President Trump talks about White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting

WASHINGTON (CBS, KYMA) - On Sunday, President Donald Trump sat down with Norah O'Donnell on 60 Minutes to discuss the White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD), which was abruptly evacuated Saturday night after a gunman charged a security checkpoint.

O'Donnell is a firsthand witness as she attended the annual gala last night.

When asked if he knows if he was the gunman's target, President Trump said, "I don't know. It sounds to me, I read a manifesto, he's radicalized. He was a Christian, a believer, and then he became an anti-Christian, and he had a lot of change. He's been going through a lot. Based on what he wrote, his brother complained about him, and I think reported him to the police, and his sister likewise complained about him. His family was very concerned. He was probably a pretty sick guy."

O'Donnell followed up by asking how worried he was that there was going to be injuries, and the president said, "I wasn't worried. I understand life. We live in a crazy world."

O'Donnell then asked the president if First Lady Melania Trump was scared, and Trump said:

"I don't want to say, and people don't like having it said that they were scared, but certainly, I mean, who wouldn't be when you have a situation like that. By that time, I think she realized ahead of time that that was more of a bullet than it was a tray. And she was I looked at her face just a little while ago before I came. I saw the scene. They played it for me in, you know, pretty good close up. And She looked very upset about what just took place, yeah. Why not? Well, what happened is it was a little bit me. I wanted to see what was happening. And I wasn't making it that easy for him. I wanted to see what was going on. And by that time we started to realize maybe it was a bad problem, a different kind of a problem, bad one. And different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom which you hear all the time and uh I was surrounded by great people."

During the interview, O'Donnell and Trump talked about the status of the Secret Service who was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time of the shooting.

"Oh, he's 100%. Yeah, no, he was 100%. He didn't want to go to the hospital. He really didn't. They asked him to go and he didn't want to go. He said, I don't need to go to the hospital, but he went because they asked him to go."

O'Donnell then asked the president if the WHCD has been rescheduled, and he said, "I hope we're going to do it again. Tell [them] to get it going, and we should do it within 30 days, and they'll have even more security, and they'll have bigger perimeter security. It'll be fine, but tell them to do it again. We can't let something, it's not that I want to go. I'm very busy. I don't need that. I think it's very important that they do it again."

Later in the interview, O'Donnell said political violence touched so many people in the room, with her asking the president if there is something he can do, and what can be done to change the trajectory, and Trump said:

"Well, you know? You go back 20 years, 40 years, 100 years, 200 years, 500 years. It's always been there. People are assassinated, people are injured, people are hurt, and I'm not sure that there's any more now than there was. I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats, much more so, is, is very dangerous. I really think it's very dangerous for the country."

To watch O'Donnell's full interview with the president, click here.