Karoline Leavitt wants people to know how President Donald Trump felt after gunfire brought the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to a halt.
The April 25 dinner at the Washington Hilton had turned chaotic. Shots forced Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and Vice President JD Vance to evacuate.
The former press secretary now says even after Secret Service rushed him off the stage, Trump was the opposite of scared and terrified.
Leavitt says the president was more riled up after cameras caught him falling onstage as Secret Service agents surrounded him.
Agents then lifted Trump and took him offstage after springing into action to get Vance out first.
Leavitt is now filling in the blanks about that night, including Trump’s backstage meltdown after Secret Service lifted him off the floor.
In an episode of Fox News’ “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” posted Sept. 22, she shared that Trump wanted the dinner to continue.
She said, “He was like a caged lion backstage, just roaring to get out. ‘We gotta go back out there.’ And I’m sitting there like, ‘I don’t know if I want to go back out there.’”
Trump kept pressing to return to the Washington Hilton ballroom, according to Leavitt, even as the people around him urged him to leave.
“Why can’t I go? I will wait all night. I don’t care if it’s 3 in the morning. Get it started,” she recalled him saying. His team even began making preparations to resume the evening.
Hannity said Trump had him on speakerphone with Melania listening. The Fox News host told the president that no one yet knew the full extent of the threat.
“You don’t know if this is a lone gunman or a broader conspiracy,” Hannity recalled saying. “There’s no way you’re going back out there.”
Secret Service agents also needed to sweep the venue. Leavitt said restarting the dinner would have required guests to leave the ballroom and pass through security again.
“It would have been a mess,” she said. “Nobody really was wanting to go back out there. Nobody wanted to go back out.”
Trump returned to the White House instead and spoke from the briefing room. Authorities later charged a suspect in connection with what federal officials described as an attempt to assassinate the president.
Leavitt’s lion comparison got a rough reception under a YouTube clip of her interview.
“Caged lion? Hilarious!!” one viewer wrote. Another posted, “He needs to be caged… But a lion he is no.”
A third was even less generous: “Oh please. No one believes he really wanted to go back on that room-unless the whole thing was staged and he knew for sure that his bloated carcass would be safe.”
The jokes kept coming.
“He felt like a caged lion in that food cart too rotflmao how strong he looked rotflmao,” wrote one commenter. One Yahoo! reader questioned Leavitt’s credibility: “We all know that she’s a Liar!”
The interview also recalled another controversy from that night. Before the shooting, Leavitt had said there would be “shots fired” during Trump’s planned speech. Her husband, Nicolas Riccio, had told a reporter to “be very safe.”
Those remarks drew suspicion online afterward. Leavitt’s phrase referred to verbal attacks in the speech, while the reporter later explained Riccio’s warning as general concern. There is no evidence either knew an attack was coming.
Leavitt may be out of office, but she is still doing what she does best: trying to make Trump look strong.
