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Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, April 27th. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that is not rooting for the Dallas Mavericks. If you know you know. [music break] On today’s show, financier Kevin Warsh is one step closer to being confirmed as federal reserve chair. And President Donald Trump backs out of negotiations with Iran in Pakistan. But let’s start with the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. President Trump was preparing to give his remarks in front of hundreds of journalists and political figures on Saturday when guests heard gunshots fired outside the ballroom. As of the time of this recording Sunday, law enforcement has a suspect in custody, a California man who traveled to Washington and was staying in the hotel where the dinner took place. According to police, he sent his family messages that indicated he was planning to take violent action against members of the administration. But there’s still a ton we don’t know. Namely, how on earth did someone with a gun get so close to the president again? Typically, an event featuring the president has incredibly tight security. But according to the New York Times, there were no metal detectors at the hotel entrances. Other journalists noted that security at the hotels seemed weirdly lax. So did the shooter, according to his alleged manifesto published by the New York Post. He wrote that there was quote, “no damn security,” and that quote, “this level of incompetence is insane.” But acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche defended law enforcement’s actions on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. 

[clip of Todd Blanche] We don’t have all the answers on to how he got far, but the perimeter is the perimeter, so necessarily, if somebody’s outside the perimeter and they try to breach it, um assuming they don’t get very far, that’s what we want, that’s what we want law enforcement to stop, and they did. 

Jane Coaston: The Washington Post also reported that the Trump administration did not designate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to be a quote, “national special security event,” despite the President, the Vice President, and most of the cabinet being in attendance. And Trump has been weirdly calm. Here he is on CBS News’ 60 Minutes Sunday recounting his experience with Secret Service agents at the dinner. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them. 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 I was surrounded by great people and I probably made them act a little bit more [?]. 

Jane Coaston: He was also impressed by the speed of the alleged gunman. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] He ran 45 yards, they say, and he just went to it, and then, boom, he popped through it. I mean, he ran like, I think the NFL should sign him up. He was fast.  

Jane Coaston: Interesting. How was the shooter able to get so close despite the perimeter? Was security more lax than it should have been? I still have a lot of questions. So to take us inside the room Saturday night, I spoke to Eugene Daniels. He’s a senior Washington correspondent at MSNOW and former president of the White House Correspondents Association. Eugene, welcome to What a Day. 

Eugene Daniels: Thank you so much for having me. 

Jane Coaston: You were at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night. First, I hope you’re doing okay. I’m so glad that you are safe. 

Eugene Daniels: Thank you. I’m shaken up, if I’m gonna be honest. It was like, we cover these things all the time, right? We cover gun violence in this country. We cover people who were, you know, hiding under things, texting their family members, holding, pulling their friends, people holding hands. Um. But you, you, and everyone says this, you never think that it’s gonna be you on the side of the other side of that equation. Um. And so that, I think a lot of folks, I’ve been touching base with a lot of other reporters and sources that were in the room, everyone’s trying to work through what it feels like when a bubble that typically feels so safe, should be very safe, um gets pierced like this. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I think that’s something I’ve been hearing from people just like, you know, this is supposed to be a very it’s like a very elite space, a very safe space. But I wanted to ask, like, what were you doing when it became clear that there had been a breach in security? There were gunshots. What were you doing? 

Eugene Daniels: Yeah, we had we had kind of just started, right? Like the whole table was just talking. We’re having fun. We were talking about um what we were expecting that day. We were talking about you know what would the coverage look like of of Donald Trump and his speech and um what the party, the MSNOW party that we were having that night that was celebrating the first amendment and all the folks that are in that room, what that was gonna look like. And we were, I was far back enough close to the door that it was very clear, very quickly to to me and some folks around me that it was like gunshots. We never, you know, there are a lot of folks, especially folks that were toward the front who um when you talked to them, they thought it was a pop dropping or someone you know dropped a tray and all these plates went everywhere. But immediately to me, um it sounded like a gun. And the first thought I had was, no, no, no, no no. Because I’ve never been in that situation and so I’m thinking like this is not like this can’t possibly be actually happening in this room and so we just dropped to the ground and you can see folks kind of realizing it throughout and especially when they started running in we started seeing Secret Service and US Marshals running in and then we all started taking out our phones and recording essentially because it became very clear to us that like other people are going to need to know what to do and frankly it was it was um quite cathartic to have something else to focus on. And I’ve been working a lot today as well. And that’s also been helpful was like, other people need the information of what happened and you’re able to take yourself out of it. 

Jane Coaston: So you and I have both been at events where secret service is present, where– 

Eugene Daniels: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: Either a sitting president or a recently sitting president, or vice president was due to be. This is potentially the third attempted assassination on Trump in less than two years. Did you notice an increase in security at this year’s dinner with the president being in attendance?

Eugene Daniels: So I can I can really talk to this because I’ve planned it, right? 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Eugene Daniels: I planned this dinner last year. And there is a difference between what it sort of looks and feels like when the president is there and when he is not there. One, it’s in who is leading it. If the president is there, Secret Service takes charge, right? They are the ones that are coordinating with NPD. They’re the ones that are coordinating with the hotel and you know and telling the WHCA what’s going to happen when things are closing, that kind of thing. When the president isn’t there, it’s the WHCA that, you know, hires a security firm to handle it all. And frankly, it looked similar and felt similar to how it’s been in the past. Now, a lot of people, including myself, have questions about what that means in the future and if changes need to be made. But folks that are saying that it felt lax compared to other years. For those of us that have gone a lot, and that have been involved in this, it kind of didn’t, it felt very similar, right? Walking in to the the hotel, and especially just getting into the the perimeter, you have to have certain things, and that’s why you feel safe. You have to have a hotel key card, usually. You have to show a ticket, you have to show that you have um a pre-reception invite, because some people go to the receptions and don’t go don’t go to the actual event. So there’s all these different types of credentialing that makes you feel safe. But the magnetometers are much closer to the actual event than where the red carpet is. And when folks watch the red carpet, what they don’t know is that is the entrance, like right there at that door. When you walk in, you are on the red carpet and no one asked to see ID. There wasn’t a list and that is not, that has not been abnormal, but it is clearly and I have not talked to the folks that are leading this on the WHCA about this this morning, but knowing them and having served with many of them, they’re having those conversations as they move forward. 

Jane Coaston: Now what struck me about this besides my immediate concern about all the people I knew at this dinner and just like, I know that there’s a lot that you’re contending with thinking about this, but I’ve also, I’m also sure that you’ve seen that the first reaction I’ve seemed to see online was an intense number of people saying, Oh, this was staged. This was a false flag. What do you think about these conspiracy theories? I mean, you were there. 

Eugene Daniels: Right. 

Jane Coaston: This all did happen. 

Eugene Daniels: Right. 

Jane Coaston: And already you’re seeing this divide between a room full of media, whose first thought is, how can we get this news out, and the world outside of that room where their first thought is it’s fake. 

Eugene Daniels: It screws with your head to have it have experienced something like that. And then immediately folks doing exactly what you’re saying. And I think it shows a couple of things. One, it shows the increasing distrust in this country of just like everything, right? People don’t trust the government and government both Democrats and Republicans have for years like denigrated the trust of the American people, right. They have they have destroyed that. Um, the media has a lot to contend with about the reasons that the folks don’t trust us in the media environment, the social media world we live in, getting that back, both the government and the media and just kind of like human being to human being, trusting each other or giving at least each other the benefit of the doubt or waiting for some kind of investigation instead of the second something happens, saying that it didn’t happen, that it’s fake. Um, I don’t know how we as a country come back from that, but what I saw in that room was like as American as it gets. You have people celebrating the first amendment which you know, we all say that we like. You have people who immediately got up and reported so the American people could see what was happening to their elected leaders. But also gun violence and then the distrust like all of those things yell and scream the current American environment to me. Um. And I don’t know how we as a country pull back from that. We have to figure out how, but I don’t know what it looks like. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. I think. I wish I knew. 

Eugene Daniels: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And to talk briefly about Trump immediately after the shooting, Trump held a press conference where he seemed unfazed. He was more concerned with rescheduling the dinner and the security of his new ballroom. At the same time, his popularity is at an all time low. How do you think Trump will try to use this moment? And do you think it’ll work?

Eugene Daniels: I think it will work with certain aspects of his base. I think it will work with, you know, certain Republicans. I think when when you talk to to even people who are like, you know Bush Republicans, you know they’ve said, you know this is possibly the third time that this man’s life has been in danger over the last two and a half years. So something must be wrong with the other side, right? Like that is what that is what you hear quite a bit. Um. And yet, like Donald Trump understands how to utilize a moment. So people who were surprised that he immediately had a press conference have not been paying attention. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Eugene Daniels: Right like he like they have not been paying attention to Donald Trump and who he is. In his heart of hearts, he’s a showman. At Butler, um he gets up ear bleeding. And despite the protocols that you know all of us that cover Presidents, Vice Presidents, and those who used to be them or candidates, nominees. He gets up and puts his fist up in the air while he’s supposed to be getting in the car, right? Knowing it seems that a moment is gonna come out of that. And so him standing in front of cameras, his team will tell you. That it was about, for them, educating the public about what happened. We did get quite a bit of information, but also showing the people who are behind these kinds of things, who want to do something like this, showing you know the suspect that you can’t scare us from wanting to continue. He really wanted to continue the dinner, right? When they were coming on the speakers and telling us, you know, our program will continue shortly, we were all like [pause] excuse me, huh? But when? How? Like, how? Is is is the mentalist coming out here? Like I’m not in the mood. You know, and so it was like such a weird, like, all of us trying to kind of figure it out, but Donald Trump is back there, according to our reports, telling his team he wants to get back on stage, that he that he is not going to be kowtowed by this, not going be scared of this. And so all of that, you know, milieu tells you a lot about how Donald Trump operates and whether or not it’s going to work. I think people are hurting so much. There’s only so much you can do to use anything, no matter what it is, as a distraction um from the pain folks are feeling, especially when it comes to the economy. There’s the Iran war. There’s still the frustration around um the Epstein files and the release or the not full release of those files. And a million other things the American people are dealing with and trying to figure out. And so trying to use anything to say um, we need to move forward and just focus on this one thing. You can’t trick the American people when they know what pain they’re feeling. So I think it maybe works for a couple of days, but eventually we all kind of go back to normal when these happen. We’ve been through this before, right? We see kids get killed. And the country just moves on, and there’s no change in the law. There’s no like real conversation about how this happened, why this happened for longer than a couple of weeks. And so I think like the whether it works, who knows? Probably not. Whether it changes anything in this country also, probably not, unfortunately. 

Jane Coaston: Eugene, thank you so much for joining me. And again, I’m glad you’re okay. 

Eugene Daniels: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Eugene Daniels, senior Washington correspondent at MSNow. There is somehow more news to talk about. Thanks for being here. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Jane Coaston: Hey, remember how last week Vice President J.D. Vance was supposed to travel to Pakistan to negotiate an end to the Iran war? That didn’t happen. And on Saturday, Trump said that special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would not be traveling to Pakistan because it’s too much travel time. But like anyone who really, really wants someone to call them but also wants to seem cool, he added that Iran, quote, “can call us any time they want.” On Sunday, Trump called into Fox News to talk about how actually he could totally destroy Iran if he wanted to. But he doesn’t want to. But he could. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We’ve wiped out, largely wiped out the opposition. If we ever had to keep going, we’d wipe them out very quickly. The rest of it, the remainder. And I hope we don’t have to do that, but it may be possible that we do. 

Jane Coaston: But he also saved some time to yell about America’s allies. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] They said, we don’t want to get involved. And frankly, when they said, we don’t want to get involved, as you know, UK said that, oh, no, we’ll send ships as soon as the war is over. And that’s not good. That’s not good. We just can’t have that. We are not happy. Let me put it this way, just finish it up. We are not happy with NATO. NATO did not serve us well. We’ve been serving them for many years, spending trillions of dollars. And when we wanted a little help, they were not there. So we have to remember that. 

Jane Coaston: Last week, President Trump indefinitely extended the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. The Department of Homeland Security has been closed for almost 10 weeks, the longest partial government shutdown in history, and the Department is expected to start missing paychecks in May. On Thursday, Republicans launched a new plan to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol without the help of Democrats. On Fox News Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche used the shooting at the White correspondence dinner to demand an end to the shutdown. 

[clip of Todd Blanche] I hope this is a wake-up call to Congress. I hope that this is wake-up call that the games that they’ve been playing, really with the lives of the men and women protecting them, should end. And I do hope that they get to work now and get a deal done, which is what President Trump has been asking for for months now, and that the folks in that room, which included included some of those congressmen and senators, not in addition to the press and the administration officials that were there, got a first-hand look at how great those men and women are and how using them as pawns in their political game is something they should not be doing. 

Jane Coaston: In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pointed the finger at Republicans, saying that he also wants DHS employees to get paid. 

[clip of Hakeem Jeffries] Well, we have to make sure that every single Secret Service agent continues to get paid. Every single TSA agent, the Coast Guard, and FEMA, as well as the hard-working men and women of the Department of Homeland Security. 

Jane Coaston: It’s worth noting that Secret Service, ICE, and members of the Coast Guard have received paychecks during the shutdown. The Department of Justice has finally dropped its criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell over alleged cost overruns on construction on two Fed buildings. Which means that after months of wrangling, North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis will finally vote to support Powell’s potential successor, Kevin Warsh. Tillis spoke to NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on Sunday. 

[clip of Senator Thom Tillis] So this will allow Mr. Warsh to move on with his confirmation on time. And that’s the absurdity of this whole thing. If this investigation, which is now closed, had never occurred, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. 

Jane Coaston: Tillis added that he believed Warsh would maintain the independence of the fed. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] And just to be clear, are you confident that Kevin Warsh will act independently of the president if he is in fact confirmed? 

[clip of Senator Thom Tillis] Yeah, as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the president doesn’t get annoyed with them once or twice. 

Jane Coaston: So yes, Tom Tillis is a yes. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] I just want to put a fine point on it, because what you’re saying is significant, Senator. You are now a yes to vote on the confirmation of Kevin Warsh. 

[clip of Senator Thom Tillis] That’s right. 

Jane Coaston: The probe of Powell was for criminal activity and has continued despite a federal prosecutor telling U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, there was no evidence. And a federal judge saying back in March that the grand jury subpoenas served to the Fed were to, quote, “harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or to resign and make way for a Fed chair who will.” But Pirro says she could reopen it if there’s any new evidence of criminal activity. And that’s the news. [music break] 

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, wish all the players well at the Madrid Open, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how a stomach virus has been making its way through the annual tennis tournament in Spain, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter, check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And I could not watch tennis if I were nauseous, let alone play it and win. You go, Coco Gauff. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]