Americanswers… on 5 Live! Could Trump have been evacuated from the shooting more quickly?

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0:30so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. What happened? What really happened at the White House Correspondents' Do? The one where Donald Trump was meant to give a speech, a speech, of course, he never made because there were shots fired. What actually was going on? Are the conspiracy theories about it, and there are plenty of them, even remotely, possibly true? Welcome to America Answers with Matt Chorley and Anthony Zerker and me, Justin Webb, on 5 Live.

1:27Anthony Zurcher:Turn the volume up! Well, it will come as no surprise at all that we've had lots of questions on the subject of the shooter, the White House Correspondents' Dinner, on Saturday night, where President Trump was in attendance alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, First Lady Melania Trump and many others from Trump's Cabinet. AmeriCast published an emergency episode on it last night, which I'm sure you've already listened to if you haven't. It is there available for you. Now, we have had loads and loads of questions on this. Tim in Scotland, John in Kettering, all asking the same question as Claire in West Norfolk.

2:01I'm just really interested in the attempted assassination of officials in the White House correspondence dinner, because watching the videos I've seen, Trump was actually the last person they seemed to go to. They got J.D. Vance out quicker. And then Trump seemed to stay in his seat and then had to be sort of forced from his seat. And then it looks like he fell over. And I'm just curious about this, because wouldn't the first thing you do is go to the president? Anthony, from what you've seen of it, what did you make of what went on?

2:36Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, I mean, that would be the logic, right? The president is the most important person in the room, at least as far as the Secret Service is concerned. So why not take him away? Although Donald Trump himself has explained that he was reluctant to leave. And it was a chaotic situation. You have to remember that also that the assailant was a floor up that people in the room would hear the gunshots, but it wasn't right outside the door. So that might have changed the thinking from the Secret Service as well. We've actually got Donald Trump's own explanation where he was speaking to Norah O'Donnell from CBS 60 Minutes about being evacuated by the Secret Service.

3:13Anthony Zurcher:I was surrounded by great people and I probably made them act a little bit more slow. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me see, wait a minute. So, you know, I'm telling guys... Just at that moment where it looks like you go sort of down with the service, you were telling them to wait. Well, you know, what happened is then I started walking with them. I turned, I started walking and they said, please go down, please go down on the floor. So I went down and the first lady went down also. but we were asked to go down by the agents. One of the striking things, Justin, was listening to people who were at the dinner, was how...

3:47They'd spent the evening standing around discussing how lax the security was. I agree with the question. I mean, it was absolute chaos by the look of it. I also wasn't there. There have been to plenty of them in the past and they are a bit chaotic and that's the way they've always been run but I don't think anyone's ever thought of them as being much of a threat, which is odd because as we were saying in our emergency episode, just in case you haven't listened to it. This Hilton Hotel that it's held in is the Hilton Hotel outside which there was very nearly a successful attempt on Ronald Reagan's life.

4:17It is somewhere where there has been political violence before. But, yeah, everyone describes going in and coming out. And obviously the guy who is the chief suspect, the only suspect actually, apparently stayed in a room there for a day or two with all his weapons, including knives, that he'd just brought into the hotel. Nobody thought to check. And the whole business, I don't know what Anthony thinks of this, When they go to Congress and they have a State of the Union and they're all there, all the bigwigs are there, they have a designated survivor to someone isn't allowed to go. Yeah. Because if everyone's wiped out, that person.

4:49Yeah, there was a series, wasn't there? Yeah. So, Anthony, I mean, are we aware that there was a survivor this time round? Because I've not seen anything about him or her.

4:59Anthony Zurcher:There were a lot of cabinet officials there, but all of them weren't there. And at the State of the Union, almost all of them attend. And so they have to make sure that there is one who stayed behind. But I don't think that there was that kind of contingency planning put into effect. Maybe there should have been because there is such a concentration of senior members of a presidential administration in one place and not in the U.S. Congress that has multiple layers of security. But in a hotel in Washington, D.C., that isn't even totally locked down. I mean, I wasn't there Saturday night, so I'm not sure what the security procedures were like.

5:37Anthony Zurcher:But having been there almost every year for the past five or six years, I'll say that they do have multiple layers of security around the ballroom. But as Justin points out, the hotel itself is still open to the public and you can get a room there and stay. And actually, when you are coming in to head down to the security court and you could walk by a bar where there are guests who are staying at the hotel or hanging out. And apparently the alleged assailant also was milling around there at some point in the days he was staying there. Now, the thing is that this did work. I mean, he got to the first security perimeter, ran through it and was quickly stopped.

6:13Anthony Zurcher:So it wasn't like he burst into the ballroom. That was still a floor and multiple checkpoints away. So the security, the way it was designed, worked. But I think now there's going to be some rethinking about whether you need to expand the court and more. in order to make it even more secure so that it doesn't get as close as he did get. Mike's just texted in saying luckily it was only one terrorist staying at the hotel. What if it had been a group of them? Well, exactly. And that's what a lot of people are saying. A group of them. And what if they've been better armed and more organised, etc. And in the wake of the Brighton bomb, I know it was a long time ago, and I know Americans don't traditionally sort of look outside the country for examples of how to behave.

6:53But the fact is we have a blueprint for how it is done when the IRA planted that bomb in Brighton and did so with enormous planning beforehand. They didn't carry it in that night. And party conferences here. You know, the hotels where the leaders stay and the cabinet stays is inside a court and you have to, you know, everyone has to go through school. That was interesting. Jeffrey says, dear Mayor Carters, do you think Trump deserves any credit for being brave in the face of these constant assassination attempts? Or do you dismiss his bravado? Actually, the thing that strikes me, Anthony, is that particularly when he talked about the one last year, or is it last year or the year before now, where it clipped his ear, I mean, that seemed to really actually affect him quite a lot in that conversation with our colleague Gary.

7:36Although he is a man with quite a lot of bravado on this, it does seem to affect him, as you would expect.

7:41Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, I mean, that was obviously the bullet or shrapnel nicked his ear. I mean, there was a person with a long gun who was easily within range of hitting him. So it was a narrow, narrow escape in that instance. This is a little bit different. But but having that, having bullets whizzing past your head, which is exactly what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania and in July of 2024, that that will change you. I don't think anyone can go through that kind of experience and not be somewhat reflective of their own mortality, whether it has had a long term change on Donald Trump's personality or whether this incident itself will bring back those memories for Donald Trump and trigger some sort of a changed outlook.

8:21Anthony Zurcher:We haven't seen that happen in the past for all the talk of cooling rhetoric and coming together. It doesn't take long before this nation is right back to its partisan divisions. It's also interesting to see whether it has a political effect, which it's too early to tell. But might it? We've got these midterms coming up. We've been saying for ages that the Democrats are very likely to win back the House of Representatives, could even win the Senate this time around, which we didn't think a year or so ago. Now, if you think it's the Senate, maybe, you know, 10 or 20 ,000 people in Texas where there's important Senate race think, oh, you know what, I'm going to I wasn't going to bother voting.

8:56But I think I will actually, particularly Hispanic people who in the past admired Trump, sort of macho image, et cetera, et cetera, particularly Hispanic men. Maybe post this because he was a bit cool, wasn't he, at the press conference that he gave afterwards when he was giving all those weird percentages about the likelihood that a president. although that should be said no president has been shot I mean let's hope it doesn't happen no president has been shot since Kennedy but shot at a lot I suppose he himself was winged but and Reagan obviously was potentially very seriously injured although he recovered from it but you've got this kind of sense I suppose of him using it politically which is not an illegitimate thing to do actually within the American political system but I don't know this time around whether it will or not yeah interesting Let's look at another expert of it.

9:42We've got Amanda, who lives in Devon, but is currently in the far north of Scotland. Hello, Amanda. Hello, hello. Why are you on the run? What are you doing in the far north of Scotland? I'm on holiday. Very good. Very good. What is your question? So, how suspicious are people? Is it getting some traction that this is the third one now,

10:02Anthony Zurcher:and it might be very convenient for Donald Trump to have had last night's, Saturday night's event cancelled because of the awards going to journalists, journalists who uncovered the Epstein scandal, and that he can now bang on about his big, beautiful ballroom and how important that's going to be. It just... I don't know how it would work, but it just seems a bit too convenient. On the other hand, the man was armed with knives and so on. So I'm interested in your thoughts. Well, I've seen similar things, conspiracy theories and so on. It's a set-up and all of that. I've had people texting me. I mean, quite sensible people.

10:34people you know American supporters roughly speaking of the Democrats who've said you know this is this is too convenient to be true but actually that's just a way of thinking isn't it that when you actually think about it is a bit crazy because this guy I mean they would have to heavily arm him he went by train weirdly I mean I say weirdly in the American context there's very few people by train from Los Angeles to Washington and that's an arrestable offense in itself isn't it anthony what is how would that take i don't know days yeah it just he did everything that that is it would be an odd thing to do and then of course they don't kill him i mean it seems to me if you're going to go down the conspiracy road then you'd want him dead and they didn't even land a shot on him he shot he shot a secret service agent wearing a bulletproof vest which

11:22Anthony Zurcher:i'm actually i'm amazed that they didn't they didn't kill him because of an armed man charging through shooting people. Yeah, that does, that is kind of strange as well. So are you going full conspiracy theory? This is the place to do it. You know, I have seen, you know, putting on my Mariana hat, I have seen stage trending as a term on social media. And so clearly Amanda is not alone in having these questions. I think it's a natural response to something so mystifying as this, that a schoolteacher from California would go through all of this trouble. He drove or took the train cross-country, I guess, so he could bring weapons.

12:02Anthony Zurcher:You can't obviously check them on a plane. And to get all the way here and to do this is just, it defies logic. And so you start reaching for some sort of an explanation as to why and thinking, well, you know, there could be ulterior motives or conspiracies, that sort of thing is one thing you can grasp. But the reality is that conspiracies are usually much more complicated than the simple explanations that this was one person who decided, for whatever reason, to try to take things into his own hands. If he's pardoned, if he's pardoned, then I'm going down this road, OK? But I suppose also it's a reflection of our times.

12:37And actually, it's a time that Donald Trump has fuelled spotting his own conspiracies and things. That's where people's minds are going to. It's a great question, imagine. You've touched on something there. And it turns out we don't need Mariana. We can just speak to Anthony's imaginary friends instead. Thank you for that, Amanda. Let's go to Simon now. Is Simon on the line? Yes, I am. What is your question, please, Simon? Right, OK. I just noticed in the last couple of years, there have been three assassination attempts on the US president, all by amateurs, by which I mean lone gunmen rather than people in a conspiracy.

13:17So I was wondering how many attempts from professionals has the Secret Service managed to disrupt? And if the amateurs are making such a good job of it, doesn't it mean that the Secret Service are looking in the wrong place? It's an interesting question, Anthony. Do they sort of reveal the ones that they've stopped?

13:39Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, and they have. There was a case against an Iranian intelligent agent earlier this year who came to the United States allegedly to arrange for political assassinations of American leaders. That was foiled by American intelligence. So there are instances where they have uncovered what they view as possible conspiracies to commit violence. But you're right. The ones that get through, the ones that are making the headlines are lone wolf kind of things, single gunmen who are taking things into their own hands. And I don't know. At some point, if the president is going to appear in public or near public, it's hard to stop a single person who is willing to trade their life for the president from at least disrupting an event.

14:25Anthony Zurcher:But I think maybe we're lucky and talking about the IRA before the United States is lucky that we haven't had these kind of organized assassination attempts by professionals, as you say. And, you know, knock wood now that we don't ever get to the point where one of those becomes much closer to reality. I mean, there's been a lot of focus on this here in the UK as well, just as the shift from organized. you know the thing about the IRA they were successful in lots of times but they were also you know they could put agents in and they could try and stop those things and we saw that with Islamist extremism as well when there were cells and there were groups and there were weaknesses but if it's one person radicalised online it's incredibly hard to break that and that's something that the security service here have talked about yeah and I mean it's obviously a problem in the states and particularly the big problem in the states has been domestic terrorism really and that That has been the way it has gone.

15:19It's quite difficult. You think of 9-11 being the great exception to the general rule that actually it's quite difficult to infiltrate people into the states and organize it all in a way that works. I'm sure people have tried in the past, but unsuccessfully, generally speaking. And that is possibly testament to the ability of the various security services to protect the states. But I think it's also just it is a difficult thing to do. I mean, partly because of the geography of the place. I mean, there's a weird thing about America, isn't it? When you think about it, it is well protected by the sea.

15:53And yes, there are all sorts of scare stories about people coming across from Canada or infiltrating their way in from Mexico, and you don't know who they are, etc., etc. But actually, it's never really led to anything properly organized. But then you've also got guns and the accessibility to guns. So if you've got an individual who's radicalized and then access to guns, then that's different as well. It's a great question. So thank you for that, Simon. Let's move on because we've got something I want to try and get through as many as we can. Greg in Glasgow, who was at the AmeriCast live event at the weekend.

16:22Nice for you, Greg. Nice for you to be invited. Greg asks, what business does Trump have with the Falkland Islands? Oh, yeah, well, this was an interesting one because Anthony told me something I didn't really know about that. So we'd better let him answer this. I hadn't realised that there's real Trump interest in the oil or the potential oil being pumped out of the Falklands. But Anthony thinks there is.

16:43Anthony Zurcher:Well, that's one theory, certainly, for why Donald Trump apparently and people in his administration have brought up the Falkland Islands in regard to the territorial claims that Argentina have made on it and possibly calling into question British sovereignty on the islands going forward. And my theory that I told Justin on the stage during our America's record is that this was Donald Trump attempting to essentially rattle the British cages, makes threats about things in order to get them to be more accommodating on supporting the U.S. effort in the Iran war. Well, if you're not going to cooperate with us, well, then maybe we'll reopen the whole Falklands Island territorial issue.

17:25Anthony Zurcher:And Trump, you know, he lived through the 70s and 80s. He remembers the Falkland Wars. He knows how important it is to Great Britain. And so he's just going to try to throw that out there, chuck a bomb into the middle of this and see if he can get a reaction. Yeah. But it's worth saying that all of this, we're talking about this because there was this kind of behind the scenes thing, wasn't there? A leaked Pentagon memo, which who knows who wrote it and in what capacity it was written. And they also suggested chucking Spain out of NATO, which I think would be probably more complicated than just doing it by memo overnight.

18:03There you go. But then I suppose there's also the risk. Once that is out there in the public and if Trump in public starts sounding a bit more lukewarm, does Argentina think? Well, he's very matey with Javier Milay, the boss in Argentina, isn't he? Very matey indeed. Although, again, I'm not sure Javier Milay particularly wants to have a... Well, it wouldn't be much of a battle now, I guess, necessarily, but doesn't particularly want to re-engage the whole business of the Falklands. There's no particular suggestion from him. And they still claim sovereignty, I think is what you're saying, but nothing more than that.

18:36So I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. Anthony says there's oil. Anthony's obviously spotted it, possibly invested. Anthony, it struck me with the king going. The king, we're told, was instrumental in getting the president to stop talking about Canada as the 51st state. He was told that the king did not like that, and he seemed to stop doing it. So maybe the king can have a quiet word about the Falklands.

18:59Anthony Zurcher:Maybe. It seems like there's a lot on the king's plate in these conversations with Donald Trump behind the scenes. But he has got he's got a lot of work to do to to mend mend the relations. But as as Donald Trump himself told our colleague Sarah in that phone conversation they had that week last week, Donald Trump does seem to think that maybe this would be a good step. He has a lot of respect for the king. And if the king handles this diplomatically, which I think he is more than able to do, maybe this will end up in a better place than we were just a few weeks ago. Yeah, maybe we'll gain territory, not lose it.

19:33Anyway, have you got your eye on? Do you want Greenland? You're looking for an extension. I know that would put us in an awkward position if they offered us Greenland. Let's finish off. We've got a question finally from Richard Piper, who's emailed. He said, I've heard very little as the consequence of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz on the price and availability of commodities away from oil and gas. Is this because the US is self-sufficient in fertiliser, CO2, helium and other supplies that most of the rest of the world sources in the Middle East? or is it that people think the US has adequate stocks to tide them over until this short-lived war is over?

20:02And in fact, before we answer that, we've got, this is Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, that was asked about cooperation with Europe at the Pentagon last Friday. Have any European countries reached out to assist in coordinating off the strait and participating in escorts? I know there's a lot of talks. You saw the, I would call it a silly conference, in Europe last week where they got together and talked about, talking about maybe doing something eventually when things are done. Those are not serious efforts yet. So Anthony, are people in America talking about those other things, fertilizer, CO2, helium and all of that?

20:37Anthony Zurcher:They are. And we are not self-sufficient on that. We are as dependent on exports from the Persian Gulf and Arab countries as much of the world is. I think the thing is that it takes longer for that to filter into the economy than the price of oil, because very quickly you see if the price of oil goes up, the cost of a gallon at the petrol station spikes rather quickly. All of the other ingredients, all the other key resources coming out of the Gulf, they they have a longer tail. So things like nitrogen, which is used in fertilizer, which is used in crops, that is getting more expensive. of farmers here.

21:15Anthony Zurcher:And there have been reports on this. Farmers here in the country are having to do with less of it or not fertilize their crops as much. That ultimately is going to lead to lower crop yields, which is going to raise the price of food. But that all takes that all takes time. So we're going to get there. Clearly, this is going to be a crisis. And you're seeing stories about the rising number of bankruptcies among small farmers in this country. And that can be attributed to what's going on in the Gulf and with Iran. It's just going to take a little longer for the country as a whole to feel it. Is there a tipping point, though, where Donald Trump starts worrying about that more than he's worrying about Iran?

21:52Anthony Zurcher:I think there could be. I mean, he is very sensitive to middle America and to farmers. He always talks about how farmers are his best friends and most loyal supporters. And he's going to start hearing it more and more now from people in places like Iowa and Nebraska that are depending on this. And they are going to start making their displeasure felt with this president. And I think that may be one of the reasons why he seems to be reluctant to restart the military campaign here during the ceasefire and seems to be so eager to try to find some way to walk this down because it is going to hit him in his base.

22:30Anthony Zurcher:And the closer we get to the midterm election, there's a Senate race in Iowa that in theory could go to the Democrats if things get bad enough. Yeah. But that then leads to the question, does he care? Which we have sort of vaguely touched on, haven't we, in various editions of the book? Because, frankly, we don't know. Nobody knows. But it's an interesting thought, actually. And maybe he's just he's had it with the party. In a really case, obviously not on the ballot himself in the midterm elections. Perhaps he doesn't mind if he loses at least the House. I think he should mind if he loses the Senate because he sort of loses everything.