00:00In the wake of Butler, the sort of muscle memory that so many people have, not just the press corps,
00:04but there were a lot of folks in the room, officials, people who were just invited guests,
00:07and everybody seemed to move on cue. Before they knew what was going on, in many cases,
00:12they were on the floor, they were under tables. There was a picture that I saw on the front of
00:17our website and on the terminal last evening of our booker, Matt Shirley, who jumped on top of
00:22one of his colleagues. And that's the, you know, the spirit of what took place in that room and
00:28the people who had a shared experience is really sad to think about, that that's an automatic. But
00:33yes, I wonder if that dinner will ever be held again in what is known affectionately here in
00:37Washington as the Hinkley Hilton, because that is where the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan
00:42took place when you walked into that entrance and went on the red carpet, Christina. You walked right
00:47by where that took place as a plaque commemorating that awful day. And so we do have a shared history
00:54here in Washington of these tragedies. The way the president went after that with the rhetoric last
00:59evening to take this as some sort of compliment is bizarre, but that in a way is very Donald Trump.
01:06That awful day, March 30th, 1981, the president was there to speak to the AFL-CIO, if I'm not
01:11mistaken. And he kept a journal. I remember him writing, it's a pithy quote, getting shot hurts,
01:17is what he wrote. But speak to the confusion that surrounded all of that. Of course, one of his
01:23closest advisors was injured grievously in that attack. The president, as I recall, didn't know
01:28that he had been shot until he was in the limousine, noticed he was bleeding and thought
01:31perhaps he'd cut himself or, of course, was much worse than that. He ended up in the hospital for
01:36a couple of days. And as you both know, we still call it the Brady briefing room for that reason
01:40at the White House. You know, I'll tell you guys, we saw J.D. Vance taken out of the room
01:46immediately. And I was struck by the fact that there weren't five or 10 Secret Service members
01:50jumping on top of the president behind the dais. He was still talking, sitting next to
01:55Weijia Jiang for a good 30 seconds to a minute while all of this chaos was unfolding. And then
02:00they came and got the president. I don't know if there'll be an exercise in which all of this
02:05is reviewed. I'm sure there will be. But it was a different look than what we saw in Butler.
02:11The president was kind of calmly taken off the stage and I'm sure was brought into a holding
02:15room immediately. We didn't see him again until he was back at the White House at that point.
02:21But the enduring vision I will have is of these SWAT team dressed law enforcement officers
02:29behind the dais. I think we have some video that I actually shot from my phone that we can roll.
02:33They're pointing their weapons into the crowd and they had lights on the scopes. And when we saw
02:38the guns pointed at us, we knew that this was
Comments