“Very brave” Secret Service agents stopped a suspect with “multiple weapons” at the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump said after he was moved to the White House in what the pool reporter described as the fastest motorcade in which he had ever traveled.
The suspected attacker’s actions led to a “room that was just totally unified,” the president said. He added that law enforcement is going through the suspect’s home in California. The suspect was described as having a “long gun.”
“He’s a very sick person,” Trump said.
The president said that he spoke with a Secret Service agent, who was shot at a “very close distance” with a “very powerful gun.”
“The vest did the job,” he said of the agent’s bulletproof vest. “I just spoke to the office and he’s doing great. Great shape,” he added. “Very high spirits.”
Trump added the hotel building was, in his opinion, not a very secure building and that is one reason, he said, why he is expanding event spaces at the White House.
“They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years,” he said. “We need levels of security that probably no one has ever seen before.”
“We’ll do it better within 30 days. We’ll make it bigger and better and even nicer,” Trump said of the event. “I fought like hell to stay, but it was protocol.”
“Probably a lone shooter, but we will find out,” he said. “We will find out very quickly.”
“I heard a noise. I sort of thought it was a tray going down,” Trump told a reporter. “It was either a tray or a bullet. I hoped it was a tray.”
“It was quite far away, but it was a gun,” he said. “I was watching what was happening. Probably should have gone down even faster.”
“We had resources sitting at tables. Some in disguise,” the president said. “He had a long way to go,” he added of the suspect, whom he said was stopped at the “first line of defense.”
“It’s not going to deter me from winning the war in Iran,” the president said. He added that he didn’t think that was a motivation for the suspected shooter.
