Donald Trump was abruptly escorted out of a press release by a Secret Service agent on Monday after an armed suspect was shot outside the White House.
The president was just minutes into the briefing of his coronavirus when a Secret Service agent asked Trump to leave the pop stage and soon leave the room along with other administration officials.
Reporters were briefly placed in lockdown as members of the president’s security unit surrounded the West Wing. One Fox News correspondent said she heard two shots almost before Trump escaped.
Trump returned to the stage about 10 minutes later to confirm that someone had been taken to the hospital after a shooting outside the perimeter gate of the White House.
“There was an actual shooting and someone was taken to the hospital,” Trump said. The president said the shots were fired by law enforcement.
The suspect was armed, Trump said, but he did not provide many additional details. “I want to thank the Secret Service. They are fantastic. ”
“It looks like the person was shot by the Secret Service so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said, calling the episode “sorry.”
“It was outside the White House,” he said. “It appears that the shooting was done by legislation at the suspect, it was the suspect who was shot,” he continued.
Law enforcement officials sought to determine the suspect’s motive. The Secret Service confirmed the shooting shortly thereafter, describing it as an “officer who was shot on 17th Street and Pennsylvania Ave.”
“A male subject and a USSS officer were both transported to a local hospital,” the agency tweeted. “At no point during this incident was the White House complex broken into or any patrons were in danger.”
Trump admitted that he was not taken into the secured underground bunker, but to an area near the Oval Office. He later told reporters he was not afraid for his safety.
Asked if he was shocked by the incident, Trump asked reporters, ‘I do not know. Do I like rattling? ‘
After asking questions about the incident outside the White House, Trump returned to his scripted comments on the nation’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic, promoted what he said were the achievements of his administration, and used the platform for politics. messages – warn that if Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden wins the elections in November, Iran, China and North Korea will have “this country”.
Trump has been widely criticized for a lack of federal leadership during the pandemic. More than 163,000 people have died from Covid-19 related diseases and more than 5m cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the US to date.
During the briefing, David Guardian of the Guardian asked the president, “If 160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch, do you think you would have mentioned his resignation?”
Trump replied, “No, I would not have done that. I find it amazing what we have been able to do. If we did not close our country, we would have killed 1.5 to 2 million people already. We just mentioned it. Now we do not have to close it … If I had listened to a lot of people, we would have kept it open. ”
The president insists the US had done an ‘extraordinary job’.
However, the US government’s own public health expert has admitted that more lives would be saved if the US had previously adopted social distance limits. Throughout the pandemic, Trump has strongly opposed efforts to impose federal restrictions to curb the spread of the virus, has urged states to reopen and has expressed sympathy for right-wing protests against lockdowns.
In addition, the US is the only rich nation that has suffered a persistent and severe outbreak for more than four months, as the New York Times recently noted.
Sam Levin contributed to this report
