Weeks after a combative sit-down on "60 Minutes" made headlines, President Donald Trump is still taking shots at Norah O'Donnell and he's not holding back.
Speaking Monday on "The Hugh Hewitt Show," Trump dismissed the CBS News anchor with pointed bluntness. "She's terrible," he said, adding that she was just "a regular person that gets paid a lot of money" with nothing particularly special about her. He went so far as to say he could pull almost any woman off the street and get the same quality of interview.
Host Hugh Hewitt suggested that O'Donnell had been deliberately baiting Trump during the interview rehearsing a provocative question designed to make him walk out. Trump didn't buy into the walkout angle, though. He said doing so would only make that moment the headline rather than the substance of the conversation. "The problem with walking off, it's like it becomes the bigger story," he explained, referencing how he handled a similar situation back in 2020.
What Actually Happened in the Interview
The tension traces back to a "60 Minutes" interview recorded last month. O'Donnell had obtained the manifesto written by Cole Allen, the suspect charged with attempting to assassinate the president at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. She read portions of it aloud to Trump on camera passages that referenced a rapist and a pedophile and asked for his reaction.
Trump's response was immediate and forceful. "Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you're horrible people," he said during the interview. He went on to flatly deny the characterizations in the manifesto, saying he was "not a rapist" and "not a pedophile," and pointed out that he had been fully exonerated of past accusations. He also turned the tables, suggesting that associates of his political opponents were the ones tied to figures like Jeffrey Epstein.
When O'Donnell clarified that she was simply quoting the alleged gunman's own words, Trump didn't soften. "You shouldn't be reading that on '60 Minutes.' You're a disgrace," he told her before telling her to go ahead and finish the interview anyway.
CBS Stands Its Ground
CBS News isn't backing down from the decision to ask those questions. In a statement provided to Fox News Digital, a network spokesperson defended O'Donnell's line of questioning without hesitation.
The network argued that with Allen facing a charge of attempting to assassinate a sitting president, it had a clear journalistic obligation to pursue the story. The manifesto had been obtained just hours before the interview took place, making it fresh, relevant, and in the network's view entirely appropriate to bring up. Asking difficult questions in pursuit of the truth, they said, is simply what responsible journalism looks like.
The back-and-forth between Trump and one of television news' most recognizable faces shows no signs of dying down. Whether it was a legitimate journalistic question or a deliberate provocation likely depends on who you ask but one thing is clear: both sides are standing firmly by their positions.
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