Both Reps. Abe Hamadeh (R., Ariz.) and Marlin Stutzman (R., Ind.) were on scene at the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) when Cole Allen, a Kamala Harris donor, rushed past security in an attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump.
The evening’s security has been heavily debated; Stutzman, for his part, described it as “a little lax” in the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter.
Prior to the evening’s chaos, Stutzman explained that he was “excited” to attend, as a guest of NewsNation, because Trump was speaking at it for the first time as president. “We’re just sitting there, enjoying the moment,” Stutzman recounted. “The excitement and energy in the room was phenomenal. One thing I did notice that when we were walking into the hotel that the protesters outside were vicious. Their signs were just over the top and they’re wishing death on people, and there are horrible people out there protesting. I’ll always defend anybody’s right to protest. But these people were something else.”
From Stutzman’s standpoint, the security was far from sufficient, as he explained to Hamadeh, the host of the latest RSC podcast. “At the first perimeter, we saw these little signs by people out on the sidewalks saying, ‘get ready to show your ticket,’” he explained. “So I had my little ticket, and it wasn’t much bigger than this Constitution here, so I flashed it. But then I after I got in, it was raining a little bit, and I had an umbrella, and all of a sudden, my Communications Director, who didn’t have a ticket, comes walking up beside me because we were going to meet there. And he was said ‘they just told me to come in.’ So that’s fine. That was expected somewhat. But then we get inside the hotel, we went to different events, and you just flashed your little invitation card. Somebody could have gotten those beforehand and made copies of those. It could have been easy. If you go to the White House, you have to have your ID, you have to match it up to the registry. We finally got to the metal detectors right outside the ballroom, and there were ladies saying later that they didn’t even have their purses inspected.”
“I just think that there could have been much tighter security, especially in a hotel that’s got 1,000 rooms where people are staying,” Stutzman added. “And of course, the shooter had stayed in the hotel, and he smuggled guns in there. Ironically, Washington, D.C. is supposed to be a gun-free city, and this guy has guns in the Hilton hotel that he tries to use to assassinate the president or cabinet members.”
As the event started, Stutzman described how “we’re sitting there at the table and having our salads, we hear these four gunshots just over my left shoulder, about 50 feet from where we were sitting, just outside the main doors; the president had already been seated. The National Anthem had just taken place. The Color Guard had just walked out. The fact that it happened so quickly, right after that was just alarming. And when we hit the deck and climbed under the table, there was actually a U.S. senator at my table. She climbed under the table with her husband. The lady to my left made sure she got down. And then after a little bit, I wanted to see what’s going on. And I started looking around, peeking out, and I didn’t know if somebody was coming into the room and just start unloading guns or what was going to happen.”
That didn’t happen, but in the moment it was far from a certainty. “In that moment,” Stutzman said, “there were liberals in that room, there were conservatives in the room, Republicans, Democrats, and my belief is that the look the leftist media, the liberal media, has provoked so much of this hatred towards President Trump. They’re calling him a Nazi. They’re calling him a dictator. This whole king thing is just over the top and and I think that that’s what’s happening with some of these crazy guys; they’re reading this stuff, and they’re on social media, and they’re al in this dark place, and they try to take matters into their own hands.”
For Stutzman, the solution is simple; the media needs to take responsibility for its rhetoric. “We have got to put a stop to that sort of rhetoric and narrative,” he said. He also echoed one of Trump’s recent priorities: “I also think that we should be building a ballroom over at the White House. President Trump is not doing it for himself. He’s doing it for safety and security. If there’s anybody who knows the dangerous job that the presidency is, President Trump does.”
Hamadeh, for his part, described the evening as “quite an experience.” The Arizona lawmaker is an Army veteran, and he said that experience helped him understand that “those were gunshots right away.”
“In those moments, your heart sinks in your stomach,” Hamadeh said. But he felt that the room itself was “relatively calm.”
“I heard people praying, but it wasn’t a stampede out the door,” he said. “People were quiet. It was kind of surreal.”
Both lawmakers hailed the Secret Service as being heroes of the day, but both also criticized House and Senate Democrats for facilitating the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“Think about the [Secret Service] guy who jumped up in front of President Trump in that moment,” Stutzman said. “It’s an incredible video. I encourage anybody to go back and watch it, because those guys sprung into action. That guy, I don’t know his name, stands in front of the president. He was ready to take a bullet and give his life for the president, he’s not getting a paycheck. How crazy is that? We can’t make sure that guy who’s willing to give his life for the president, and that’s his job, is getting his paycheck. He’s got the president’s back, but we don’t have his.”
Hamadeh agreed, calling the Democrats’ intransigence on government funding “wild.”
“These people,” Hamadeh said of his cross-party colleagues, “they always say they want to support government workers; they want to support the working man. And they’ve had these poor people like not getting paid for 75 days, and we know it’s expensive. They’ve got bills to pay, and it’s not just Secret Service; it’s the Coast Guard. We’re hitting critical levels. We saw what the TSA was dealing with just a few weeks ago, and President Trump, there were executive actions. He started getting them paid again, but we saw the chaos at the airports….These Democrats are literally willing to let our country burn to the ground and have people get hurt in order to try to score political points.”
The joint interview between Hamadeh and Stutzman can be found here, along with the rest of the RSC’s podcast library.