Pandemonium, and a familiar queasiness, descended on Washington political and media society on Saturday evening after US president Donald Trump was rushed from the White House correspondents annual gala dinner after at least half a dozen shots were fired inside the Hilton Hotel.
It was confirmed that a single gunman was subdued and taken into custody by Secret Service afterwards. The shots fired were in the lobby rather than the basement-level ballroom, where ceremonies had just got underway.
Trump was to give the address, or “roast”, at the annual event and his attendance, for the first time as president, had generated both anticipation and conflicting views from a press corps which has been subject to sustained attacks by the president and the administration.
If it’s true that journalism, as an institution, has been under sustained attack from Trump, it is also true that the transformation Trump made a decade ago from New York tycoon to generational political disruptor gave an electrifying jolt to a dynastic media left unmoored by the digital revolution. And there is a parallel truth, too, that much as Trump has derided the “fake news media” there is really no group to whom he more enjoys talking.
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[ Timeline: How the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner unfoldedOpens in new window ]
And all of those contradictions blended into a kind of fantasia on Saturday evening when the White House press pool, many still in their evening finery, hurried downtown from their abandoned starters to the James Brady press room to attend the impromptu conference called by the president. Like all impresarios, Trump will never not be alive to the vitality of the oldest American dictum of show-going-on.
And so, still in full tux, Trump took to the podium of the Brady press room (named after James Brady, the Reagan press secretary shot in the head and left with partial paralysis in the 1981 atrocity) just after 10.30pm while the Hilton Hotel was still under evacuation orders. He was joined by FBI director Kash Patel, also in tuxedo, and his new Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin.
“Well, thank you very much,” Trump began.
“That was very unexpected. But incredibly acted upon by Secret Service and law enforcement. This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press. And in a certain way, it did. Because I saw a room that was just totally unified. In one way it was a very beautiful thing to see.
“This is not the first time in the past couple of years that our Republic has been attacked by a would-be assassin who sought to kill,” Trump continued, alluding the Butler atrocity (which did leave one attendee dead) and by the thwarted attempt on his life as he played golf on his course in Florida.
The surreality of the entire drama was underlined when Weijia Jiang, president of the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA), asked Trump, with the first question of the evening, what had gone through his mind.
“That’s a very good question actually. It’s always shocking when something like this happens. It’s happened to me a little bit and that never changes. We were sitting next to one another – the First Lady on the other side. And at first I thought it was a tray, a tray going down, I’ve heard that many times and it’s a pretty loud noise. And it was from quite far away – he hadn’t breached the area at all. They really got him. But it was a gun. And some people really understood that really quickly. I was watching to see what was happening. Probably should have gone down a little faster.”
Although the backdrop and attire were different, scenes in which the sitting US president was once more hustled from a public event by service men and descending SWAT teams after gunfire was redolent of the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, July 2024.
Among the guests in attendance was Erika Kirk, the widow of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk who was shot during one of a live event at a Turning Point USA college campus event in Utah in September of last year.
Both that atrocity and the live televised events in Butler have both fallen under the spotlight of conspiracy theorists in recent months. But Saturday’s foiled violence was the latest clear warning of the heightened propensity for violent lunacy in a political climate where language and feelings are daily expressed at an unchecked fever pitch.
The Hilton Hotel was also the site of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in March 1981. And Saturday night’s disturbing attack provides a strange bookend to the night back in 2011 when Trump, attending as the WHCA dinner as a guest of The Washington Post, sat smarting as then president Barack Obama mocked and roasted him from the podium – a humiliation that has been suggested as the impetus behind his decision to run for president himself.
Saturday’s event was regarded as an attempted rapprochement by the WHCA. Trump’s confirmed attendance meant that most networks were carrying the dinner event, which had flagged in recent years, live. Those who tuned in witnessed the latest live broadcast of gun violence in the proximity of president Trump. At 8.34pm, Trump was sitting in the centre of the high table flanked by the first lady, Melania Trump and Jiang when the scene was suddenly flooded with Secret Service and military personnel who rushed the president out. The banquet table was empty by 8.36pm.
Senior cabinet members, including Robert Kennedy Jr, Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio were observed being escorted from the room through emergency exit doors while the guests – some 2,600 people attended the dinner – crouched beside their seats and banquet tables. Trump was returned to the White House, about a mile south, down Connecticut Avenue.
Wolf Blitzer, the veteran CNN anchor had actually left the ballroom to attend the bathrooms upstairs and inadvertently happened upon the shooting, simultaneously stumbling on the scoop of scoops.
“All of a sudden I hear these huge really loud blasting away,” he told colleagues.
“And I had no idea what was really going on but the next thing I knew a police officer pushed me to the ground and jumped on top of me as if he was trying to protect me. I was just a few feet away from the gunman. And after a few minutes the police officer and other police officers who were there took me and a bunch of others who were nearby, they wanted to make us secure and they took us to a men’s room and shut the door.”
Through the mayhem, Blitzer managed to see another set of police officers overpower the gunman.
“It looked to me like he had been shot but I don’t know that for sure and I didn’t see any blood or anything like that.”
In the confusion afterwards, it was announced at 9pm that the evening’s programme would resume but given the gravity and underlying violence, and the fact that the venue had become a crime scene, it was impossible to see how that would occur.
Within 20 minutes, there were unconfirmed reports that Trump wished to return to deliver the speech – which was to be a traditional roast – he had been preparing for. To deepen the overwhelming strangeness and unease of the evening, the president then issued a wistful Truth Social post from the White House.
“Quite an evening in DC. Secret Service and law enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO On’ but will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again.”
But the night was cancelled.
Instead, an odd, extremely well-dressed truce broke out in the Brady press room between the president and the US media who cover his daily life and utterances. It was cold in Washington for late April, and squally.
“We very much wanted to continue because I don’t like to let these sick people, these thugs, these horrible people change the fabric of what we do,” Trump told the room.
“But there was protocol. We are going to be doing one in 30 days or sooner. I am ready, willing and able. And I was all set to really rip it. I said to my people, this would be the most inappropriate speech ever … I’ll have to save it. I don’t know if I can ever be as rough as I was gonna be tonight. I think I’m probably gonna be nice. I’ll be very boring the next time. But we’re going to have a fantastic time.”
The president chuckled. The White House press members responded. And there it was, for a short while: laughter in the dark.
