CBS’s Norah O’Donnell Uses Assassin’s Rhetoric To Target Trump
Norah O’Donnell, a *60 Minutes* correspondent, is criticized for repeating on TV an alleged assassin’s manifesto that accused President Donald Trump of being a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” shortly after another attempt on Trump’s life. The article argues she did so without treating the claims as baseless or inappropriate to amplify.
It describes the suspect, Cole Allen, as having written about wanting to murder Trump and members of his cabinet, and claims O’Donnell’s questioning effectively fed into the same rhetoric Democrats and media outlets have used for years. The piece highlights Trump’s immediate reaction-calling O’Donnell and “horrible people” and saying she should be ashamed-then claims she continued the line of questioning by feigning surprise at Trump’s denials.
the author also argues this approach reflects a broader pattern in corporate media coverage,pointing to how Axios framed O’Donnell’s exchange as an “uncomfortable question” that supposedly “prompted” Trump to resume hostility with the press. the article portrays O’Donnell’s conduct not as an error but as part of a media ecosystem that repeats political talking points tied to violence.
What, if anything, was left of Norah O’Donnell’s credibility went up in flames on Sunday when the 60 Minutes correspondent repeated an alleged would-be assassin’s baseless accusations against President Donald Trump without hesitation.
Cole Allen, the 31-year-old armed man who allegedly stormed a Secret Service checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where Trump, members of his administration, and thousands of guests were wined and dined, was not shy in his manifesto about hoping to murder the president and his cabinet.
“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” Allen reportedly wrote.
In her sit-down with Trump just one day after the latest assassination attempt, O’Donnell repeated the line with a straight face.
“What’s your reaction to that?” O’Donnell said, after remarking that the manifesto was a “stunning thing to read.”
Trump clocked the trick immediately.
“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. He later added, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
The president’s chastising didn’t deter O’Donnell from deploying her old propagandist tricks. Instead she feigned surprise when Trump declared, “I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody. … I’m not a pedophile.”
“Oh, do you think he was referring to you?” O’Donnell intejected.
O’Donnell is a lot of things, but out of the loop on the “rapist, pedophile, and traitor” accusations Democrats and corporate media have lobbed at the president for years is not one of them.
The 60 Minutes correspondent is undoubtedly familiar with countless headlines, including many from her employer CBS, catering against all evidence to fake narratives claiming Trump sexually assaulted a woman in a department store dressing room, was in on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s racket, and committed treason against his country by colluding with Russia, Ukraine, or any other foreign country. O’Donnell also knows about and even lied in her coverage of the deep state’s attempt to throw Trump in prison ahead of the 2024 election.
If anything, O’Donnell certainly saw that Trump sued ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos over false claims that the now-president raped E. Jean Carroll. The suit settled after the Disney-owned media company decided to pay $15 million to the Trump library instead of subjecting itself to a legal discovery that could reveal even more slander against the Republican.
It’s already taboo to treat the rhetoric of an attempted assassin’s manifesto as a legitimate thing to repeat on national television. To pretend that the president doesn’t have to defend himself against such outrageous claims, especially when they’ve been countlessly recycled by media hacks and Bluesky users and directly inspired leftist violence, is even worse. Yet that’s exactly what O’Donnell did.
The CBS correspondent’s patronizing approach to covering the most recent attempt on Trump’s life is not a bug in the corporate media system, it’s a feature. Exhibit A came in Axios, which repackaged O’Donnell’s repeat of the baseless accusation as an “uncomfortable question” and sold it to Americans as the reason Trump “resume[d] hostilities with the Washington press, less than 24 hours after their shared brush with death.”
One uncomfortable question was all it took for President Trump to resume hostilities with the Washington press, less than 24 hours after their shared brush with death. https://t.co/2nBcYEuNXU
— Axios (@axios) April 27, 2026
First the media and Democrats such as President Barack Obama pretended not to know why a seemingly normal “teacher of the month” from California would target an event attended by the president and his cabinet. Now, they are pretending to be surprised when Trump reacts to their willing echo of the assassination-prep talking points they supplied to would-be political killers.
If you thought Bari Weiss’s CBS takeover was a rescue operation, you were wrong. It was a public relations stunt that, as evidenced by O’Donnell’s latest propaganda performance, did not deter so-called journalists’ dereliction of duty
[RELATED: There Can Be No Unity With The Violent Democrat-Media Industrial Complex]
Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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