Shooting at White House Correspondents' Dinner: Donald Trump says suspect in custody, officer shot but ‘doing great'
Donald Trump was evacuated from the White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Washington Hilton after gunshots were heard inside the ballroom. A shooter has been apprehended
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.
Addressing a press conference right after the incident, President Donald Trump said a suspect who disrupted the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday was carrying multiple weapons but was subdued and in custody.
“A man charged a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons, and he was taken down by some very brave members of Secret Service,” Trump said at a press briefing at the White House Saturday.
Trump said the incident was “probably a lone shooter” and indicated that police were searching the suspect’s residence in California.
Trump praised the efforts of law enforcement and said that one officer was shot, but protected by a bullet-proof vest. That officer is “doing great,” Trump said.
It is now being reported by Fox News that a US Secret Service agent was hit with a bullet by the shooter but was wearing a vest and is not injured. It is also being reported that the shot came from near the magnetometer.
After gunshots rang out inside the Washington Hilton, attendees scrambled to hide underneath tables in the ballroom. Senator John Fetterman was reportedly seen assisting another woman as she got up from underneath a table.
Elsewhere, a Secret Service agent was seen carrying a military rifle. Some tables and chairs were flipped over.
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)
About the Author
Sayantani Biswas is an assistant editor at Livemint with seven years of experience covering geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations and global power dynamics. She reports on Indian and international politics, including elections worldwide, and specialises in historically grounded analysis of contemporary conflicts and state decisions. She joined Mint in 2021, after covering politics at publications including The Telegraph. <br> She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (2019), with a specialisation in postcolonial Latin American literature. Her research examined economic nationalism through Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. She also writes on political language, cultural memory and the long shadows of conflict. <br> Biswas grew up in Durgapur, an industrial town in West Bengal shaped by migration, which drew families from across India to the Durgapur Steel Plant. As the only child in a joint family, she spent years listening—almost obsessively—to her grandparents’ testimonies of struggle, fear and loss as they fled Bangladesh during the Partition of 1947. This formative exposure to lived historical memory later converged with her training in Comparative Literature, equipping her to analyse socio-economic structures and their reverberations. <br> Outside the newsroom, she gravitates towards cultural history and critical theory, returning often to texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As a journalist, she is committed to accuracy, intellectual rigour and fairness, and believes political reporting demands not only clarity and speed, but historical depth, contextual precision, and a disciplined resistance to spectacle.
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