What I Witnessed on a Chaotic Night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Everyone attending Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner expected President Donald Trump’s first appearance as president to make for an unprecedented night. No one could’ve predicted why.
The shooting upstairs at the Washington Hilton led the Secret Service to whisk the president off the ballroom stage and sent the dinner’s hundreds of guests ducking under tables. Many journalists — including CBS News’ Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association —got back to work reporting, changing the night’s celebratory dynamic to one consumed by professionalism.
The chaotic scene unsurprisingly drove the conversation at after-parties that continued despite the dinner ending abruptly and raised questions about the security apparatus at the hotel, which has traditionally been the site of the annual dinner — as well as the location where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
Before arriving at the Hilton, I stopped at Puck’s pre-dinner party at the Hepburn apartment complex steps away from the hotel. (There, California Gov. Gavin Newsom told me he didn’t expect Trump’s speech “to be that damn interesting,” finding him increasingly “more dull” and “not as entertaining as he used to be.”)
After our chat, I made my way down an offramp at the Hepburn toward an entrance to the Hilton. Well-dressed journalists attending the pre-dinner receptions moved easily through the hotel lobby en route to parties sponsored by media companies.
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche popped up at Politico and CBS News’ annual reception, where the contingent of CNN attendees prompted a running joke of the two news networks’ potential merger. I saw CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss stay planted in the party’s center posing for photos with guests, while “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil popped up after recovering from an afternoon brunch with a nap.
Though security checks invitations, magnetometers are located downstairs before attendees enter the ballroom. I didn’t go through that checkpoint since I wasn’t attending the dinner, but instead Uber’d to the nearby Substack New Media party at the Renwick Gallery across the street from the White House. The Texas-themed party party was initially a jovial affair, with a cornbread station featuring flavors from jalapeno to applesauce and cowboys handing out what appeared to be ice cream cones from white coolers.
But the mood changed dramatically as news broke that the dinner was disrupted and guests were thrown into a state of confusion.
From the stage, we were told the event was safe, but a crew of four staffers — some dressed in cowboy attire — blocked people from leaving. Aaron Parnas went live on Instagram from the party moments after it became clear a gunman breached the Hilton, while I filmed multiple videos recapping what we knew for TheWrap’s social media pages. Others, however, still tried to enjoy the night: I saw MeidasTouch’s Scott MacFarlane near the party’s GIF-making stand, while TMZ DC reporter Jacob Wasserman was one of four people dancing in front of the DJ booth.
By 10 p.m., we learned that three after parties scheduled for the evening – NBC, MS NOW and Time — would go on. NBC News executives wanted to use their party as a landing pad for those shaken by the dinner to come together, according to a source familiar with the matter, while MS NOW acknowledged that while their party “won’t be what we originally intended, we still think it is important to provide a space for friends and colleagues to be together.”
I headed to NBC’s party first, held at the French Ambassador‘s Residence in Georgetown. There was no line as I arrived, but as I walked up to security, I spotted a dinner guest offering a security officer a wine bottle he grabbed from a Hilton dinner table. It was unopened, he said.
Once inside, the crowd was sparse. The journalists who would typically parade around the space — “Nightly News“ anchor Tom Llamas, senior White House correspondent Garrett Haake — were instead covering the unprecedented moment either at the bureau or the White House itself, leaving a small array of NBC News executives and revelers munching on food themed around U.S. cities hosting this summer’s FIFA World Cup (the L.A. table had Korean short rib tacos).
I spotted C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist glued to his phone watching his network’s live coverage of the shooting, an experience he told me “was like no other event I’d ever been at, or moment I’d ever experienced.”
It is C-SPAN that operates the cameras inside the ballroom. While much of the crowd ducked for cover, including C-SPAN’s camera operator, cameraman Mohaimen Aljasheme never stopped filming. When Feist asked him why he kept rolling despite the apparent danger, Aljasheme was blunt: He had covered the Iraq War, so he knew how to operate in a dangerous environment.
“He realized that there had not been a gunshot in the room, and he just continued to do his job,” Feist told me. “So much of what we saw in the immediate aftermath was from that camera, that C-SPAN photographer, because he kept showing what was happening.”
I took that harrowing story with me to MS NOW’s “Democracy After Hours” gathering at the Dupont Underground, a former trolley tunnel that the network refashioned into a speakeasy-like soiree.
Despite the crab cake slides and flask-engraving station, the crowd was also considerably muted, with much of the network’s talent off doing their jobs and others trying to process the trauma of the moment. I spotted Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey near the middle of the tunnel’s red-carpeted runway, while Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) sat in a booth further down.
“The 11th Hour” anchor Stephanie Ruhle made her way to the party just before 1 a.m., as she went from hiding under a dinner table to anchoring the network’s live coverage. Processing the moment didn’t even occur to her, she said, because “clearly it was a news event.”
“When I spoke to [MS NOW president] Rebecca Kutler and she said, ‘Can you anchor?’ The answer is yes,” Ruhle told me over ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme.” “We would always cover a big news event. The fact that we were part of it made it all the more important.”
By the end of the night, much of the crowd tried to seize the moment, with a small subset dancing to hits including Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” Some of the last people to enter the party included MS NOW correspondent Vaughn Hillyard, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, and the New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh — all of whom, on journalism’s biggest night, were coming off doing their jobs and covering the president.
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