Inside the White House press dinner shooting
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Donald Trump's dislike of the press... has repeatedly seen him refuse to attend the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C., until this year. He'd taken his seat not long before a 31-year-old tried to burst into the function room armed with guns and knives. Today, we speak to Missy Ryan, staff writer at The Atlantic, who was in the room about the security failings and Trump's response. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Missy, let's set the scene first of all. You arrived at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. It's a ritzy affair, right? Everyone's dressed in black tie, looking their best. And Trump and most of his administration is there. So just paint a picture for me.
So the Washington Hilton is this huge, sprawling hotel. And every April, hundreds and hundreds of journalists and government officials, politicians, business executives, some celebrities descend upon the Hilton for the White House Correspondents Association dinner. It was the first time that the president attended this event. He's boycotted it for his whole first term. And, you know, he has had a famously adversarial relationship with the press. And so it was kind of a surprise that he was going to be there. So we all go down to the ballroom. There is security, security screening, these mag gates that were two levels down from the lobby. So you had to go quite far in down into the hotel in order to show your ticket or show your ticket again.
I think you had to do it once up above and then get screened for any sort of threat. It was about 15 minutes into the dinner after President Trump had showed up where all of a sudden we hear screaming. People were shouting to get down. I heard a big crash. Everybody was diving under the tables and there was Secret Service or police climbing over people, trying to get to the stage area, to the dais where President Trump, his wife, Vice President Vance, and a number of other people were seated.
At this point, Donald Trump, the First Lady and the Vice President, J.D. Vance and others, they're sitting at this long table, a high table at the front of the room. There's around 2,000 attendees. You've all hit the ground when you've heard these noises and there's a whole heap of confusion. Just tell me about that.
Yeah, so according to the footage that we saw after the fact, Vance's production team got to him first, and then the president's team kind of swarmed him and took him out just seconds later, essentially. And what we heard was that they were... holding somewhere on the premises briefly before they left. You know, the president said last night at the news conference that he really wanted to return and continue with the event, but the Secret Service deemed it, you know, insufficiently safe.
Why did Donald Trump attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner this year?
We wanted to stay tonight. I will tell you, I fought like hell to stay. But they, it was protocol.
They said, please, sir, because they didn't know a lot of... And Donald Trump was actually asked about that evacuation on 60 Minutes on CBS. He sort of said that he delayed his exit in a way.
It was a little bit me. I wanted to see what was happening. And I wasn't making it that easy for him. I wanted to... see what was going on. And by that time, we started to... He did that before.
During the first assassination attempt, it seemed like he delayed his removal from the stage.
Yeah, I mean, I think Donald Trump, if nothing else, can sense a political window opening. And, you know, this certainly seemed to be something that he was comfortable talking about after the fact, comfortable sort of anchoring the news cycle.
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