In the spring of 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton on his way out of a luncheon. Cabdrivers sometimes call it the Hinckley Hilton—a weird local homage to the shooter, John Hinckley, Jr. On Saturday evening, I walked by the hotel, in the rain, as antiwar protesters yelled through bullhorns at journalists streaming inside for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It was the War Crimes Correspondents’ dinner, they shouted. I was on my way to the White House to join the press pool, the small contingent of media that travels with the President wherever he goes. We loaded into vans in the motorcade and waited for Donald and Melania Trump to enter the Beast, the President’s bulletproof limousine. A reporter next to me scrolled through posts on George Santos’s X account, where he was criticizing the red-carpet fashion. As we rode through the streets of downtown D.C. back to the Hilton, the motorcade slowed for a long-languishing construction project around Dupont Circle. When we pulled up to the hotel, I saw a Trump official I know standing on the street corner in his tuxedo. “I’m late as fuck,” he texted me.
Trump was attending the dinner for the first time as President. The Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief” as he came out onto a dais at the front of the ballroom. “It is meaningful that you are with us tonight,” Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said. After Jiang’s opening announcements, wranglers guided the press pool outside the ballroom, where they set up chairs for us and put out boxed dinners. Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump’s longtime fixers, ambled around in a white tuxedo jacket. We made small talk as guests inside the ballroom tucked into their appetizers. The President and the First Lady were talking with the mentalist Oz Pearlman, who was leaning over and showing them something on a piece of paper; he seemed to be performing a trick of some sort.
Around eight-thirty, as I was trying to decide whether I would have a turkey sandwich or a veggie sandwich for dinner, I heard what sounded like a caterer dropping a stack of plates down a flight of stairs. (“I thought it was a tray going down,” Trump would later say.) Shouts of “Shots fired!” soon followed, and members of the Secret Service and other law-enforcement officers raced by us. I was pushed against the wall; three members of the waitstaff pulled me into a stairwell with them. They were sobbing. We heard what seemed like more gunfire. I opened the door to go back into the hotel lobby. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., stumbled by with his wife, Cheryl Hines, escorted by a security detail. Dessert hadn’t been served, but it looked like there was cake frosting on the back of his suit jacket. I watched as Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., was ushered away; Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., ran by, holding a cellphone to his ear.
A group of agents had already whisked Trump out of the ballroom, while guests on the dais and seated across the room ducked under tables. Law-enforcement officers, clad in helmets and flak jackets and wielding long guns, materialized on the stage. One W.H.C.A. photographer took out his camera and pointed it at the fleeing crowd.
Trump insisted that the show would go on. (“I fought like hell to stay,” he later said.) Eventually, we were moved back into the ballroom. There were cloth dinner napkins all over the ground. I took a seat at a table of half-eaten goat-cheese salads and an empty bottle of red wine. Over the loudspeaker, someone said that the “dinner service will resume momentarily.” Seconds later, the wranglers rushed us out—the President was leaving. We sprinted past Pete Hegseth and his wife, up the stairs and across the red carpet. National Guardsmen lined the rope where guests had posed earlier for photographs.
The motorcade drove back to the White House in three minutes. “We are flying,” as a veteran reporter in one of the vans put it. “Fastest motorcade I’ve ever been in.” Trump had announced on Truth Social that he would be giving a press conference shortly. I took a seat in the briefing room. The flags that typically stand behind the podium when the President speaks were hastily brought in. Trump appeared, flanked by Cabinet officials. Melania stood to the side with Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, whose maternity leave had started the day before. Reporters and staffers from the press office were still in tuxedos and evening gowns, some holding their high heels.