept saying, you know, we should go back. We should go back because he didn't want to be deterred by any threat. Um so, ultimately, of course, um uh law enforcement decided that was not a good idea and we came here to the White House. And we're going to do it again? Um the president says that we are going to do it again. In fact, he called me back to have a conversation with him before he posted about it. And he explained uh that despite, you know, the fact that he really wanted this dinner to go on tonight that it would have to wait, but he stressed multiple times that he wanted to have the dinner at some point because he thought it was important. Um you know,

this is the first time President Trump had ever agreed to come to this dinner as president. He didn't do it in his first term and so forth, yeah. And you know, in the briefing just now you heard him. He said, you know, tonight was supposed to bring um the White House and the press together and in a way this has. Um because you realize um the gravity and you realize that, you know, the one thing we have in common the one thing is our duty to the American people. Right. And at the end of the day that's what it's about. And um you know, he was quite reflective about that, I thought. You've spent months, a year working on this.

Uh this happens. They're asking me to ask you cuz we're all concerned as colleagues. How are you feeling? Thank you for asking that. Um you know, what we do isn't about a big fancy dinner party. Right. In some ways what happened tonight is actually a much better reflection of what it is we do. Because when I looked at my phone and I didn't go into the ballroom, but I was scrolling just trying to find out what people were reporting, I saw many reporters reporting live from in the room and tweeting from in the room and having no idea whether their lives were at stake um because [snorts] they didn't know if there was an ongoing threat. And that's what reporters do. And that

was on full display. And why do we do it even in the most unthinkable circumstances? To inform the public. We're not doing it for ourselves. So. Um uh Tony, and we all ran back here and we'll be here through the night to sort out what's going on. I know there's some other information being shared up the street, so we should go to deal with that, Tony. Thank you, Weijia. Weijia, thank you very much. Ed, thank you very much. That's not where they expected to be tonight. That's not where we expected to be tonight.