An attempted attack at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner is spurring fresh questions about the security around President Donald Trump and other top officials.
The armed assailant, who investigators believe was staying at the Washington Hilton where the dinner was being held, ran past a security checkpoint before being apprehended after a brief pursuit that included gunfire. Administration officials said Sunday they believe he was targeting US officials, including Trump, who faced a pair of assassination attempts in 2024.
Trump and others have praised the US Secret Service for the response and for successfully quelling the attack, but it may yet prompt a review of precautions and procedures as Trump wondered aloud about the vulnerabilities of the venue. The security for the event was essentially designed as a tight perimeter around the ballroom, with the rest of the hotel largely open to the public, raising questions about how close a potential attacker could get.
“I think we have to. We have to take a look at the outer perimeter,” Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas and former chairman of the House Homeland Security panel, told Bloomberg This Weekend on Sunday. “I do think we’ll be analyzing that.”
Trump, speaking after the incident, called the Hilton “not a particularly secure building” and said again on Sunday morning that the attempted attack reinforces the need for his controversial White House ballroom project, saying that will be more secure. But it’s not an obvious venue for the annual media dinner, which is hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not by the White House.
Nonetheless, the ordeal exposed longstanding vulnerabilities in how one of Washington’s most high-profile annual events is secured, current and former law enforcement officials said. The Hilton, in particular, is already infamous in Washington as the site where then-President Ronald Reagan was shot by gunman John Hinckley Jr. outside the hotel doors — the hotel is still referred to colloquially in Washington as the “Hinckley Hilton.” Changes were made after that shooting, including building a secure entry for the president.
At the hotel on Saturday, guests and members of the public were able to enter the hotel with relative ease, such as by flashing an invitation, and did not have to go through security — magnetometers, similar to those at an airport or major sporting event — until they were moving toward the ballroom, two levels down from the main floor.
Current and former law enforcement officials said the single checkpoint was not as thin as it appears — every other point of entry into the ballroom was frozen and manned by standing agents, making the magnetometers the only viable path in. In addition, the US Secret Service’s primary role is to safeguard the president, his family and key dignitaries, and the gunman didn’t make it into the ballroom where they were.
“That venue, the larger venue and its occupants fall under the protective umbrella of the site plan. But when things go bad, my primary objective is whoever my protectee is,” said Anthony Cangelosi, a former Secret Service agent and a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “When you come up with a site security plan, you’re looking for site vulnerabilities and ways to address them.”
Still, officials acknowledged the setup is difficult to defend publicly, and that to most civilians the security perimeter felt dangerously close to the action.
Even the suspect apparently was surprised by what he described as lax security. “I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo,” he wrote in a manifesto to family members and seen by Bloomberg. “What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.”
He added, “The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.”
The sprawling hotel where the event is held boasts more than 1,100 rooms, several restaurants and bars. It has over 118,000 square feet (10,963 square meters) of meeting and event space, according to its website.
What the Secret Service did after the shooting largely tracked protocol, the officials said. Members of the Counter Assault Team, heavily armed agents in tactical gear, held the stage after Trump and other top officials were evacuated, taking the high ground over the ballroom floor.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran defended the agency’s response in a statement Sunday. “That individual, when he charged a checkpoint, was apprehended,” Curran said. “It shows that our multi-layered protection works.”
Trump himself praised the response. “I thought Secret Service and law enforcement — and that includes DC police, law enforcement — was great. I really thought they were great. And I would be the first to complain that they weren’t, believe me,” he said during a Fox News interview on Sunday morning.
He said the large hotel makes it inherently difficult to secure the ballroom as one would a building like the White House, while also saying he didn’t blame the hotel. “Nobody’s blaming them, they’re good people, they’re very good people,” Trump said. “But, you know, it’s had difficulty in the past.”
Saturday’s breach is the latest in a series of security issues that have shadowed the Secret Service in recent years. A gunman opened fire at Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, grazing his ear in an attack that prompted widespread criticism of the agency’s advance work. Weeks later, a second would-be assassin was apprehended at a Trump golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, before he could get off a shot.
Trump, speaking on Fox News, called again for the dinner to be rescheduled within roughly 30 days, though it’s not clear whether that’s feasible or a certainty.
“Let’s not let people like this change the course of our country,” he said. “I’ll be there, I promise.”
White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang said in a statement Sunday the board would meet “to assess what happened and determine how to proceed.”
