Trump vows to attend a rescheduled White House correspondents’ dinner following shooting

President Trump is safe and “honoured” after what appears to have been the third attempt on his life since he announced his second run for the White House.

Cole Thomas Allen, a 31 year-old from California, is in custody and will appear in court tomorrow after sprinting through a security checkpoint in the Washington Hilton about five minutes after Trump and the first lady sat down to a spring pea and burrata starter at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

At least one shot was fired and one member of the Secret Service was hurt. But no one died, no one was seriously injured and, according to those present, an atmosphere of tense calm settled over the gathering of several hundred journalists and media executives as they got up from under their tables and set about covering a story unfolding in front of them.

There was black humour too. As Politico set up a makeshift newsroom near the banqueting hall someone asked if there was more champagne, according to the New York Times, which already had 12 people on the story.

But like any threat to presidential security this one will be taken intensely seriously by the Secret Service, the White House and the vast press corps that covers it, with ripple effects reaching deep into politics and lasting at least until the midterm elections in November.

Here are four things worth noting about last night:

There was something familiar about it. Trump said he “fought like hell” to stay at the hotel and continue the dinner, for which he’d planned a speech apparently intended to roast the liberal media. Perhaps. But he went willingly as Secret Service agents swarmed round him, Melania Trump and vice-president Vance to move them away from their raised table to safety. The footage was online within minutes and will play endlessly on social media, including in conspiratorial echo chambers, along with footage of the shooting he survived on the campaign trail in Butler, Pennsylvania on 13 July 2024, and a second apparent assassination attempt on 15 September that year on one of his golf courses in West Palm Beach.

He took it as a compliment… Not long after returning to the White House, still in black tie, Trump took the podium in the press briefing room to talk through what had happened. He said he’d made a study of assassinations, not surprisingly perhaps in view of his experience, and concluded that “the people that make the biggest impact” tend to be targeted. People like Abraham Lincoln, he suggested, and Donald Trump: “I hate to say I’m honoured but we’ve done a lot”.

… and an opportunity. Barely 100 yards from the West Wing’s Brady Briefing Room, much of the presidential mansion’s East Wing has, notoriously, been demolished to make way for a ballroom. A federal judge has ordered that work on it be suspended because the Trump administration has ignored planning rules for this part of DC and those governing alternations to the White House. It’s a sore point for Trump, who has personally supervised the design of the 90,000 square-foot structure, which he says will be big enough for dinner and dancing for 1000 people. The floor-to-ceiling windows, he says, will be bullet-proof. Last night he seized the moment. “I didn’t want to say this,” he said, “but this is why we have to have all the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House”.

He seems to have a new friend in Weijia Jang, a CBS White House correspondent who is also current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which hosts the annual dinner. She was seated next to him at the time of the evacuation from the hotel and got the first question at the briefing. He addressed her as “Madam chairman”, thanked her for a “fantastic job” and promised to attend a rescheduled dinner, having boycotted the occasion for the past ten years. Jiang took up her WHCA post this year, soon after CBS’s purchase by David Ellison, a Trump ally. Also noteworthy: it was at the 2011 dinner that President Obama mocked Trump for having to take “the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night” on Celebrity Apprentice, a humiliation that some say helps explain Trump’s decision to run for president in 2016.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images