Trump Called Norah O'Donnell a Disgrace on Live TV. He Was Not Wrong.
Norah O’Donnell sat across from the president of the United States days after a gunman tried to kill him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and chose to read aloud, on camera, the assassin’s manifesto. The passage called Trump a pedophile and a rapist. She then asked for his reaction.
Trump called her a disgrace. The clip went everywhere.
The media’s defense — that O’Donnell was simply asking about a document in the public record — holds up for about thirty seconds before collapsing. There is a difference between reporting that a manifesto exists and its general character, and reading its most inflammatory accusations directly into the face of the person targeted by an attempted murder. One is journalism. The other is theater designed to force a specific response.
O’Donnell tried damage control on Facebook the next day. That she felt the need to do so says everything.
The Correspondents’ Dinner itself was already wreckage. The shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, ran through a metal detector and opened fire before being taken down. The room smelled of gunpowder. Mentalist Oz Pearlman was mid-trick, guessing the name of Karoline Leavitt’s baby, when the chaos started. Trump told O’Donnell he had made the Secret Service’s job harder by wanting to see what was happening. He said the NFL should sign the shooter for his speed.
The manifesto interview will be picked apart for weeks. The underlying event — an armed man attempting to breach a room full of senior US officials — deserves more sustained attention than it is getting. The media found the manifesto clip more useful.