Inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Gunshots Rang Out

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