Donald Trump was evacuated from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday evening after gunshots rang out inside the Washington Hilton, throwing one of Washington’s most prestigious annual gatherings into immediate chaos. The President, who had been seated at the dais alongside First Lady Melania Trump and Weijia Jiang, a CBS News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, was swiftly ushered from the ballroom by security personnel as attendees dived for cover beneath tables.
Nick Sorter, on X, shared an unconfirmed image of the shooter
A correspondent attending the White House dinner informed that the program will resume. “We’re being told to wait and be patient.”, wrote Selina Wang on X (formerly Twitter)..
According to reports from the Independent, the room was immediately sealed. Crucially, no one inside the ballroom was hurt, though glass, presumably from windows, shattered during the incident.
According to reports from both TMZ and CNN, multiple shots were fired in the lobby of the Washington Hilton, and a shooter has been confirmed dead, presumably killed by a Secret Service agent. However, the US President took to Truth Social to post that the Secret Service had ‘apprehended’ the shooter.
No other injuries have been reported. The US President and First Lady Melania Trump were unhurt.
According to the Independent one woman cried and described the incident as the “scariest thing” she’d ever experienced. Senator John Fetterman was seen assisting another woman.
The scale of the potential threat is difficult to overstate: the ballroom was, at that moment, filled with the most senior members of the Trump administration simultaneously.
The President, the First Lady, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Homeland Security were among those present.
The dinner, held annually in celebration of the First Amendment and the freedom of the press, had already drawn considerable attention this year given that Trump was attending for the first time as a sitting president, ending a years-long boycott of the event.
What had been anticipated as a tense but celebratory evening, with journalists, politicians and administration officials sharing a room, ended instead in evacuation, emergency response and, for those inside the ballroom, a moment of genuine terror. The full circumstances surrounding the shooting continue to emerge.
(This is a breaking story. Please come back for more updates)
