Guests take cover after a shooting at the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.
Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Never for a moment did I think I was in danger when shots rang out at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, although nearly every person I was sitting with — and most of the diners near us — immediately ducked completely under the table, pulled the tablecloth down behind them, and fell silent.
Their hiding on cue rattled me more than the chaos itself. It felt too rehearsed and too passive; I wanted to figure out where the danger was coming from and decide which way to run. I consider the duck-and-hide instincts of my younger colleagues to be the product of years of mandatory drills practicing how to react to a school shooting. Us older folk, who grew up in the years before the 1999 Columbine massacre, have different muscle memory: back in the 80s and 90s, if you heard shots or even the threat of violence at a club, bar or block party, the best move was to round up your friends and get the hell out of there.
My conscious mind had registered the Washington Hilton ballroom as a safe place with this year’s security palpably more intense than WHCA dinners I attended when presidents Obama and Biden were on the dais. This year, as a hotel guest wearing a tux, I was stopped and asked to produce my dinner ticket three different times in the 50-foot walk from the elevator to the security checkpoint.
“Are we really doing this every 10 feet?” I asked one of the plainclothes agents, who smiled and shrugged. “Yep. You know why,” he said. “Step over and empty your pockets, please.” The checkpoint itself had about 15 people manning two magnetometers, with some officers wearing TSA jackets and several clearly armed. One flight down in the ballroom, my Spectrum News colleagues and I were seated a couple of tables away from FBI Director Kash Patel, who, like other cabinet members, was accompanied by an armed detail.
When the shots popped off, at least 20 people with weapons suddenly appeared, including two holding rifles and wearing tactical gear. Security with pistols drawn escorted cabinet members out of the room while the rest of us waited, called loved ones, and tried to relay information back to our newsrooms.
It’s a mistake to think of the shooting as a failure of security. On the contrary, the checkpoint and armed details roaming the ballroom visually signaled to everyone that no weapons, uninvited guests, or other nonsense would be allowed. Cole Thomas Allen, the suspected attacker, was stopped cold a floor away from the ballroom. He might as well have tried to shoot his way through a brick wall.
The silliest response, suggested by Trump and echoed by many of his followers, is the idea that the thwarted attack is a post-facto justification for Trump’s building of a gigantic, privately funded, ethically problematic ballroom attached to the East Wing of the White House. The annual dinner of the Correspondents’ Association, a private organization, is not a government event: the gala celebrates the achievements of the press, raises scholarship money for young journalists, and offers a chance for the press and politicians to do some networking.
Despite the understandable annual grumbling about the media perhaps getting too cozy with pols — it’s a valid concern — there is zero chance the group would go so far as to hold its biggest event at the president’s home. This year, in fact, reporters joked about how the normal order of the evening was scrambled so that Trump — making his first appearance at the event as president — could speak and then leave the ballroom rather than watch a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal win an award for breaking the story of a book Jeffrey Epstein got on his 50th birthday that included a bawdy sketch and suggestive poem by Trump.
If the gala gets rescheduled, I might not go back to the Hilton — I’ll be busy working on New York’s upcoming primary debates — but it won’t be because they can’t host a safe, secure event.
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