Megyn Kelly and Pat Brosnan dissect the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where suspect Cole Allen breached security using a shotgun despite magnetometer failures. They condemn Secret Service negligence under outdated 2023 protocols and criticize left-wing media for radicalizing violence through unsubstantiated pedophile allegations. The discussion highlights Melania Trump's demand to fire Jimmy Kimmel over his "expectant widow" joke, arguing such rhetoric normalizes political murder while ABC ignores the danger despite a $16 million libel settlement against Trump. Ultimately, the episode asserts that systemic security lapses and toxic cultural narratives fuel this escalating cycle of political violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Secret Service Security Failures00:14:58
Is there any way to get a big net since you have the best fanged deck?
You have to build your own helicopter into the land?
No.
What?
What do you mean?
That's the biggest net.
That's why we're here to tell you about it.
So we can build it for you.
Spark it, my one call.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Happy Monday, everyone.
And we begin with the continued fallout from yet another assassination attempt, the third that we know about of President Donald Trump.
I mean, really, I think it's the fourth.
You could argue it's the fifth, but I think it's the fourth.
There was that guy who breached the White House and tried to set it on fire.
Sorry, not the White House, the Mar a Lago perimeter.
It happened Saturday night, the latest in the Washington Hilton Hotel at the annual.
White House Correspondents Association dinner, the very first that Mr. Trump has attended as president.
He's been refusing to go all the other times when they had it and he was president because of his contentious relationship with the press.
So, this was a big deal that he was actually going to show up.
The entire cabinet basically was there, several luminaries from Congress, members of.
And that's the same hotel where President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt on him 45 years ago.
We call it the Hinckley Hilton.
Because it's where John Hinckley tried to kill Ronald Reagan.
And I've been to this thing many times.
You go there for the radio and television correspondence dinner, you go there for the White House correspondence dinner, and it's basically just a big cattle call.
You go in the front, you get your picture taken on the red carpet, you mill about, you might go to a pre party at one of the little smaller conference rooms on that sort of first level.
And then you take a very, very long escalator downstairs.
Into the ballroom, which is where the main event is.
So, this guy didn't get anywhere close to the actual main event, but he was certainly all over that first floor and was intent on getting down to the level below where the president and everyone else was.
His name is 31 year old Cole Allen.
That's his name, Cole Allen.
He's 31.
He's self employed, he says he's a video game developer and part time teacher.
From the Los Angeles area.
This is just no coincidence.
It's just not.
It's just not.
The more education, the more likely you are to be a shooter or think that violence to solve your political problems is okay.
We've seen it time and time again.
Did anyone think, oh, it's a working class guy from Ohio?
No.
You knew who it was going to be.
My only shock was that he was 31 instead of between 18 and 25.
But the fact that it was a disaffected, relatively young man.
Well educated, not a shock at all.
Teacher, not a shock.
He attempted to breach the final layer of security at the event.
Okay, so like right above that long, long escalator that goes downstairs, there is a layer of perimeter there where they have a layer of security.
And that's where you would have to go through a magnetometer.
And he ran through it.
He ran through the mags with his guns, et cetera, reportedly carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple.
Knives.
You can see here, this just came out a picture of the shotgun that Alan was carrying in a photo obtained by the New York Post.
More on Alan's motivation in just a bit, but here's a quick recap of what happened.
Alan booked a room at the Hilton in early April.
So it's amazing.
He seems to have come upon this plan this month.
He traveled from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. via train, one presumes because they don't check.
For guns on trains, the way they do on planes.
In other words, Allen was able to travel across the country and check into a hotel where the President of the United States and all of his top advisors and cabinet secretaries were with multiple lethal weapons on him.
According to CBS, surveillance footage from Saturday shows Allen, a graduate of the prestigious Caltech University, leaving his 10th floor room inside the hotel.
By the way, this is hotel surveillance.
This is not Secret Service surveillance.
This is like there was no Secret Service.
Surveillance inside the stairwells, to our knowledge.
So, this is hotel surveillance, shows him leaving his 10th floor room where he checked in the day before on Friday, inside of the hotel, dressed in all black, carrying the shotgun, the handgun, and the knives in a bag.
We're told.
Instead of the elevator, he ran down 10 flights of stairs, emerging at the terrace level, one floor above where the event was taking place, and the primary access point to the room where the president was on stage.
In other words, the access point was that layer above, that's where you'd go through the mags.
Once you got through them, you'd go into the escalator and get downstairs.
The event began at 8 p.m.
We are told that the president was seated around 8 15 p.m.
And at 8 36 p.m., as you can see in this surveillance footage, Alan made a mad dash past the final layer of security.
Look at screen left.
There he goes through the magnetometer.
You can see that there's a Secret Service agent, we believe, pulling his gun.
So he comes on scene from the left.
You can see the outlines of the mag.
It's white.
You see the figure run through.
And very quickly, guns are drawn and he's out of frame right there on his way.
And indeed, he was not shot, but one Secret Service agent was.
Several rounds were fired, and we do not know exactly how that one officer was shot.
So, one Secret Service officer was shot.
Thankfully, he was wearing his vest and has already been released.
From the hospital, but it's unclear if the would be assassin shot him or whether he was shot by friendly fire.
That'll be one of the things that they investigate.
The suspect was not shot, so the Secret Service did not manage to hit him.
Allen, though, did not make it beyond the terrorist level.
He was taken down, and you could see him on his stomach in pictures with his clothing removed, but he did not get close to Trump.
He did not get past that terrorist level.
He was up a level above, as you can see here in this diagram from the Daily Mail.
He wasn't that far away either.
And this, don't kid yourself, could have been truly catastrophic at one of those most high profile events in Washington.
I mean, many of us are asking, like, how this could have happened.
Like, truly, what's going on with the Secret Service?
Because let me tell you something even with my own security, and I'm not the president of the United States, they've made clear to me so many times that.
The best security is the one that prevents the person from ever getting anywhere near you.
You know, that it is monitoring exactly what you're going to be doing, what the vulnerable points are, whether there are any threats, that kind of thing.
So that, you know, things like watching the hotel, making anybody staying there put their bags through a mag in the week leading up to the big event.
It's really not that hard.
They do it in other countries all the time.
Something like that.
Like preemptive security.
Yes, the last line of defense protecting President Trump did work.
You know, the mags outside of where he was sitting.
Should we really have to wait until he's that close?
What if there were more than one?
What if this were like a band of five guys?
Again, they missed.
If they fired at him, they missed.
He doesn't have a wound on him that we know about.
Now, they took him down.
I'm not taking that away from them.
I'm just saying.
A lot of questions about how it was, I guess, the second last.
Realm of security around him.
The very, very last would have been the Secret Service agents right next to the president.
Thank God it didn't get that far.
You know, personally, I think about what was inside that ballroom.
Like Melania was to the president's right, the first lady sitting there.
She doesn't often appear with him at these events, but she was at this one.
And who was right next to her?
A very pregnant Caroline Levitt.
I think she's like literally nine months pregnant.
I think she's doing a week.
A very pregnant Caroline Levitt sitting there, who was in the front row of the ballroom, Stephen Miller and his very pregnant wife, Katie Miller.
She's got to be due within a month or so.
You know, not far from them, Erica Kirk, who is not pregnant, but good Lord, lost her husband in an assassination that took place seven, eight months ago.
Just Steve Scalise was there, who was shot in an act of political violence on Capitol Hill.
By a deranged gunman who is a Bernie Sanders fan.
I just, I don't know.
There were a lot of especially vulnerable people there last night, even outside of the president, the secretary of war, the FBI director, the acting attorney general.
The level of catastrophe this could have been is rattling.
It really is rattling.
The president is not as safe as we need him to be.
And the question really is, why not?
According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration did provide a level of security at this event that was lower than other gatherings with high ranking officials.
Like they did not unleash the same amount of security that they would have had this been an inauguration or a State of the Union.
Why not?
Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth.
All the top dignitaries, all the people who run this country were there, other than like some House members and some senators, but they're more plentiful.
There's only one Secretary of War.
That was typical of a White House correspondence dinner.
Okay, so they don't normally treat those like they're a State of the Union or an inauguration.
But in this new threat environment, where the president's been targeted three times already, where we had Charlie Kirk shot and killed nine months ago, where Luigi Mangione's about to go on trial for murdering.
The CEO of United Healthcare and an act of political violence of a different sort.
Like what the environment right now, it feels closer to 1968 than 2028 at the moment.
White House Chief of Staff Suzy Wiles will reportedly hold a meeting with the people in charge of Trump's security now to discuss security protocol.
They say that she's been a big backer of the Secret Service and a defender of them.
And I think she's finally coming to see maybe she's been a little too defensive of them.
It's not to take anything away from those who did their job on site, but once again, much like Butler, this seems to have been a problem in the planning.
Who's doing the fucking planning?
That's what I want to know.
Truly, who didn't have someone patrolling the rooftops in Butler, Pennsylvania?
Who seated the rooftops in Utah when Charlie was killed?
And who didn't think to take a look at the hotel guests or an outer perimeter outside of Hinckley Hilton when the president of the United States and all of these cabinet secretaries were going to be there?
Who?
That's what I want to know.
Who is sitting with the pen and the paper and the computer and the maps?
That's the person I want to know.
Of course, the guys on site did their job.
Though we should talk about the AIM problem that we seem to have with the Secret Service.
But like the planning on this, you don't have to have a law enforcement background to see it seems to have been woefully inadequate.
Look, watch here how long it takes the Secret Service.
To remove President Trump after shots ring out.
Now, I'm going to cover him after 10 seconds.
All right.
So the shots had rung and the people are getting underneath their tables.
And President Trump is sitting there.
He's sitting there.
It took nine of those 10 seconds before an agent even came to stand in front of him.
And the people are already under their tables.
What the?
Yeah.
Why?
As you could see from your screen, if you're watching this on YouTube, Vice President Vance was removed from the stage well before Trump.
Why?
Unfortunately, there seem to be a growing number of people like this would be assassin who hold a deep rooted hatred for members of the Trump administration and who would very much like something to be done to stop them from governing.
And this guy Allen did not do anything to hide his disgust for Trump and his team.
Here's his post on Blue Sky on April 15th calling Vice President Vance a piece of shit for not supporting funding for Ukraine.
Here he is on April 8th, the day the ceasefire.
Fire with Iran was announced, writing, quote, Trump is literally one of those villains that if you beat his ass hard enough, he'll join your team.
Don't really have any other insights to this.
It's not really actionable because no way Schumer just canes him into acting his age, but like it would probably literally work on him.
Trump's Violent Manifesto Details00:05:04
He also wrote a manifesto about his assassination attempt, which CBS's Nora O'Donnell read in part to the president last night on 60 Minutes.
Watch.
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?
Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're horrible people, horrible people.
Yeah, he did write that.
I'm not a rapist.
I didn't rape anybody.
Oh, you think he was referring to you?
Excuse me.
I'm not a pedophile.
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.
But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably, I read the manifesto.
You know, he's a sick person.
You should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I'm not any of those things.
Mr. President, I'm just a little bit of a.
Excuse me.
You shouldn't be reading that on 60 Minutes.
You're a disgrace.
But go ahead, let's finish the interview.
The other thing that he wrote in the interview.
You're disgraceful.
I had no problem with her reading the would-be assassin's words to him.
I don't think that was beyond the pale.
Like, she's trying to get his reaction to what this guy said about the president.
I don't think I would have done it.
Just I was thinking it through.
Like, would I have read those words to him?
I don't think so.
But I have no problem with the fact that she did.
I do, however, have a serious problem with her weird, oh, you think that was about you?
What the fuck?
What are you saying?
Of course it was about him.
What is that?
And she knows it.
She's not an idiot.
She knows very well that was a comment about President Trump.
What is she trying to like get Trump?
Like, aha, it's an admission by you that you are a rapist and a pedophile.
The fact that you recognize that was about you.
You recognize that was about him too.
That's why you read it to him.
And if you didn't recognize that it was about him, then I do have a problem with you reading it to him.
What's the, what is, pick a lane.
Which is it?
What was that?
Oh, you think it was about you?
Yeah, it was obviously about him.
Why are you faking this?
You're so fake.
Like the acting.
Honestly, it's just, what is that?
And the other thing is if you're going to read it to him, if you're going to read him that, somebody saying he's a pedophile and he's a rapist, and you're just reading it to him because you're reading the words of his would be assassin to get his reaction, then you say, forgive me, Mr. President, quoting here.
And then he would have forgiven her.
Trump would have forgiven her.
He would have understood she's not doing this to be an asshole.
But she was doing it to be an ass.
And then she doubled down on that exact thing, and Trump picked up on it.
We're going to have more on this assassin's manifesto in a minute because it goes on.
And it's actually very interesting.
I have to say, it's very interesting.
It's like he wants us to like him.
He wants us to feel sorry for him, maybe.
He feels kind of sad or sorry about what he's doing, or he wants us to believe that.
And like he's not ranging.
Like a mat raging like a madman.
Like he's not going to get away with an insanity defense.
This guy's cooked.
But it's very interesting from those standpoints, among others.
And by the way, the manifesto, which makes perfectly clear his motive, he wanted to kill President Trump.
He thought he was all those terrible things and he thought it was his obligation to stop him.
Somebody might want to tell Barack Obama because at 5 15 p.m. Eastern yesterday, hours after the manifesto was released, he wrote on X quote, this is former President Obama, although we don't yet have the details about the motives.
Behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondence Dinner.
Yeah, we do.
We do.
Why are you saying that?
He goes on.
It's incumbent upon all of us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.
Why did he write, although we don't yet have the details on the motive?
We have exactly the details, way more than we ever normally get, because the guy wrote a manifesto in great detail.
In great detail.
He wrote about what he hated about Donald Trump.
He then went through these might be the objections to me doing this.
Let me take them on one, two, three, four, five, and rebut why the objections don't hold water for me and why I really feel like I do need to do this.
And I mean, like, it was the most detailed.
Insurance Ad Break and Questions00:03:04
You could ask for no better.
Truly, like, what is he talking about?
Like, this is, it's like a parody, you know, like, we may never know.
We've been seeing that.
With left wing violence.
We saw it after Charlie Kirk.
The shooter wrote on the bullets, you know, fascist.
We may never know.
No, we know.
We have a good idea.
If this guy shot Charlie, he wrote his motivations on the bullets.
So just read the bullets.
This is, I'm tired of this.
Like there are some things we need answers to, like the questions we outlined at the top of the show.
His motivations, not really.
Those have been written down.
They were given to his family members, to his friends, and to police.
So, what of the Secret Service, and how does this keep happening?
Joining me now for reaction, Pat Brosnan.
He's a former NYPD detective and host of The Bat Cave with Pat Brosnan.
Pat owned, developed the second largest security company in the nation up until just 2024.
So, he knows how to keep not only massive retail.
Spots safe with thousands and thousands of customers coming through, but he knows how to protect dignitaries and presidents and has with the best in the business.
And Susan Crabtree, she's national correspondent for Real Clear Politics, and she covers the Secret Service literally better than anyone in the country.
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More Assets Needed for Protection00:15:37
Thank you both so much for being here.
So, Susan, let me start with you as the reporter on this beat and your take on the questions that are being asked and where, if anywhere, those who oversee the Secret Service may be potentially realizing they fell down on the job.
Sadly, this is another epic failure for the Secret Service leadership.
And I say that deliberately because, once again, just like Butler, these lower agents, these rank and file agents, were put in a place to fail and set up to fail.
They performed remarkably considering the circumstances.
However, there were several elements of this that are concerning.
One being they were taking down the checkpoint, the magnometer.
They were sitting more idly than a robust posture when Cole Allen decided to rampage through there.
And then there was a sort of a bit of chaos.
We don't know if there was friendly fire that was resulting in the uniformed division officer going down and taking a bullet.
Thankfully, he was okay.
These people put their lives on the line.
There's nobody, there's no better part of humanity than these agents and officers.
So I am not faulting them.
This is a serious leadership issue at the Secret Service.
I have been warning about this since Butler.
I was very happy to.
Report on the reforms of the Secret Service.
I was expecting we report on the reforms of the Secret Service.
Instead, we've seen failure after failure.
And I'm told that I will break a little news here with you exclusively that Susie Wiles was pushing back.
She was directly overseeing the Secret Service and was pushing back on DHS under Christine Ohm, providing some oversight to the reforms after several incidents that I reported on.
You know, the Code Pink incident.
Where they got too close to Trump in that restaurant nearby the White House.
I reported on agents falling asleep on the job at the UN General Assembly, the fact that Melania rode up that escalator that was stalled.
There was a celebration of Charlie Kirk's assassination by a Secret Service agent.
Most recently, two sex scandals, one broken by James O'Keefe.
The one I broke was last weekend, where I asked the White House do they still have full confidence in Sean Curran?
Did not get a usable response back on that.
This has been.
Time and time again, failure after failure.
And from what I understand, Christy Noam was trying to do something about it, wanted to put a political chief of staff, sorry, chief counsel in after the one that Sean Curran chose crashed and burned, literally was in, pretending to be an officer and got pushed out by the White House.
There's just been so many incidents.
I cannot even list them all here for you.
But It's the DEI is alive and well in the Secret Service, and you layer on top of that this sort of culture of corruption that I've been reporting about since 2012 with the prostitution scandal, and it's just still needs serious reforms.
And for some reason, Congress is not doing its job.
Can you just give us a little background on Sean Curran?
Is he in charge of Secret Service right now?
That's the director of the Secret Service.
You have Deputy Director.
Quinn, Matt Quinn.
He has a cat background.
He has counter assault.
He's very, you know, he has all the background he needs.
Sean Kern is honestly, they rushed him through.
He was in charge of Trump's detail.
He was leader of that detail.
And he had the receipts.
He was pushing for more assets from the Secret Service.
And as you know, Kimberly Cheadle was being political and not treating him as a regular president.
She was treating him as any old former president like Jimmy Carter.
There was not enough assets at Butler.
Some of them were being pushed over to Jill Biden's event.
She had more post standards than even Trump did that night because she had a similar 400 person event in a closed ballroom that night.
All of this is just, I expected way more reforms.
And I'm telling you, the White House pushed back on those, on some of the reforms that they wanted to put in.
I have a statement I can read to you by Carolyn Levitt.
When I reported that Susie Wiles is pushing back on this, she tells me this morning nobody cares more or has pushed harder or has asked more hard questions about President Trump's safety than Susie Wiles.
The insinuation that Susie would object to anything that would help strengthen protection for her boss and friend is absolutely absurd.
But you're reporting that it's not absurd.
It's not that Susie Wiles did push back on an attempt by Christy Noam to.
Add an additional person overseeing the security protocol.
There's two attempts.
One was to put a political chief counsel in charge of the secret service or put him as install him there.
The other issue was a deputy chief of staff at DHS was at the secret service to provide recommendations for reforms.
This is recently, and he was walked out of the building when Sean Curran complained to Susie Wiles, according to my sources.
Wow, but this is relevant because what we're told is that the reason.
That the White House Correspondents' Dinner did not have a higher security profile is because there's typically a DHS employee who would make the recommendation.
This one needs to be bumped up.
Like, don't treat this like some random dinner.
You need to treat this more like a State of the Union.
And our understanding is that that didn't happen, that recommendation was not made because I presume it had never been made in the past.
And I guess whoever the DHS person was, and I don't know if this is Mark Wayne Mullen or somebody beneath him, didn't see the need, notwithstanding the fact that this is not an ordinary president.
This is somebody who they've already tried to kill three times.
Absolutely.
They were using a 2023 model, Biden model, on Donald Trump.
It is the same issue.
That was what we had at Butler.
You Trump broke the mold when it comes to the threats against him.
The national security should revise all of their former models.
They have these models, that's the first step.
When you get assigned to be in charge of the White House correspondence dinner for the Secret Service, you pull out the old model and then you revise it.
If there's been any renovations to the space, the hotel, there haven't been.
And you, right now, though.
Are you kidding me with all of these cabinet secretaries in this?
This was a disgrace to have all of our cabinet and dignitaries under the tables.
It was a disgrace to the entire world.
And there were warning signs that I have reported on consistently over the last year.
Dan Bongino, at the time when Sean Kern was up for this job, said, Sean Kern is not a reformer.
He's not a change agent.
Suddenly, Dan Bongino went silent when he joined the administration about that.
I did not.
Stay silent.
I was ready for the reforms.
They did not come consistently in terms of getting rid of the DEI that the Secret Service was riddled with under Joe Biden.
And they have a goal of 30% female workforce.
That's exactly right.
Like 20, 25.
Keep going.
That's exactly right.
And they also were, you know, there was a lot of things that needed to be reformed.
There's an exodus, mass exodus.
Output transcript Out of the Secret Service, a brain drain from the senior talent.
And now they're trying to hire really quickly, but they have lowered the hiring standards.
You no longer have to have a college degree.
Recently, they lowered the drug standards.
It's completely different than it used to be 10 years ago.
It's time and time again, you see it in the people that they're hiring.
You had, they missed a Glock at Donald Trump's golf course in Sterling, Virginia.
I reported on that.
They've had, like I said, multiple.
Sex scandals.
There was a cat fight outside of between two uniformed officers outside of Obama's residence.
I mean, these are just signs of problems within the Secret Service.
And when you have an agent falling asleep, there's also been an FBI raid.
And this is when the Secret Service stopped talking to me last year.
They used to get back to me regularly, and they stopped talking to me when I reported on an FBI raid of a Secret Service's agent's home.
And I think he was on presidential protective detail last December because he was involved in a tax scheme that involved possibly 30 other agents.
What is going on at the Secret Service?
This was his moonlighting career.
There is serious problems going on at the Secret Service.
And, you know, I was more than happy to report on the reforms.
In fact, I kept telling them, if you're doing some hiring at, you know, for college athletes, if you're reaching out, Whatever you're doing, let me know.
I'm happy to report on positive elements.
But they never engaged me.
And I know why.
There were some serious problems going on in that detail, even a couple months before Donald Trump, before the Butler assassination attempt and the subsequent one at the golf course nearby, Mar a Lago.
There were some problems going on in that detail, and I reported on those problems.
And ever since, they've been concerned about me.
And I'm sorry to say, there were formal complaints lodged against Sean Kern and his deputy, and they were cleared.
But the Secret Service is notorious for playing favorites with agents, and this culture of corruption has to end.
They retaliate against agents, and this DEI problem has never been because they have a hiring problem.
They can't really effectively deal with the DEI issues that occurred under the Biden administration.
And meanwhile, President Trump is sent out there like a sitting duck because they won't get real about what the problems are.
Susan, I know you got to run.
Thank you for coming on and giving us.
Your exclusive information.
We appreciate it.
Great reporting as always.
My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Turning now to Pat Brosnan.
Pat, your reaction, first of all, to everything Susan just said.
Well, she's spot on.
Good afternoon.
On the vast majority of the points that she referenced, I mean, to be very frank with you, Megan, if I had a burner in front of the front burner, ramping up the president's security detail would be on that burner.
Throwing out the outdated model that Susan astutely referenced from 2023.
I'm in kind of a little bit of a unique position.
I've been physically present by design and by coincidence at all four locations.
I went out to Butler because I had to see building six in late July.
I jumped on a motorcycle and went there.
I was out at the Irish Riviera, Long Beach Island, so it wasn't a long haul.
And I went there and I took a close look at the field.
I scoured the terrain.
I made some assessments and did some.
Pretty significant reporting on it, painstaking, detailed reporting.
But I also walked the perimeter of the Trump International and saw the area where Wesley Routh was secreted for 12 hours.
Also, as in Mar a Lago, I've been through that North Gate 100 times.
And then I've had a number of different dinners and business meetings at the Hilton Washington.
So, what does all that mean?
Well, it means a lot because I'm intimately familiar.
And the fact is, That's what we saw Saturday night was a, I would call it a catastrophic failure of the four C's communication, coordination, control, and command.
And that's the omniscience that's needed and necessary and required when you're protecting the biggest of all the big shots, President of the United States.
What do you make of these reports that people were allowed to just come into the hotel room, check in this shooter?
He checked in Friday.
The event was Saturday.
No one ever magged his bags.
He just ran down the stairwell with his guns in his duffel.
The woman saw him take the gun out, assemble it.
She said, He ran out and did a bunch of shooting.
I mean, so easy, Pat.
Megan is a catastrophic failure on so many levels.
I don't know, should I go alphabetically, chronologically, or just random?
But let's start with the Connecticut Avenue entrance to this hotel with 1,100 rooms.
2500 guests coming in and folks coming in and out all week.
At Brasden Risk Consultants, my security company, over the years, we provided security for the Republican National Convention.
We provided it for the King of Saudi Arabia, the Prime Minister, so a lot of different folks.
So we know a good bit about the protocol process and procedures that are absolutely mandatory when it comes to attempting to completely sail proof and fail proof in terms of not just the security measures.
Which were delinquent, and we'll discuss that.
But the rudimentary stuff, like the due diligence, and the due diligence is critical.
The fact that they did not vet and do a background search on all the guests in that hotel for the prior three to seven days, somewhere in there, okay?
The significant failure and a particularly glaring red flag with this individual, Cole Allen.
Is he hit both check boxes?
He's solo and he traveled a great distance and he got in the night before.
Yes.
Those are clues.
Stevie Wonder would have picked up on them.
Let's be crystal clear.
They're easy ones, they're ground balls.
I mean, that is so true.
I know this just from my own security team.
Like, if I travel, if I'm going to be up close with people and they know who they are in advance, they will.
They'll make sure it's not somebody who's like appears to have a grudge who traveled a long distance, like all those red flags.
That's for me.
Reckless Negligence in Protocols00:10:24
Like, this is the president and the entire cabinet virtually.
It's incredible that they allowed this guy to get within 100 yards of him, never mind 100 feet.
Mind bending.
It's mind bending.
When you think of the concept of layered security, this is the textbook example of what was needed and necessary and was failed to be implemented.
A 200 or 250 foot lobby in the distance from Connecticut Avenue.
West to the doors to the international ballroom, which is subterranean, by the way.
I've been there.
To not have hosted as fixed posts, armed and uniformed and plainclothes armed officers throughout that lobby is the height of negligence.
It's the height of reckless negligence.
To not have a fixed post at the stairway at ingress and egress points is supremely negligent.
And to not have a fixed post, At the base of the elevator is supremely negligent.
These are fundamental.
Yeah, like Pat, why wouldn't they have said, okay, we got to think about people who are staying in the hotel and there's going to have to be a person at every stairwell?
Like what?
Maybe this is just 2020 hindsight.
I don't know.
You've done these things before.
Is that 2020 hindsight or is that an obvious one to have looked into?
It's really a very obvious one to look into.
And it's coordinated and implemented in conjunction with the CSO, Chief Security Officer of the hotel.
They were Canton Hamilton.
That's how we operated it.
Our senior leadership would interface not just at the RNC with the CSOs of the specific hotel, but hotels in every direction, east, northwest, and south, for a few blocks from Madison Square Garden and different venues.
That's called doing your homework.
That's called intelligent and pragmatic due diligence.
And it was not done here.
And it's shameful.
Okay, how about the fact that this guy, we saw the video of him running.
Through the mag.
There was one mag still standing.
They were in the process of dismantling the other mags.
There's one that they were taking apart as this guy ran through the one mag.
They seem to have gone into, well, the dinner's started.
POTUS is inside the dinner.
Like, we're good.
The people, we're not going to let anybody else in.
So we're going to take everything down, like without anticipating, Pat.
But what if somebody isn't respectful of the 8 15 start time?
What if somebody comes right now when we're all feeling super lax with two guns and a bunch of knives and tries to run through us?
8 to cited.
Because I was in civil service as a detective.
What you're seeing in real time, front and close, the civil service mindset, civil service mindset.
And that doesn't apply to this president.
Not when we are now in an everything, everywhere, all at once threat environment for the past 22 months, where you astutely pointed out, Megan, and no surprise, that it's four.
That's right, four.
Cole Austin Martin on February 22nd or 26th, he wanted to go in and kill the president.
The president just happened to not be.
In Mar a Lago at the time, and they neutralized them at the North Gate of Mar a Lago.
But to not have this at this particular time is unbelievable.
It really is that these fundamental and rudimentary steps are not in place.
And the civil service mindset, and that's why I said early on, if I had a front burner in front of the front burner, it would be throwing out the rule book as it relates to the Secret Service methodology and policy.
That was before Trump.
That's another guy.
That's Carter or somebody.
Somebody sleeping at the switch and unremarkable.
Trump is, if nothing else, extremely remarkable.
And he has developed an army of wicked, evil haters who are committed to murdering him.
That book has to go out.
What has to come in?
I have some thoughts on it.
But I will say the first thing is it's got to be a consideration for bringing in special forces operators.
They are the best and the brightest and the fastest.
And they do not have a civil.
Service mindset.
They have a battlefield mindset.
It's entirely different.
They adhere better, and I'm saying it as a former civil service detective, they adhere better to ironclad protocols.
They're much better at the command structure, reporting structure.
They would not ever be disassembling a magnetometer.
And they would not, Megan, have had their faces buried in their phones, which I saw on various clips.
Not in this lifetime.
I hate to ask this because I'm sure anybody could make this mistake.
But we saw six rounds fired when that guy approached the golf course.
He was lying in wait for Trump for 12 hours.
And when Secret Service finally discovered him, they fired on him six times and missed every single time.
Now, here we see a collection of, I think it's both local law enforcement and Secret Service.
This is why we arm the Secret Service.
This is why we arm cops who are there sent there to protect the president in case a shooter comes by with a gun.
This guy had two of them, ran right past the good guys with the guns who did appear to open fire and once again missed, missed and missed and missed, and may have actually hit a fellow Secret Service officer.
We're not sure who hit him.
And we don't know exactly how many rounds, if any, the actual assailant fired.
We just have this one woman's eyewitness testimony saying he shot a bunch of times.
So we don't know, but like, Does it surprise you at all that there's so much missing going on?
I'd like to think that they're all like that sharpshooter who took out the killer and butler.
But these guys were a lot closer.
They were a lot closer than that sharpshooter and with a lot worse aim.
Well, again, it comes back to civil service mentality.
You may be mandated to train every six months, perhaps every 12 months.
I'm not certain, but probably not much more than that.
Completely unlike the military, it's a completely different set of protocols for practicing and for training with your weapons.
And I do concur.
A lot of rounds do miss.
We don't have the facts yet.
That may very likely have been friendly fire Saturday night, but certainly at the golf course, there was a number of rounds fired at Wesley Roth, and he was unscathed.
But again, it comes to gross negligence at every level.
Even then, September 15th to 24th at the International, one dog, Megan, one foot patrolman, and one dog would have detected him in minutes.
I walked exactly that path where he was up against the gate in the bushes.
A dog would have picked him up lightning fast.
One drone.
He was lying in wait.
Butler.
He was lying in wait for 12 hours, that guy.
12 hours.
12 hours he was there.
12 hours.
He had his little pack of food.
He had his waters, his supplies, a little blanket for his little leggies.
I mean, you just can't make it up.
You can't make it up.
12 hours.
And it wasn't the Amazon forest.
I feel like Trump is going to get killed.
I'm.
I'm very worried that he's going to get killed.
If we didn't start taking this extremely seriously after Butler, Pat, after Butler, then we're not going to.
I mean, so Susie Weil is going to have a meeting.
Oh, great, great.
But like a meeting, what are you talking about?
Like, I don't know if everybody should be fired.
What, what, if they call you tomorrow and say, Pat, please come in and take over, take over all of the president's security, all of it, Secret Service, everywhere, what's the first thing you do?
We bring in the best and the brightest.
We pay up.
I would make sure that they made double so they wouldn't leave, which is exactly what I did at my business.
You pay up, you make sure that the best and the brightest stays with you, surround yourself with them, learn from them, forget that you're the leader because they've forgotten more than you know, and take their collective wisdom, expertise, and experience and meld that into an ironclad policy, protocol, procedure, training, vetting that ensures that the president will not be murdered.
Because I share that with you, Megan, every single day I think that a bullet.
To catch him.
And I thought, mistakenly, sadly, that after Butler, which was beyond biblical level catastrophe, I thought, and September 15th, I thought when he was out of 46 and in again as 47, that it would have been far, far, far superior.
And it's not.
These fundamental missteps, and they're not even missteps, they're catastrophic failures in terms of planning.
Hexhook on the response, right?
When he ran to an The magnetometer, but it's all in the planning.
It's all in setting the stage.
And I never should have gotten to that point.
What about the fact that JD Vance was removed from the stage before the president?
And the fact that all these people are under their tables, Pat, and Trump is still sitting up there without an agent in front of him, without being pulled away?
Like, how does that happen?
He's a tough cookie from Queens.
That's all I can say.
He's a tough cookie.
He wouldn't leave.
And I watched the 60 Minutes interview.
And I know from Butler because a friend of mine was present, a Secret Service guy, and he gave me the inside skinny on it.
When Trump stood up with his fists raised and had somehow kicked off his shoes that were tightly laced, they had to wrestle him off that stage.
They had to wrestle him off the stage.
He's a tough guy.
I saw the same exact thing, and they were yelling at him to hit the floor and to crawl out.
And he just stayed at it.
He's really not scared of these threats.
President Survives Dramatic Threats00:02:21
And it's a testament to all of that.
He was extremely cool and composed.
Yes, I know.
He was incredibly cool and composed.
And of course, immediately was like, let's go back out there.
We'll have.
We'll have the dinner.
We'll have the dinner.
Thank God they talked him out of that.
Because when I was watching it, I remarked to the bride, I said, he's definitely going to come out and finish this up because he won't let a criminal thug disrupt his plans.
That's how his mind thinks.
And that's what he kept saying on 60 Minutes.
But I guess other minds prevailed.
But overall, horrific.
Horrific.
It's terrifying, Megan.
It really is.
Because these were fundamental resource allocations, labor allocations, fixed posts, and this could have been mitigated.
This guy should never, ever, ever have been able to run through the magnetometer checkpoint.
Should never, ever have happened.
Yep.
I really hope they are calling you, Pat Brosnan, and I hope somebody listens this time before this happens again.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you, Megan.
Unbelievable, right?
I mean, it's stunning.
It's like we're getting used to this.
How crazy is that?
Not just assassination attempts on Trump, but left wing violence.
What's causing it?
What is it?
I have a lot of thoughts on this, and I have a lot of thoughts on the messaging around this.
We're going to take a quick break.
We're going to come back.
I'll talk about it with you guys, and we're going to bring in the guys, the rest of the team from Real Clear Politics, to react to everything that's happening.
Stay tuned.
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Trauma vs. Political Violence00:15:37
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Joining me now, Tom Bevan, co founder and president of Real Clear Politics, Carl Cannon, RCP's Washington Bureau Chief, and Andrew Walworth, the chief content officer for Real Clear Politics.
Together they host Real Clear Politics on the Megyn Kelly channel, Serious XM 111, right before this show, and you can listen to their show via podcast later in the day as well.
Guys, welcome back.
Okay, so.
Two of you guys were there, and I've got to start with this as I completely understand that there was a real threat.
There was a lunatic with two armed guns, bloated guns, and knives out there.
But the dramatics of some of these reporters who are talking like they just got back from NAM, it's like, okay, like deep breaths.
You're fine.
You were never actually in danger.
And they, like, just the over the top.
Acting is a bit much.
I'll give you just one example.
Brian Stelter was out there today comparing the trauma that he went through to that experienced by actual shooting victims in mass shootings, like one we saw last weekend where a nutcase killed his seven children.
Look at this.
Today, I've been having some memories come back from last night, but I've also been thinking about Shreveport, about the mass murder a week ago.
I was thinking about the mall shooting in Louisiana where that teen girl died a few days ago.
The scourge of gun violence is all too common in America, and I've been thinking about how people.
Process it.
My sources, my contacts, my friends who were in the room with me, they're processing the traumatic stress.
And I know for me personally, the memories have been flooding back today.
I remembered talking to House Speaker Mike Johnson two minutes before all this went down.
And then I remembered as we were crouching on the ground, hearing people shouting, Get down, and wondering if there was some assailant who was loose in the ballroom.
So those memories are coming back.
And I'm also thinking about how people who work at places like CNN, people like this, we have access to counselors, we have access to employee assistance programs, we typically have health insurance.
But what about folks in Shreveport, right?
What about folks who experienced this in their communities, in their hometowns, in their schools, in their churches?
Okay.
First of all, Brian Stelter tweeted out oh, it was just a bunch of plates that fell.
It was.
So, like, which is it?
You were so terrified you need counseling, or you actually weren't one of the scared ones because you thought it was plates?
And second of all, like, to even raise an actual mass shooting in comparison to what he went through is absurd.
I personally, my favorite of the night was this guy, Michael Glance, who's an agent from CAA, who never missed a bite of his salad through the whole thing.
And somebody took a video of him eating his salad.
I'm like, that's hashtag goals.
Like, everybody's under the tables and he sat there eating his meal.
And then Dana White, I was told, I didn't see it personally, but I was told he was like, this is the greatest night of my life.
He was like, on top of the table.
He was watching the security do its thing.
He had like admiration and respect for them.
This guy spends his life in the arena, so he's tough to scare.
Tom Bevan, you tell me your take on it as somebody who was actually there.
So, and I saw Brian Stelter's thing, and I tweeted something back at him saying, you know, listen, there was a moment, there was about 90 seconds when after the noise, right, which was this muffled sound that we couldn't be sure was a gunshot, and, you know, that the doors opened and the Secret Service came swarming in the room like 50 agents.
And they were like plowing through, climbing over tables and all that.
And that was kind of dramatic.
And we didn't know if there was a shooter in the middle of the room they were trying to get to or what was going on.
And everyone was looking around.
And, and, um, but then we realized that, you know, they were trying, they were there trying to get to the cabinet members and get them out of the room.
And once they did that, and they obviously got the president, the vice president, the first lady off the stage, then there was that was it.
I mean, we were all kind of stood there and for about 15 minutes trying to, you know, and there was, you, There wasn't good Wi Fi in the ballroom, Megan, which is why people couldn't send texts or get calls or whatever.
So there was a bit of an information void.
And then there was, you'd hear, well, someone said, well, maybe it was a tray dropped or something that, you know.
But there was this bizarre reaction from folks.
Some folks were like diving under tables.
There was a table right next to us where, after about 10 minutes, these two women literally crawled out from underneath the tablecloth.
Like they were under there the whole time.
I just stood up to try and see what was going on.
I'm not mocking them, but when everybody else is milling about, you saw these people who were crouching under the tables for a long, long period while everybody else had already started milling about again and going about their business.
And they were giving off Michelle Kaczynski vibes.
Do you guys know that reference?
Michelle.
She was the NBC Today Show correspondent who was rowing her little canoe through the non existent flood.
And then the firefighters walked right by her in ankle deep water.
It's like.
At some point, you have to stop pretending that you are in the middle of a mass shooting and just eat your salad.
Yeah.
I will say, you know, there were exceptions.
You know, Erica Kirk was there, and obviously she has trauma that's real and recent.
And when she left, you know, she was in tears.
And, you know, Carl, RFK Jr. was there.
Obviously, he's got some family trauma that's wrapped up.
But for the fact he had no reaction.
Yeah.
RFK Jr. also ate his meal.
His dad was killed in a ballroom like this.
He was like, I'm good.
Where's my what are we?
Is the steak coming?
Is it going to be medium or medium rare?
Like, there were examples of people who, let's just face it, like it's one of these things is like a test of how you deal with trauma and like fear.
And I think we'd all like to believe that we look, this is poor Katie Miller.
I feel so bad for her.
She's she's very pregnant right now, and that's clearly a secret service agent with her, Major Garrett, and Stephen Miller trying to protect her.
And if you were married to Stephen Miller, you'd have to seriously be worried that they're going to target him because the left has made him into such a villain.
There's Cheryl Hines.
Running after they swoop away the principal, RFKJ.
They leave the spouse behind, unless you're Melania.
So she's running after it.
It's not great to be the spouse, but you do kind of wonder how you'd react.
And I do respect the ones, I'm sure Tom and Carl, you were two of them who were just cool, just cool about it.
We just, I mean, Carl actually went and started walking.
He's an old school reporter.
I'll let him tell his story.
He started walking away from the table, heading toward where he thought the action was.
I just stood up and was like, we were looking around and just kind of, you know, as I said, it was like 90 seconds of drama and then the rest was.
Was kind of just a low level chaos and confusion about what was going on, and that was it.
Why is it always the Carl Cannon types, like the sweet ones who you never see, who are like, I'm good, we're it's fine, and like the big burly men are like, under the table, like everybody down?
Carl's like, Could you pass the salt?
Actually, actually, you explain it to me, Carl.
I had a glass of wine in my hand, and all I'll say is, I kept it in my hand.
I, you know, you see those pictures, you know, those guys with the baby at the ball game, and they Catch the foul ball without spilling their beer while they're holding the baby.
That's who you want to be.
That's you.
Yes.
Well done.
Well, you know what?
You're a seasoned political pro.
This ain't your first rodeo at an event like this.
I don't know.
It's like, I'm sure it was scary.
I do not mean to take that away from those who are in the room for like those 10 minutes.
And then after you realize you're fine and nothing happened to you, you should act like a normal human.
But a lot of these reporters truly are acting like they just got back from Fallujah.
It's like, okay, can we let's keep some perspective here?
I'm just going to give you one more.
Here's Olivia Reingold.
She writes for the Free Press.
I got a thought or two on this one.
Sot 31.
We were just seated over, I'm seated near one of the doors, and there.
Zay!
Like four huge knocks by this door, everyone.
safe now but Okay.
First of all, you don't wear mini pigtails to the White House Correspondence Center.
Second of all, she shows herself crouching.
All the guys, she shows the guys, all the guys are standing up all around her.
She's like the only one less crouching.
And third of all, note to self, Olivia, to be a good reporter, you turn the camera outward to film what's happening in the ballroom, not yourself.
Is there a better example of the vainglorious upcoming class of reporters in America today?
Keep it on.
I'm telling you, there might be a shooter here, but I want you to see me and how scared I am.
Carl, I object.
Well, you know what, Megan, you're on to something.
So in my day, you had the way you got to cover the White House.
You started at a small newspaper.
You covered police and courts and fires.
Then you went to a bigger newspaper.
You covered police and courts.
Then you went to City Hall.
You covered, you know, you covered.
And you go to courts, you cover trials, murder trials.
If you're really good, you get to go to the state capitol, and then finally you get to go to Washington.
Well, you know, those newspapers, the pipeline doesn't exist anymore.
And you get people covering the White House who've never, never, never covered a murder case, never covered a trial, never even covered a fire.
And sometimes it shows.
You know, Brian Stelter, I think Tom's, as we speak, in sort of an exchange with his fans on X, but you know, you don't compare yourself.
To victims of a shooting.
He wasn't at those places.
He wasn't in Shreveport.
Having said that, there were people in that room, Megan, who had every right to be very alarmed and very scared and very upset.
You know, Tom mentioned a couple of them.
You mentioned Erica Kirk, the White House press secretary, is nine months pregnant.
And I thought, as you did, Megan, immediately of Bobby Kennedy Jr.
I had spoken with him at a reception at some length just before, half an hour earlier.
I he asked me where I was from, and I taught him.
I told him, he asked, and I told him a story about one of the reasons I went into became a reporter was when I was on my paper out in Sacramento the night his father was killed, his father and namesake, as you point out, in a crowded, chaotic ballroom.
I had to hand out the newspapers that morning to you know 96 in the morning, people were up, there was no cable television.
I had to hand paper, and the paper didn't even have the shooting, it had Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, and I had to tell people.
My mom told me.
Wow.
She said, I said, Mom, nobody will be awake.
She said, they'll be awake.
And I said, Where's dad?
She said, He's at work.
He was a newspaper man in Sacramento.
So I had this three by five card and I read these.
And the route usually took me about 45 minutes.
It took me two and a half hours this day.
And usually the woman in the house would come out and people would hug you and they were sad.
And so Bobby Kennedy, I have every right.
You know, you're right.
He, you know, somebody came, the security got him, pulled him up, literally climbed on a table.
He's very, you know, he's big and athletic.
And then his wife was right behind him.
He had a, If he's traumatized, he has a right to be.
I don't know that he was.
How about Steve Scalise?
Yeah.
They had at least two people there Steve Scalise and President Trump, who had been shot before in acts of political violence.
I mean, it's like I haven't seen Steve's reaction, but I saw, you know, President Trump was cool as a cucumber.
Here's a little of the president.
I thought this is actually a really good point.
He said this, he held a presser right after.
He went back to the White House, held a presser.
The press corps is sitting there in their ball gowns and tuxes.
President Trump's still in his tux.
And he made a good point here in SOT 17.
I've studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most, you take a look at the people, Abraham Lincoln, I mean, you go through the people that have gone through this where they got them.
But the people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they're the ones that they go after.
They don't go after the ones that don't do much because they like it that way.
And when you look at the people that have either, whether it was an attempt, Or a successful attempt.
They're very impactful people.
Just take a look at the names here, the big names.
And I hate to say I'm honored by that, but I've done a lot.
We've done a lot.
We've taken this country and we were a laughing stock for years, and now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world.
We've changed this country.
And there are a lot of people that are not happy about that.
Andrew, he talked about how his job is a dangerous job.
And he knows that in today's day and age.
He's willing to take the risk.
Yeah, it's the most dangerous job in America, I think he's called it on more than one occasion.
And he's right.
And that press conference he gave immediately after, I thought he struck the right tone.
I thought that he was complimentary to the press.
He said that he wanted to hold the dinner again within 30 days, said that he wanted to keep the dinner going that night.
So you got a sense of his resilience in these situations, which, you know, are Happened all too often now, but this is what his third time around in the last two years where he's been the subject of an attack.
So he, you know, I hate to say he's kind of used to it, and I hope we aren't used to it, but his sort of his affable give and take with the press after that, I thought was to his credit.
Yeah, he was magnanimous.
He was, he sounded like the Trump at the Republican National Convention, which was.
Days after the Butler assassination attempt, where he sounded much more magnanimous than we're used to President Trump sounding.
You know, we're used to the fighter and the one who's like, you're an idiot, you're a loser, you're low IQ, whatever.
But Megan, there's a historical correction here.
Acceptance of Political Murder00:15:26
These assassins don't only go after impactful presidents.
They tried to kill Jerry Ford twice in like a month.
There were two assassinations.
He never hurt anybody or did anything.
He was a caretaker, buzzard.
Buzzard.
Yeah, I'll give you another one.
James A. Garfield.
Trump's thinking Lincoln.
He's thinking Kennedy.
You know, he's thinking some of the Reagan, the attacker.
James A. Garfield.
The greats.
I'll give you Kennedy.
I'll raise your guards.
Okay.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about, though.
Listen to him.
He's like, he gives a shout out here to Weijia Jang, who's the president of the White House Correspondence Dinner, who was the person sitting to Trump's left on the dais who organized this whole thing.
And now they're back at the White House for this, you know, impromptu press conference here in SOP 15.
Madam Chairman, I just want to say you did a fantastic job.
What a beautiful evening, and we're going to reschedule.
And after that, it's very tough for her to ask a killer question, right?
But you have done a fantastic job, please.
Mr. President, I appreciate it.
As you mentioned, it all happened so quickly.
And I wonder, especially because, unfortunately, you have experience with.
These sorts of threats.
In that moment when you realized there was a threat and service agents were telling us to get down, can you describe what was playing through your mind, how you were feeling in that moment?
That's a very good question, actually.
It's always shocking when something like this happens.
It happened to me a little bit, and that never changes.
So, just a different tone entirely there, right, from a president who's normally much more combative with the press, but.
He was openly calling for actually the temperature to be turned down.
I'll play one more, guys.
Not just between him and the press, but with Americans.
Here he is in SOT 12.
So, as you know, this is not the first time in the past couple of years that our Republic has been attacked by a would be assassin who sought to kill in Butler, Pennsylvania, less than two years ago.
You all know that story.
And in Palm Beach, Florida, a few months after that, we came close.
We really had, again, We had some great work done by law enforcement.
But in light of this evening's events, I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts and resolving our difference peacefully.
We have to resolve our differences.
I mean, I don't think this moment of detente with the press will last, Tom Bevan.
And unfortunately, I don't think it will last on either part.
I don't think the press will be any nicer to Trump, and I don't think Trump will be any nicer to the press.
And I think we will devolve back into the very low.
Level name calling situation within hours.
But I also, unfortunately, don't believe the president is going to convince anybody to tone it down, to resolve our differences peacefully, as he said.
There's just too many nut jobs out there.
And the messaging around Trump has been too ubiquitously catastrophic in its levels of hysteria.
Like, I don't even know if you can turn it down.
You know, what do you think?
I agree.
And look, Nora O'Donnell already ruined it.
And I heard your righteous rant on that earlier in the show.
I mean, you know, that so it's already spoiled.
And the, you know, the headlines were, oh, Trump's detente with the press, you know, is over or something.
I mean, she's the one who basically ruined it by reading that quote and then pretending that she was, oh, you know, you think that's about you?
It was really, really disingenuous.
But I think you're right.
Look, the coverage of Trump, and I know, look, Trump has played into this too.
He's used harsh language about his political opponents.
And the left always points that out.
But, you know, when you look at the shooter's, if we call it a manifesto, the stuff that he said about Trump being a pedophile and a rapist and a traitor and a fascist and all that, that is what you get on MSNBC every single day for 10 hours a day and have gotten for 10 years.
And so he's not a mentally ill person, this shooter.
He's not some deranged wacko.
He's basically been radicalized by.
The left and the media into thinking that they create this permission structure, which allows some of these people who, you know, malfunction and decide that, you know what, I'm going to take care of this and I am doing so.
My doing so is justified and in some ways righteous because I believe this person is so evil.
And they've done that.
And then they all come out like they did, you know, Hakeem Jeffries, who just last week said maximum warfare every day, all day.
Is now like it's a time for unity, and I'm so glad that nobody was hurt.
And they try and wave it away like, you know, they haven't been complicit in the demonization of this president in particular for a dozen years.
And the irony, of course, because Trump, while very not normal in his rhetoric, is actually quite moderate in most of his policies.
Now, he's been hardline on immigration up until recently, anyway.
That's what the American people put him in office to do.
The poll showed that the public was majority behind him.
On the deportations and closing of the border.
But on most of everything else, Trump has been very moderate, even like the trade practices and the tariffs and all that.
That's not right wing.
That's not right wing at all.
That's like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should be, you know, breaking out the pom poms.
Right.
Like Trump is not radical in his policies at all.
He's just a fighter, rhetorically.
He's a fighter.
He engages with the press, just he gives as good as he gets.
And that's led them to hate him.
And write the worst possible things about him.
And you're right, they all show up here.
It's no accident.
This guy was well educated, had an advanced degree.
He says things like, I don't expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it onto why I did any of this.
Alert Barack Obama, this part's for you.
We may never know the motive.
Here's why I did it.
Wait, okay.
Literally, he says that onto why I did this.
I'm a citizen of the US.
What my representatives do reflects on me, and I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to cope my hands with his crimes.
Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I've had to do something about it.
Then he goes through who he will kill and who he won't.
For some reason, he exempted Kash Patel.
He appears to like him, but everybody else was fair game, especially administration officials.
He didn't want to have to kill hotel security, Capitol Police, National Guard, hotel employees, or guests, but said he would.
If he had to, in order to get to the targets he wanted.
And then he goes on to say rebuttals to objections.
One, as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
No, my rebuttal is turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed.
I'm not the person raped in a detention camp.
I'm not the fisherman executed without trial.
He's talking about those Venezuela drug boats, I think.
I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
I don't know what.
That is.
I'm not sure what that's a reference to.
Objection two, this is not a convenient time for you to do this.
He's just making this shit up because I don't think anybody would have said this is not a convenient time for the murder.
Find a more convenient time.
But in any event, his rebuttal to his fake objection is take a couple minutes and realize the world isn't about them.
Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be inconvenient for people who aren't the victim?
Objection three, you didn't get them all.
Rebuttal, got to start somewhere.
Objection four, as a half black, half white person, you shouldn't be the one doing this.
Rebuttal I don't see anyone else picking up the slack.
Objection five, yield unto Caesar.
What is Caesar's?
Rebuttal The U.S. is ruled by the law, not by any one or several people.
Insofar as our representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so lawfully ordered.
And he goes on from there.
And then, by the way, he has a whole long page on how incompetent the Secret Service is.
Astoundingly so.
Talking about how he had free reign over the hotel.
No one stopped him.
He walked right in.
There were no security cameras.
His hotel room wasn't bugged as he thought it might be, I guess, given his rhetoric about the president.
He thought he'd see armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.
What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me, is nothing.
No damn security, not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event.
Goes on from there.
It's just amazing when he gets onto that part.
So you guys tell me, because I'm very interested in this piece of the debate.
You could, Tom's right, you could see all those terms, rapist, pedophile, et cetera, on any MSNBC show, on any left leaning podcast, radio show, et cetera.
But.
The left has been doing this to the right for many, many decades.
You know, a shooter shows up, a mass shooter, and says something that tracks something Trump said in a speech or Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh back in the day may have said.
And we on the right have said for years, nutcases are nutcases, and you can't pin their nutcase behavior on the words of an anchor or a radio show host.
And I still believe that.
This is my own take.
I still believe that.
But I also believe that, like, that.
The incendiary rhetoric around Trump is ubiquitous now.
Like it is so out of control and so constant.
You also cannot just write it off like it had no effect when we keep hearing it out of shooter after shooter's mouth.
You know, I mean, I could say the same thing about Charlie and then what wound up on that shooter's bullets.
But like, so where do you stand on the rhetoric has something to do with it or it doesn't have anything to do with it, Andrew?
Well, I think the rhetoric does have something to do with it.
There's certainly, well, I'll just back up one thing.
Carl and I talked about this earlier on our program.
We should not refer to this document as a manifesto, what you just read.
It's about a thousand words that the guy wrote.
It's pretty nonsensical.
It doesn't make sense.
It's not, we give it too much credit when we call it a manifesto.
There is such a thing as a manifesto.
The Communist Manifesto is a good example of it.
This is not that.
But I think that the, you know, there's, you don't have to go all the way to, you know, a murder like this, a political murder, to understand why this level of political rhetoric is bad.
I mean, we see it in our everyday lives.
If you try to have a political conversation with a friend right now, it's very difficult.
And, you know, on our program where we kind of disagree on things, but we're all friends, we're trying to model, in some sense, how we, used to have political discussions in Washington and how we think it should be done.
So I do think that the rhetoric should be turned down on both sides.
I think that would be nice.
But I also agree with your original point, which is that there are going to be people out there.
We live in a country with a lot of guns and a lot of freedom and a lot of freedom to move around the country.
And if we don't want to live in a police state, we're going to have to sort of securitize the area around our politicians and our our leading officials, in order to keep them safe.
I don't think there's any way around that.
That's right.
So, we have this is a very good point because here's what we have we have the same security perimeter around Trump that we would have put around Carter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which is just foolish.
But it's especially because of Trump and who he is.
But it's especially foolish when you consider that we do live in a cesspool of really charged rhetoric around this president and his top.
Admin officials.
And here's the third piece where political violence is more accepted than ever, especially amongst young people.
If you look at the polls, like young liberals are just fine with political violence.
They, in like some scary numbers, over 20% are like, yeah, it's fine to feel happy when somebody I don't like politically gets assassinated.
I'm good with that.
And so while I wouldn't say, you know, you can't blame this assassination attempt on a Joy Reid type who says the most incendiary things, Carl, you have to factor in that there's not only that ubiquitous message, but there is ubiquitous leftist celebration of political violence.
Violence.
I agree with you.
I guess ubiquitous is not the right word there, but it's widespread.
It's widespread on the left.
I'm just going to give you an example.
Here's Corinne Baum, another teacher.
This would be assassin was a teacher.
The Lucy Martinez, who did the shooting in the neck infamous video outside at the No Kings rally after Charlie was killed, over and over to a truck going by with an American flag that praised Charlie.
She's a teacher.
Here she is.
Disgusting filth, that woman.
And here's another teacher, Corinne Baum, teacher of young children at the Children's House Ohio on TikTok.
Watch this, stop 21.
Man, there's been a few creators on here saying that like Friday or yesterday could have been the day.
And then I wake up to that news, but not that news.
We're going to have to pay really close attention to what they're trying to actually distract us from.
One more.
Another, another, another sound by here, SAT 22.
I wake up each morning hoping he has died.
I go to bed each night hoping by the time I get up in the morning, he has died.
I'm fully convinced that we can't even begin to start fixing any of our problems until he has died.
For the love of all things good, just fuck.
Another teacher.
The he too is a teacher.
And Carl, that also relates.
Teaching Generations to Hate00:06:27
So it's the acceptance of political violence.
Deb sent me the poll, YouGov polling.
22% of liberals under age 44 say it's okay to feel happy when a political opponent dies, compared to just 6% of conservatives that same age.
So it's all that.
But then all these teachers have access to our children coming up through the pipeline.
What does the lesson plan look like in history, in English?
Even in math and gym these days, they find ways of indoctrinating the children K through 12.
It's not just college anymore, right?
So, like, all these factors have gone into why it's more dangerous than ever to be a Republican.
Let's face it, it's to be a Republican because it's our side of the aisle that's getting killed.
Well, I agree with you.
That one teacher said we can't begin to solve our problems until Trump dies.
I would turn that around.
I said we can't begin to solve our problems.
As long as we're letting people like this have access to our children, let's just start there.
And Megan, they're taught that the mantra on college campuses, it started out that speech is violent.
Speech is violence.
Speech I don't like is violence.
And then the next level was silence is violence.
Well, if you actually say that, then how are you telling, if you're teaching young people that, then how do you tell them that violence is wrong?
Because it's like anything they don't agree with is violence so that they can.
Respond violently to it.
And it's an existential problem for this country that we are teaching a whole generation of Americans that if they don't like somebody, it's okay to kill them or root for their death.
And it's not only that it's so destructive, it's that it shows they're not even capable of abstract reasoning.
We're teaching people not to think because the abstract reasoning there is oh, will it be okay if somebody disagree with me would kill me?
Well, no, I guess not.
Well, they're not even getting that far.
We're teaching a generation of people, first of all, we're proselytizing them on politics.
Then we're teaching them that violence is okay.
And then we're teaching them not to think.
And it's a toxic combination.
And I'll say one other thing, Megan, to your original point, was Rush Lumbaugh responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing?
Of course not.
But was Alex Jones responsible for the poor bastard who showed up at the pizza place in Washington, D.C.?
Yeah, maybe.
But this is not Alex Jones types in the Democratic Party, these are members of Congress.
Who are repeating things from the Jeffrey Epstein files that they know are false or they should know are false.
And they're slandering Trump on a daily basis and demonizing him.
And so there are going to be some people.
And this shooter to me is clearly not legally insane.
He doesn't meet the legal definition.
But he's clearly been radicalized, as Tom pointed out.
He's a misanthrope.
He's a malcontent.
He's got this grandiose idea.
But he's operating under things he thinks are factual because he'd been told, not by crazy people, not by Joy Reid, not by.
People who get their, you know, make money by being incendiary, but by elected members of the Democratic Party, leaders in the Democratic Party who repeat this stuff knowing it's wrong.
And what's going to be the result of that?
It's going to be this.
Yeah, the reference to a teenage girl abused does suggest he's been watching MSNBC or listening to top Democrats who took those unsubstantiated Epstein allegations and just put them on the board as fact and accepted.
They're not only unsubstantiated, there's a lot of evidence that they're not true.
I mean, I.
I don't just say that.
I think they're lying about it, Megan.
I think that if they thought about it for a minute, there's no evidence it's true at all.
And they should know that.
Yes.
Can I just say so?
But they ran with that.
I saw many segments on MSNBC about those ridiculous allegations.
We did not touch them.
It was ridiculous.
Go ahead, Tom.
I just wanted to add one of the things that disturbs me most about you play that clip of the teacher and the other one is that we're the inhumanity.
I mean, we're just as a country.
As individuals, we're losing our humanity.
If you can't, if you're rooting for the death of another person or you celebrate the death of another person for any reason, but certainly over politics, over ideas, over a difference of viewpoints, I mean, you have really, your soul has been corrupted.
And I don't know how we turn that around.
And that's disturbing to me most when I see these people and I'm like, how can you possibly, just as a human, Be saying and feeling and thinking these things because they're so deeply inhuman.
I know.
I've said before, like, I can't think of somebody on the other side of the aisle whose death I would celebrate.
I just, that's so crazy.
And in fact, people have asked me many times, like, clearly President Trump and I have had our ups and downs together over the many years that I've been covering him.
And I just, I don't hold it against him personally.
I don't love it.
Of course, it is annoying, but.
I don't hold it against him personally because, as they say, and you guys know this better than anyone politics ain't beanball.
And it's like, if you're going to get in the arena and you're going to have your own sharp commentary, every once in a while, you're going to run into a politician who's going to elbow you right back in the eye socket rhetorically.
And you have to be able to take that without, you know, getting too personal about it, like making it a personal thing.
This press corps can't take it.
Like they can't take his return rhetorical fire.
They personalize it, they internalize it, they grow to loathe him.
It's reflected in their coverage.
It's just got to stop.
We got to get back to the way it used to be when the report.
Reporters would try to be objective and at a minimum to project objectivity to remove the adjectives from their reporting.
You know, Carl, I came up in a different way.
I was a practitioner of law for many years, almost a decade, and then I got into reporting.
But I too started in local TV and was out there doing snow preps, standing in front of the salt mines, you know, covering all like weather and hurricanes and all the stuff.
Objective Reporting Must Return00:02:17
And you do learn one thing when you're doing that humility.
You learn humility.
That you are but a cog in the wheel, that you are a part of an important system, but it's really not about you.
It's not about you when you're standing out there.
It's about the potential loss of life that's coming your way.
It's about your audience who's watching you for reliable information.
It's not about you, Olivia Reingold, as you're crouching in your very weird double mini pigtails.
All right, stand by.
I have to take a break.
We've got to talk about Margaret Brennan and Melania, who just launched one at Jimmy Kimmel.
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The guys from Real Clear Politics are back with me now.
Start your day at realclearpolitics.com and you will be a happier, smarter person.
Okay.
Margaret Brennan of CBS News gets an interview with acting Attorney General Todd Blanch yesterday.
And you could go so many different places with what happened on Saturday night.
We've gone to most of them in these two hours here today.
This is one place.
You should not go.
This is not the place.
Gun Laws and Double Standards00:10:32
Maybe 10 days after the shooting, some leftist might raise this.
Even then, it would be dumb.
But you definitely, within 24 hours, 12 hours of the event, don't go here on how the shooter took a train with a gun.
Watch this.
Here in the District of Columbia, open carry is not permitted.
You just said he traveled from California across the country by train.
At this point, are you thinking at the federal level?
Of changing security protocols in any way to, for example, match on trains what you are expected to go through when you fly, where you do have to declare a weapon when you cross state lines.
And look, this isn't about, in my mind, changing the law or making the laws more restrictive around possession of firearms.
It appears he purchased these firearms the past couple years.
We don't know how those firearms ended up in his possession in D.C. I'm not talking about changing the law in terms of possession of a firearm.
I'm asking about crossing state lines with that.
Firearm and arriving the Capitol.
If you try to fly, you do have to have your firearms declared in some way.
You don't when you get on a train.
That's.
We need TSA at Amtrak.
That's where she went with it, guys.
Because, like, why don't we have TSA before you get into your car?
Everyone has to be inspected before they, at Avis, at Hertz, and then also at their homes before they get into their cars and dare drive across the country, Tom.
I mean, look, Margaret Brennan is, she has distinguished herself, not in a good way, many, many times over the last year or so with her line of questioning, her performance in the debate, all of that.
And this is almost inexplicable.
You've got how many minutes?
10 minutes with the acting attorney general of the United States to talk about a significant major news event.
That just happened the night before, and this is what you choose.
I mean, it just boggles the mind, and it does make you question what these reporters are thinking and how skewed their viewpoints are that this is the kinds of questions that they would eat up that valuable time with.
Well, there's a reason for it.
She was more interested in virtue signaling to her audience than she was in actually doing journalism.
And you need to look no further.
Than her stupid little arm tag at the event for verification.
She showed up at the dinner wearing a hideous dress.
Hideous, gentlemen.
I'm sorry, but it couldn't have been uglier or less flattering.
It's so bad.
She's got like the Madonna pointy breast thing happening on the front of it with the points above that, too.
All pointy, pointy, sharp, pointy.
Nothing soft about her.
And that's, she needs something soft given like the face, the makeup that's harsh, the hair, like something feminine.
And then these.
All the way up to the shoulder gloves, red as well, with a little armband.
It looks like a purchase price stuck on there.
And it reads, same as Jake Tapper's little pocket square Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press or of speech.
Because she really needed a virtue signal that she was there, but she hates Trump.
I gotta say, I was saying this to my team beforehand.
Don Lemon did this weird thing where he was like, I'm not going.
You know, he's a fascist or whatever he called him.
He's like, I'm not going.
I gotta tell you, I respect that.
I actually, if you believe that, As I'm sure Mark or Brennan does too, then do what Don Lemon did.
Don't go.
He's right about that.
Of course, he also thinks the whole thing was a hoax, that it was staged.
That's what he's asking everybody.
So, King can only go so far in painting him as the reasonable one, but that's why she asked that question.
She's got to wear her armband, and Carl, she's got to tell everybody there that everybody watching her show knows this is really at its heart about gun violence.
Well, that's right.
That's what this is.
That phrase gun violence came up, and I.
I get it.
I know what it means.
And I remember, you know, Jim Brady was the press secretary.
I met him once.
He was a lovely man.
He was Reagan's press secretary.
He was shot in the head and grievously wounded, he was never the same and eventually died at that same hotel.
And his widow started a campaign against handguns.
And because a guy like she wondered quite properly, Sarah Brady, why a guy like John Hinckley could buy a handgun.
It's a debate worth having.
It was an issue that I covered, and I thought her heart was in the right place.
But when Democrats today use the phrase gun violence, they almost mean something else.
Like the way they say it, it's like the gun didn't, it's like the gun did the violence on its own.
And I don't think this is a gun control story.
Some crimes are, Megan.
This one isn't.
This guy, he never had a record.
He bought guns legally, as you pointed out in your inminuable way.
He could have driven across country just as easily as taking a train.
This is not really a story about gun control if you're being honest, if you look at the issue fairly.
But you want to be careful not to have double standards.
And Tom and I and Andy, we always talk about that on our show.
And I think sometimes we're guilty of it.
I mean, we were just talking about people dying, rooting for a person to death.
Well, Tom, I mean, just.
Didn't Donald Trump say how he was glad Robert Mueller was dead?
I mean, this doesn't only come from the left and this kind of rhetoric.
And so, you know, I wanted to point that out as well.
Well, it's true.
But I would say I think the vast majority of Republicans and Trump supporters, I mean, maybe not the most hardcore, but the vast majority condemned that.
You know, like when President Trump does that, he gets ripped by his own side.
He did get ripped for that at one point.
And he should have gotten ripped for it.
The left doesn't do that.
They don't self police over there.
Andrew, what did you think of Margaret's dress and why am I right about it?
Oh, God.
I mean, questions.
She loves you the most, Danny.
She wouldn't ask you questions like that.
You don't think that.
I have three daughters and a wife who would be able to answer that in a heartbeat and tell you everything you want to know about the dress.
She is a woman in the middle of the bill.
I think she looks great.
You don't think that.
No, you don't.
No.
I deny that.
On your behalf, I deny the kid out in the house.
He's trying to stand his wife's good side, maybe.
No, no, I do not criticize women's choices and dresses.
I think she looks terrific.
How about her choice in questions?
There, I think you have a point.
And I think the interesting thing that struck me about it is if D.C. has these terrific gun laws, it again shows that the gun laws really can't stop this sort of thing.
I have friends who come out to the Eastern Shore where I live to shoot.
You have to be very careful about when you're driving through Washington, D.C. with a gun in your car.
You have to have it locked and disassembled.
So if you're a legal gun owner coming out to shoot some clays, you take it all very seriously because there's horrible, horrible consequences if you don't.
But I think for someone like this, obviously, it just shows that if you want to get into a hotel in Washington, D.C. with a firearm, you can do it.
I do want to bring up Hassan Piker, if we could, for just a second, because we're talking about.
He's a left wing podcaster.
Right.
And because it helps if you do have sort of a mythology and an ideology that allows violence.
And these leftists, because he brought this up in the New York Times last week, he called it social murder.
He quoted Frederick Engels on it.
He said, Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, was engaged in a tremendous amount of social murder.
And that's a fascinating story for me because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment.
They're very black and white on this issue, and yet because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system has created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.
I mean, to me, that's frightening.
I mean, that is justifying murder through, you know, your left-wing ideology, and I think that that's one of the things we have to contend with, with the sort of rise in socialism in the United States.
There's a lot of stuff that comes along with the economic part of socialism.
It's mostly about using violence, actually.
And people just should be aware of that going forward.
That's my take.
Oh, you know, not to steal this moment for a book plug, but my husband's book is about to hit, and it's called The Lost Fortune of Emmanuel Nobel.
And it's got a lot about socialism, the rise of it, and exactly that, Andrew.
Thank you guys.
I got a couple more things to get to, and I'm going to be back on the opposite side.
We'll see you guys soon.
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Melania's Reaction to the Attempt00:15:28
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Hey everyone, it's me, Megan Kelly.
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Okay, we've got to get to Jimmy Kimmel before we go.
All right.
Jimmy Kimmel never misses a moment to be crass and off point and inappropriate.
Thursday night, he decided to do a mock White House correspondence dinner as the comedian who would have been.
You know, invited.
They didn't have a comedian this year.
They had a mentalist.
Somebody actually made a funny comment about it because the mentalist was apparently on stage, accurately telling Caroline Levitt what her baby's name was going to be.
Like he figured it out some magical way.
And people were saying, like, he was literally on the stage when they, like, kneeling down by her at the time when the shots rang out.
Somebody was like, there was a much more useful prediction you could have made in that moment if you really did have the magical powers, sir.
Okay.
Thank God everybody's okay.
So, Jimmy Kimmel does this mock White House correspondence dinner comedian routine on Thursday night.
And I'm just going to show you, I'm driving towards something here, but I'm going to just show you how unfunny the jokes were.
Truly, we all think that we can be funny, but if you actually had to sit down and write jokes, and maybe you've tried to do this for a speech, you cross out everyone.
You're like, this isn't funny.
I thought I was funny, but I'm not.
Wrong again, wrong.
This is a much higher art form than I give comedians credit for.
It's not for me.
Jimmy Kimmel needed to come to that realization.
These are so.
On the nose, like 11 year old humor, like an 11 year old could come up with these stupid jokes.
They're so obvious, not clever, not surprising, not even a mild laugh or like bemusement as you listen to them.
Watch.
It's hard to get JD to come to an event like this.
He's a real homebody.
His wife had to peel him off the couch.
Please do not get up from your seats during the performance because the vice president will them.
Stephen Miller is so racist.
The reason he went bald is because his hair was black.
Stephen Miller puts the cyst in white supremacists.
If anyone starts any trouble, fear not, because FBI Director Kash Patel is standing by.
Waitress, can we get Cash a vodka soda and a booster seat, please?
Pete's hair has more oil in it right now than the Strait of Hormuz.
Bobby Kennedy, years ago, he wrote in his diary that he pulled his car over to the side of the road to carve the penis out of a raccoon.
And his son asked him, Dad, why did you do that?
Why did you chop the penis off a dead animal?
And he looked at his son.
He said, Because I'm a psychopath.
Now get out of this car and go get measles.
I don't even know where to begin.
They had fake reaction shots from administration officials.
Nothing funny, nothing remotely clever.
That didn't sound anything like RFKJ.
He doesn't talk like that.
He doesn't actually talk like that at all.
For some reason, you gave him a Brooklyn accent, which he doesn't have.
And the laugh track meant to boost his sagging audiences, I'm sure, like a smattering of applause.
Even leftists don't find that funny.
That was so not funny.
Jimmy Kimmel is not funny.
And here he was, least funny of all.
What he said about Melania Trump now is making major news.
You would think he would have learned after making light of the Charlie Kirk assassination, suggesting that the guy who did it, Tyler Robinson, who's been accused of doing it, Is MAGA, remember?
That led to his show getting pulled off the air for five days and then they turned him into Rosa Parks on the left.
But listen to the terrible quote joke he made about Melania Trump during the same routine.
And of course, our first lady Melania is here.
Look at Melissa.
So beautiful.
Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.
Who would make a joke like that knowing that Trump had almost been killed relatively recently?
This is obviously before Saturday night, but I mean, It is not an exaggeration to say that Trump was almost killed in July of 2024.
That's recent.
And for this guy to get up there and say she's got the glow of an expectant widow, like, how insensitive can you be?
Honestly, like, Trump, he's got children, he's got grandchildren, he does have a wife, he has millions of people who love him.
And the glow of an expectant widow, how sick are you?
That, I mean, truly the left and the desensitivity that they're trying to create, you know, in people to the thought of political violence is truly pernicious.
It's a force for evil in this country, and he doubles and triples and quadruples down on it every other week.
Now, today, Melania Trump actually responded, which she never does.
As you know, Melania does not seek the spotlight.
Did you see her by chance the other night when Trump came out and spoke in the White House press briefing room after the shooter was apprehended, attempted shooter?
Somebody asked a question about Melania and how she reacted.
Of course, she hasn't been with Trump or by his side.
She wasn't right next to him on the stage in Butler or when Ruth tried to open fire on him on his golf course and so on.
So, poor Melania, this is, I hate to say it so cavalierly, but her first assassination attempt, forgive me.
So she puts out the following.
And by the way, so Trump said, Do you want to say something at the end of that presser?
And she, no, she does not like the spotlight.
It's very rare when you hear Melania speak out.
So she has today.
She posted online Kimmel's hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country.
His monologue about my family isn't comedy.
His words are corrosive and deepen the political sickness within America.
People like Kimmel should not have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.
Wow, how about that?
A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him.
Enough is enough.
It is time for ABC to take a stand.
How many times will ABC's leadership enable Kimmel's atrocious behavior at the expense of our community?
Wow.
How about that, guys?
That is extraordinary.
That's the closest I've heard to her Melania getting, I mean, explicitly political and actually.
Appears to be calling for him to be fired, obviously.
Enough is enough.
It's time for ABC to take a stand.
How many times will they allow him and his atrocious behavior to go on?
Well, no sooner did she post that than I'd say two or three hours later, we get this from her husband, who is the president of the United States.
Wow, Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny, as attested to by his terrible TV ratings, made a statement on his show that is really shocking.
He showed a fake video of the first lady, Melania, and our son, Baron, like they were actually sitting in his studio listening to him speak.
Which they weren't and never would be.
He then stated, Our first lady, Melania, is here.
Look at Melania, so beautiful.
Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.
A day later, a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House correspondence dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives.
He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason.
I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel's despicable call to violence and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said, but this is something far beyond the pale.
Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Trump.
It's pretty explosive.
I can only imagine the oh shit moment that any normal person would have after saying she has the glow of an expectant widow, and within 48 hours, someone tries to kill her husband.
Like a normal person would have a complete meltdown at that series of events.
It was bad enough.
Poor Caroline Levitt, in a pre interview before the event got kicked off, was talking about the president's expected speech, which always historically includes it's all about barbs against the media.
That's the fun thing of having him there.
You make fun of him and do corrosive coverage of him all year long.
And with your typical president, they never say anything about you.
And this is their big night to rip on you, the press, by name and network and so on.
President Trump does it differently.
As you know, he's nonstop ripping.
But she said, Oh, there's going to be some shots fired tonight.
And some nutcases on the internet are now suggesting she was in on it.
Okay, get a grip, get a grip, people.
That's a figure of speech.
If you haven't used that phrase, you need to expand your vocabulary.
But this was, you know, pretty extraordinary for this guy 48 hours before to say she's got the glow of an expectant widow.
I mean, if President Trump, God forbid, had been killed at that event, can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
ABC would have no choice but to rip this guy off the air once and for all.
He's irresponsible.
He is so deeply offensive.
Truly, imagine someone saying that about Michelle Obama.
Imagine what the reaction would be.
Just think about that for a second.
Think of if somebody had said that about Erica Kirk before Charlie had been killed.
Like these predictions.
I'm not saying that the shooter was motivated by Jimmy Kimmel, though, to be honest, who knows if he'd watched that episode?
I don't.
I'm saying this is irresponsible talk given his professional position.
You don't.
Make jokes about assassinations of the president, especially when he's had multiple assassination attempts against him.
Okay, don't you make light of it?
Honestly, and I'll say one other thing I can even understand in the wake of an assassination, easy for me to say, assassination attempt to like a comedian like Jay Leno, who's universally beloved and is not known as a partisan hack, who actually really does hate the president who just got shot, making a joke like that was in good faith.
You could find a way.
Like, that's not in bad taste.
To help the nation heal, that's actually always been one of the great roles of our great comedians to help us heal through humor.
This was not that.
We were not healing from anything.
It was in advance of a massive gathering where he knew the president would be attending, and Melania too.
He was pretending that he was at the event and that he was the comedian there, and just sending the message out to whomever follows that show that wouldn't it be funny?
It's so funny to think of Trump dead.
And Melania as a glowing widow.
It's just sick.
So we'll see.
Balls in your court, ABC.
You're not going to be able to ignore this.
You are not going to be able to ignore both the president and the first lady.
She's even more powerful than he is in this particular moment on this particular issue, speaking out.
We'll see.
Balls in your court.
Do the right thing, honestly.
Like, I can't imagine this.
Like, think about it.
ABC fired Chris Harrison from The Bachelor.
Because a bachelorette on that show went to an antebellum party years earlier when she'd been a young college student.
And they thought that was racially insensitive.
And all Chris Harrison said was, Are we judging her by the standards of today or by the standards of when she did it?
That's all he said.
And ABC ruined him.
He's never been heard from again.
Have you seen Chris Harrison hosting some network show?
No, his life was ruined.
His career was ruined.
But you can say this as Jimmy Kimmel, as like the face of ABC.
You can say she's got the glow of an expectant widow about a husband who was almost killed at least once and two other times.
Attempts were obviously in the making.
And now a fourth, very ill timed, too bad for Jimmy.
What are you going to do about it, ABC?
Right?
Disney, they're the ones who fired Gina Carano over a totally anodyne online posting about World War II and Hitler.
And the excesses of the left.
She got fired.
That was too much.
Her tweet, her one post online.
Okay, your move.
What are you going to do?
Let's see.
You paid Donald Trump $16 million when George Stephanopoulos said erroneously, a factually, that Trump had been found liable for rape over and over and over.
You recognize the deep, Offense caused by that comment when it wasn't true.
How about the libel of Melania Trump suggesting she wants her husband dead?
That's what you just did to her.
Forget what you did to President Trump there.
But you suggested she wants her husband executed.
How about that?
You paid $16 million for civilly found libel for rape.
Are we going to do anything about she wants her husband fucking dead?
Or normalizing the thought of an execution.
Anything?
Okay, we'll wait.
We'll wait.
Look forward to seeing what ABC does.
All right, that's it for us today.
Tomorrow on this show, you will be joined, as will I, by our friend Stuber Geer.