It’s a notable thing when the president of the United States sits for an interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” It’s doubly notable when that president has just survived a third assassination attempt.

Cole Tomas Allen showed up at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner with a couple of guns, looking to kill Trump administration officials and perhaps the president. (Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, along with President Donald Trump, were all there.) The assailant called himself “The Friendly Federal Assassin,” posting a “manifesto” outlining his hatred for all things related to Donald Trump.

Our Douglas Andrews has much more on that event. My interest here is that the guy’s motive was plain as day, though the Leftmedia feigned ignorance as if it were still a mystery.

In that context, CBS’s Norah O'Donnell interviewed President Trump for the “60 Minutes” segment.

“Mr. President, thank you for doing this,” she began cordially enough. “I’m glad you are safe. I am glad that everyone is safe. How are you doing?”

Trump answered that he’s “doing very well,” so she asked next, “Mr. President, do you know if you were the target of the gunman?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied before laying out some of the known red flags with the “radicalized” perpetrator.

O'Donnell then asked, “This appears to be the third attempted assassination on your life, the first in Butler, the second, of course, on the golf course in Florida. Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you?”

It’s relatively simple, Trump said: Assassins “go after consequential presidents.” He took the opportunity to lay out some of the ways he has been consequential.

“You mention, Mr. President, consequential,” O'Donnell followed up. “Your policies are also controversial. Is that part of it?”

Naturally, Leftmedia propagandists like O'Donnell are invested in and stir the controversy. That’s not to say they are solely responsible for it, but that they churn it for revenue and ideological purposes. Fighting crime and securing the border, as Trump noted, shouldn’t be controversial.

For the ensuing several minutes, the two discussed what happened at the dinner and what the president, the first lady, and others thought and did in the tense moments after shots rang out. In some ways, it was just a normal conversation between two people about an extraordinary event.

Now, if it feels like I’m belaboring the exchange, it’s because I have a point to make. You see, the exchange that brought the fireworks was all set up by O'Donnell’s initial concern and acknowledgment that the assassin was, indeed, targeting Trump. But then she opted to read from his “manifesto” to get Trump’s reaction.

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 am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” What’s your reaction to that?

Trump let her have it:

Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would. Because you're— you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I'm— I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.

“Oh, you think— do you think he was referring to you?” O'Donnell asked, pretending to be astonished. It was one of those moments that makes you want to slap someone.

Perhaps she merely didn’t want to get sued like George Stephanopoulos did for falsely stating that Trump was found “liable for rape.” But she read those words knowing full well that she was reinforcing the propaganda about the president — propaganda that, hours earlier, had inspired a third attempt on his life.

“I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile,” Trump continued. “You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with … 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. … You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself for reading that because I’m not any of those things.”

O'Donnell defended herself by saying, “Mr. President, these are the gunman’s words.”

Yeah, Trump shot back, “You shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes.’ You’re a disgrace.”

Later in the interview, she declined to read other portions of Allen’s manifesto that outed him as a radicalized left-winger. “Why don’t you read all the anti-Trump?” the president challenged her. “Why don’t you read it? You just did, so why don’t you read it?”

He knows the answer as well as we do: She only wanted to read the portion that smeared the president. To astute readers of The Patriot Post, that gives the game away. To CBS’s low-information audience, however, O'Donnell succeeded in her goal of tarnishing Trump’s image while concealing the role her Democrat friends played in the heated hate rhetoric that inspired a would-be assassin.

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