Inside The Ballroom: Chaos And Confusion

One moment was utterly familiar: The massive ballroom at the Washington Hilton was filled with an indistinct buzz from thousands of mostly inconsequential conversations all blended together across a sea of hundreds of tightly packed tables, just like always happens before the formal program gets underway at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.

The next moment was utterly bizarre: Women in gowns, men in tuxes, nearly everyone in the place crouching down on the floor as the ballroom turned quiet. When people tentatively lifted their gazes to survey the room we saw men with machine guns standing at the head table where President Donald Trump had been and cabinet secretaries being escorted by agents one-by-one out of the giant hall.

The juxtaposition of those scenes may suggest a sudden, piercing realization of terror. Perhaps some in the room did experience it that way. For my part, and I sense for others around me, that’s not quite how it felt as the incident unfolded. The sensation instead was something akin to the blurred in-between zone of consciousness when a phone call awakens you in the middle of the night. Huh, what’s happening, I’m confused, is this for real? 

Donald Trump told reporters when he returned to the White House that the shots fired just outside the ballroom sounded to him like a food tray dropping. Yes — a good way of putting it. In my case, the noise was on the periphery of awareness, not enough to cause a jolt alarm or even to interrupt my conversation. (Others on the POLITICO team heard them clearly.)

What happened next took place within seconds but seemed to unfold slower than that in my mind. The subconscious instinct to assume normal order was overcome by cognitive recognition that something definitely abnormal was underway. People were ducking on the floor. C’mon, I wondered, is that really necessary? The sight of agents with guns brandished made it clear that joining colleagues on the ground was in fact a good idea.

Once there, my thoughts were dominated first by a question: What the hell is actually happening? Then came a journalist’s instinctual reaction: Whatever the answer is, the president just got rushed out of the event, this is a big damn story. Many colleagues while crouching on the floor lifted their phones above their heads to record the scene.

At no time during the episode did I perceive myself or colleagues as in acute danger. Whatever had happened, it was clear that it had taken place just outside the ballroom. There was no indication of an active gunman or a terrorist act underway.

The problem, for a long while, was that there was no indication of any kind in any direction. The physical characteristics of the Hilton ballroom — set deep within the bowels of the cavernous hotel — mean cell phone service is often not very good, especially with thousands of people in attendance.

For the moment, the disruption of the event and the president’s abrupt removal from the scene was the biggest news in the country, and it had been witnessed by hundreds of journalists. But the room was locked down, and most of these reporters could not get connections to learn anything, or to reassure family members that they were OK. For a half-hour or so, once it was clearly safe to stand, people milled about and asked each other what they had heard. The mood was plainly no longer celebratory, but nor for the most part was it solemn and grim. It was mostly anxious and uncertain.

For a while, everyone seemed to be saying the same thing: A would-be attacker had been gunned down by security and was lying dead just a few feet away outside the ballroom’s center doors.

That turned out not to be true. But while we all thought it was true — but before anything had been confirmed — the president of the correspondents' association, Weijia Jiang of CBS News, came to the podium to assure everyone that the evening’s program would be resuming shortly. Really, while a dead body is just outside and every serious journalist needs to get to work — we are going back to the dinner’s usual fare of awards and humorous speeches? Or would Trump insist on making a dramatic return to the stage? ("I have recommended that we “LET THE SHOW GO ON”" Trump posted on Truth Social as the ballroom waited.)

After announcing a couple times that the evening would resume soon, Jiang returned again to say, blessedly, that it would not. But she did pass on Trump’s pledge that the dinner would be rescheduled within 30 days. She said Trump wanted to do the dinner — a notable assertion, because this was the first time during two terms that he ever chose to attend.

One wonders, however, if the strange events of this Saturday night — of which we still have only a fragmentary understanding — might make it hard to go back to the familiar conception of the correspondents' dinners. The Hilton, with a huge ballroom inside an even huger hotel, has never seemed the easiest facility to reliably secure. (It was outside the hotel, while departing the same ballroom, that Ronald Reagan was shot by would-be assassin John Hinckley in March 1981.) Trump himself has been the subject of two serious assassination attempts, including being grazed by a bullet near Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.

The dinner’s mix of journalism, celebrity and frivolity has for a good while like an anachronism in an angry and agitated age of politics. And never has the occasion felt more surreal than this weekend.